THE GLOBE AND MAIL – Feb 10 – When Markus Frind sat down at his home computer in 2003 to build a website, he had only one goal: to teach himself a programming language. But a decade later, his programming exercise has grown into one of the largest dating sites in the world, with ~50M registered users visiting POF more than 430M times each month. In Canada alone, ~400K people log in every day.
Q: How does Plenty of Fish’s matching system work?
Markus Frind: We look at hundreds of thousands of people who left the site in relationships and we look at what combinations of attributes made them successful. For instance, we know that a doctor will never date a carpenter.
Q: Do you have any interesting statistics that relate to Canada specifically?
A: Edmonton and Calgary have a lot of singles. It’s mostly because those are singles towns; with the oil boom and whatnot it’s harder to meet people.
Q: Does the site see any patterns, such as dips or spikes, over certain holidays?
A: We see 15- 20% increase from two days after Christmas and it goes all the way until the Wednesday after Valentine’s Day.
Q: What have been the biggest changes to the site lately?
A: ~60% of our users now access the site from mobile. We also launched top prospects a few weeks ago, which shows all the people you have communicated with and then we predict which one of those you’re most likely to enter into a relationship with and also stay in it.
by Andrea Woo
The full article was originally published at Globe and Mail, but is no longer available.

Wow! POF is predicting relationship success now. That’s something new. The real challenge over the coming year for the iDating industry is in monetizing mobile more effectively. Internet traffic is down for the entire industry in the USA, because mobile traffic is usurping usage. (Full Disclosure: POF is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Wow! POF is predicting relationship success now. That’s something new. The real challenge over the coming year for the iDating industry is in monetizing mobile more effectively. Internet traffic is down for the entire industry in the USA, because mobile traffic is usurping usage. (Full Disclosure: POF is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Wow! POF is predicting relationship success now. That’s something new. The real challenge over the coming year for the iDating industry is in monetizing mobile more effectively. Internet traffic is down for the entire industry in the USA, because mobile traffic is usurping usage. (Full Disclosure: POF is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Wow! POF is predicting relationship success now. That’s something new. The real challenge over the coming year for the iDating industry is in monetizing mobile more effectively. Internet traffic is down for the entire industry in the USA, because mobile traffic is usurping usage. (Full Disclosure: POF is a client of Courtland Brooks)