Plenty of Fish & The 23 Primes In Arithmetic Progression
Plenty of fish in the seaPlenty of Fish is a 100% Free online dating and matchmaking service for singles that was started four years ago by Markus Frind because he could see people were wasting money on paid dating and matchmaking sites. It has grown from a nickel and dime operation run from the owner's apartment to a huge business with 30 million pageviews a day....still run from the owner's apartment. But now he's making $10,000 a day as well as making a lot of singles happy by finding them relationships and love.
The success of PlentyofFish isn't just in its free service - its in the very sophisticated algorithms that Markus wrote and uses. He explains it on his site -
The CP was designed to pair people who come from very diverse backgrounds – such as are found on dating sites like POF that have a huge, global membership base. In a group like this it is always possible to find people with significant and healthy differences (or complementarities) in their personal characteristics. Accordingly, the CP firstly assesses the degree that two people have the right recipe of similarities. In other words, good partner candidates should have similar profiles of personal characteristics.
Profile similarity alone is not sufficient. Decades of empirical research on the ingredients that make a healthy and satisfying relationship suggest that intimate partners who have strong similarities across key personal characteristics are more satisfied in their relationships and are less likely to break up than are partners that differ on those key characteristics. Thus, secondly, regardless of profile, simply being similar matters as well.
Thus, to maximize potential satisfaction the matching algorithm takes into account both the rank ordering between two persons’ profiles and the overall level of their scores on the relationship factors. This approach works extremely well, while simultaneously avoiding some of the problems in other systems that focus on one of these approaches in isolation.
If you don't understand that (and I don't blame you) Markus has described his algorithms more succinctly elsewhere as -
I've invented stuff like multi-dimensional wheel sieve. I create very advanced algorithms. The more you search and the more you use the site, the more it limits your view of the people you see. So if you only message smokers, then it doesn't matter what pages you're on, you're only going to see smokers. It generates a database on the site that's built around your preferences, which is something that no other dating site is capable of doing yet. It's technically not feasible for them at least using known algorithms. I invented algorithms that no one else thought were feasible. What you say you want and what you actually want are two different things. It hardly ever corresponds on a dating site. So I just track a user and see what they're actually doing on the site and then show them matches based on their actual surfing preferences. My site is deceptively simple but no one knows just how complex it is under the surface.
What he's saying is that if a girl says she's looking for a nice boy-next-door type who's an accountant and wants to get married but the tracking shows she's checking out Tattooed rock band drummers who love to party, he'll show her more matches of the latter.
Plenty of Fish for gropersPlentyofFish also uses what Markus calls a Relationship Needs Assessment that determines in great detail a person’s overt and hidden needs in a relationship. But that’s not all. This assessment provides users with highly specific guidance for putting the results in practice. Therefore, each user receives customized “Action Plans” that outline specific questions and topics for the user to ask or explore with potential partners.
These “Action Plans” are based entirely on the unique answer patterns of the test taker, so everyone receives guidance that is custom-made for them. There is nothing like this assessment on the Internet today.
It's no wonder that Markus Frind has been able to write his own algorithms - it's not very well known - but Markus was the instigator of a project that on July 24th 2004 discovered the worlds first 23 primes in arithmetic progression. 56,211,383,760,397 +K*44,546,738,095,860 for K =0 to 22. I think this means this guy is a genius. Here's what he says about it -
Several years ago I came up with a algorithm that was thousands of times faster then anything else known at finding long chains of primes in sequences. I created the application, and then recruited Paul Jobling and Paul Underwood to provide computers to aid in finding the record.In 2004 Terry Tao (an Australian) solved one of the hardest problems in Math and cited our record http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.NT/0404188
Earlier this year I refined the program and found several more chains of 23 primes. I am amazed I managed to create this program in the first place, I barely even understand how it works and I wrote it. This is because the program scans in multiple dimensions is very hard to conceptualize. At any rate I think its cool that my record is cited in the Fields Medals press release.
The Fields Medal - is a prize awarded to up to four young mathematicians (less than 40 years old) each International Congress of the International Mathematical Union, a meeting that takes place every four years. It's is widely viewed as the top honor a mathematician can receive. Interestingly my wife's uncle, Alain Connes, won the medal back in 1982. Eggheads can read more about Arithmetical Progressions here.
PlentyofFish is a one man show run on five or six servers; one database server, one web server, an image server and a mail server. As Markus says "It's a dating site; it's not rocket science. You don't need thousands of servers".
PlentyofFish is making $5-$10 Million a year - Google Adsense's biggest earner. Markus talks about his life here in his Plentyoffish blog
I’ve come a long way in the last 3 years, today I’ve single handily built the largest dating site in the world with no employees. The site generates more relationships than Match.com yet only makes a tiny tiny fraction of Match.com’s 300 Million a year. So today I sit at a turning point, the site has over 1.1 billion pageviews and 45 million visitors a month, the maintaince and all that annoying stuff is growing fast and there is no way to effectively monetize the site without employees.I can either sell and walk away with a few hundred million or start an office and grow the site. So in the coming weeks/months i’m going to turn my hobby into a business. Like anyone else founding a startup, i’m going to go get myself a business lisence so I can get office space. Then go office space hunting, set up the office, put up job descriptions etc etc.
The main goal is to start replacing adsense/dating ads and hire sales people. I spent the last few weeks working long days optimizing my ad revenue and as a result adding over a million a year net per week of work. Yet compared to match.com all these efforts are really just rounding errors. At the end of the day its not possible for me optimize revenues myself or to outsource sales as no one vender could sell more than 3% of my inventory. I am at a size now were there are no off the shelf solutions and everything has to be built from the ground up.
This is going to be an insane next few months, Right out of the gate my hobby turned business plentyoffish is a Top 30 site in the US based on Competes Attention metric, Top 10 in Canada and Top 30 in the UK.
"I can either sell and walk away with a few hundred million" - I love the way he just casually says that. I reckon he's having too much fun, don't you? All that might change once he takes on an office and staff. This guy just amazes me. BTW - you notice he can't spell to save his life? (Not having a go at you Markus - I find it funny :-))
Millions and millions of dollars from a free online dating and matchmaking for singles looking for love and relationships. Who says there's not Plenty of Fish.
Malcolm Lambe
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"Plentyoffish" and Chips for Poker with this One-Man Dating Show
Markus Frind of Plentyoffish free dating site is an absolute internet legend. He's managed to turn a small, simple idea into a multi-million dollar earner just by harnessing the power of the computer and the web. Here's an extract from an interview last year with Mark Brooks of Online personal Watch -
Why is Plentyoffish a Web 2.0 site? Because, like other Web 2.0 sites, Plentyoffish is driven by the community. There are one million people who have moderating powers in the Plentyoffish forum and there's several thousand people attending parties all over the country every week. And it's all organized and done by users. So unlike the paid sites, Plentyoffish is run by the users.I read that you had a check for $900K from Google for two months Ad Sense sales. What sort of pay-per-click (PPC) spend does it take to generate this?
I don't spend more then 10% of my monthly income on advertising. Pretty much the entire thing is viral. I never did any pay-per-click at the start, not in the first two years and then after that it was just a growing. The community was really built by word of mouth. There was a need for a free site and because no one else was providing it, it just grew like a weed. A lot of people just don't want to pay for dating sites. I'm providing a service for millions of people and it's costing me barely anything. These other sites, they're all just out for people's money.How many employees do you have? How many uniques a month do you get and how many servers does Plentyoffish.com run on?
Just me, myself and I. Google says it's over 3.4 or 3.5 million uniques a month. I run Google analytics which records all my traffic.I have five or six servers; one database server, one web server, an image server, a mail server…it's a dating site; it's not rocket science. You don't need thousands of servers.
I have highly optimized the database and the site, so I guess normally everyone else is using two to three hundred servers and I'm doing what they are doing with more complexity on top of it. I've invented stuff like multi-dimensional wheel sieve. I create very advanced algorithms. The more you search and the more you use the site, the more it limits your view of the people you see. So if you only message smokers, then it doesn't matter what pages you're on, you're only going to see smokers. It generates a database on the site that's built around your preferences, which is something that no other dating site is capable of doing yet. It's technically not feasible for them at least using known algorithms. I invented algorithms that no one else thought were feasible.
What you say you want and what you actually want are two different things. It hardly ever corresponds on a dating site. So I just track a user and see what they're actually doing on the site and then show them matches based on their actual surfing preferences. My site is deceptively simple but no one knows just how complex it is under the surface.
Let's go on to the final question. What's your advice for other Web 2.0 start up web entrepreneur's about making money?
Build something useful, simple in ways that people will use. Explore things like Ad Sense, affiliate programs, and just explore ways of making money. Most 2.0 companies will never make a dime and they're not built to make a dime. So I would start looking at how to make money before you even design or think about starting a business.
Here's a link to a video from NBC Today show showing Markus at work. He says he only spends an hour a day servicing the site. I don't believe him. But I do believe the million-dollar cheques he's getting from Google Adsense. Amazing fella.
Plenty of Fish - "there's something you should know"
I got this through Markus Frind's blog Paradigm Shift - an article from the Chicago Tribune on Dating web sites for those with serious medical conditions.
"The second date is going well, so maybe now is a good time to bring up your colostomy bag. Herpes. Third-degree burns.Dating can be challenging for singles with medical conditions. For 15 years, Ricky Durham watched as his younger brother dealt with the gastrointestinal inflammatory ailment known as Crohn's disease while trying to date.
"He had a colostomy bag, and this is a very good-looking boy," said Durham, 46, of Atlanta. "I started thinking, 'When do you tell someone you have a colostomy bag?' He didn't know how to approach this at all." After his brother's death at age 41 in 2004, Durham was inspired to start an Internet dating company where people with medical conditions could meet a love interest.
The site Prescription4Love.com is less than 2 years old and has 1,000 members."
That's brilliant isn't it? I wish I'd thought of it. Especially seeing the success Markus Frind has had with Plentyoffish.
The site offers search options for more than a dozen medical conditions including, arthritis, cancer, deafness, diabetes, epilepsy, herpes, HIV, HPV, obesity, alcoholism and "little people".
But there are other sites out there too - Positive Singles and DAWN-disabled-dating - for singles who are "differently abled". The first site is free but the latter costs $190 a year Subscription.
Allen Heinemann, a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation with the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University talks about the difficulties of dating for some people
"There can be issues of transportation problems. Just getting out and about to meet people and socialize and meet one's pool of candidates." Singles may also be dealing with an overprotective family concerned with the risks of dating, he said. "We're also a society that values beauty, appearance and being able to engage in physical activity," Heinemann said. "People who cannot engage in physical activities are often marginalized." Wolf said she knows that feeling of being excluded and even considered paying someone to date her when she was in high school.
Mary Mocny, 24, of Chicago is one of DAWN's new clients.
"I realized I don't know anyone else who is an amputee," Mocny said. "I never knew what it was like to know someone who goes through the same issues and has the same troubles." Mocny has been a double amputee all her life. "Since birth, I've had multiple deformities," she said. "My legs were shorter and at the end, they curved inward. To give me more opportunities, they were amputated above the knee." In November, the dating service introduced Mocny to a man living in a different state whom she describes as "able-bodied." The two have been e-mailing and talking on the phone for eight months. Mocny said the newly forming relationship is going well, and the two hope to meet in person.
DAWN is more like a matchmaking service. Members sign up online and are paired. Each member is required to write a letter of introduction that is sent to potential matches.
Prescription4Love.com follows a more traditional online dating setup. Members search by ZIP code and medical condition. The site currently allows users to search more than 20 medical conditions and send e-mails to members of interest.
Hmmm. I quite like this idea. Whilst probably not as lucrative as Plenty of Fish there would definitely be a niche market for a dating site for people with serious medical problems. You could call it www.plentyoffishforsome.com. And it would be a great free service to offer people.
plentyoffishPlenty of Fish - Mate or Date
This guy is genius! And I'm so envious. He's taken a pretty simple idea, albeit a twist on an old one and given it (dare I say) balls.
Markus Frind, the 28 year old owner of the "free" dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense. What is even more remarkable is that he is single handedly (with a little help from his girlfriend and several servers) running one of the largest dating sites on the internet out of his Vancouver apartment.
The headquarters of Plenty Of Fish is on the 16th floor of a brand-new building with panoramic views of the nearby Canadian Rockies.
Markus Frind was born in a small rural town in northern British Columbia. He headed to Vancouver in the late 1990s, went to trade school in computers and rotated through several dot-com jobs before starting PlentyOfFish in 2003 to keep himself busy.
The site was done without much of a plan, though Mr. Frind was intent on finding out how far he could get keeping it entirely free of charge. Most other dating sites charge anywhere between $20 and $40 a month for membership.
The site runs on Microsoft software on a half-dozen machines at a hosting facility a few miles away. From his bedroom, though, Mr. Frind can keep tabs on everything going on.
He's using a server with 2 Quad Core Intel chips(Zeon X5355 @ 2.66Ghz), 8 Gigs of ram (only using about 800 megs) and 2 hard drives using Windows x64 Server 2003. Total cost was a couple of grand. He says the system works a lot better when going over 2 million page views an hour. All outbound data is being Gzipped and even then only 30% CPU usage. He has only 1 webserver that serves all those pageviews. Most of the 100 million plus image requests a day are running through Akamai. This server does serve 10’s of millions of image requests directly, but most of those images are in ram so its not much of a load.
There's a March 2006 interview here - webpublishingblog.
Markus has put the cat amongst the dating site pigeons by offering a free alternative to pay-to-play sites like match.com.
Here are some amazing stats. For the week ended April 28, PlentyOfFish.com was the 96th-busiest Web site in the U.S. - most number of hits, that is.
A few months back, Markus posted on his blog The Paradigm Shift a pic of a Google check for nearly 1 million smackers for a two-month period. (Google confirmed the check was genuine).
Markus says his site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year. Holey Moley! $5 - $10 Million a year!!?? Working out of his apartment? Just he and his girlfriend??!!
To me...the amazing thing is how ordinary his site looks. It's your basic, no-frills dating site. In common or garden variety light blue with touches of green. There's nothing hip and trendy about it; Its just clean and uncluttered. And where are these Google Adsense ads that are making him a fortune? Am I missing something here? I can only see four text ads across the top of the page - and not every page either. Alright he's getting heaps of traffic but how can just those few ads generate such enormous figures?
There are now 1.2 million active members. He's making money three ways: via Google's small text ads, with bigger banner ads and through "affiliate marketing" where other sites pay you for sending them customers.
Part of the PlentyOfFish success is due to several converging Web trends - Servers and server software have become simple and reliable enough that they can run on their own, without a lot of babysitting. What's more, a remarkably sophisticated economic infrastructure now exists that allows busy Web sites to make lots of money.
"No one else has ever done something like this before," Markus says. Plenty of Fish is "like my own personal toy."
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