OPW — June 26 — Here's a little graph of Plentyoffish vs OKCupid vs Matchdoctor vs American Singles fyi. Plentyoffish is powering away. Here's Myspace vs Friendster vs Hi5 vs Facebook.
Mark Brooks: Crazy outta control! Myspace is taking over the internet.
WORK HAPPY.NET — June 15 — Markus Frind runs a free online dating site called PlentyOfFish.com and he rocked the Internet world this week when he posted a photo of his latest Google AdSense check for $900k Canadian. It was a check for 2 months because the first check they sent was so big it was rejected by his bank.
You're a one-man show running a very successful dating site. Tell us how you got started.
Back in 2001 after my birthday someone in the office introduced me to online dating sites. I went back to my desk and checked out udate.com and kiss.com and lavalife/web personals. I was bored and I wanted to chat with people. I was really annoyed when I found out you had to pay for everything, I ended up telling the girl who introduced me to the sites that I could do better and make them for free.
Your site, if you'll forgive me, isn't terribly attractive. What's your secret and what are your thoughts about what it takes to be successful?
I created the first real free dating and the first one that actually worked. Just like Google created the first real search engine that worked. There is no such thing as a secret. When I came home from work I sat down and I forced myself to code for a hour or 2. There are only 1000 or so sites in the world with massive traffic, and of those mine is the only one that is run by a single person. For being successful in building sites you need to give something to the surfer faster or better or both. If you want to do pay per click, you just need to be good at picking words to bid on. For that business its just a matter of repetition and fighting boredom. At the end of the day you just need to sit down and DO it. Most people don't. FULL INTERVIEW @ WORK HAPPY.NET
Mark Brooks: I just started listing the Canadian internet dating rankings at http://www.onlinepersonalswatch.com courtesy of Comscore Mediametrix. Plentyoffish.com is #3, very close behind Mate1, and has 3.7 times the number of uniques that it had in May of 2005. I'll interview Markus for OPW again shortly. Let me know the questions you'd like me to ask him.
SCOBLEIZER — Mar 4 — At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He's Google's #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. What's the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it "anti-marketing design." He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue. Google. Is it pretty? No. Craig's List? Pretty? No. MySpace? Pretty? No.
The full article was originally published at Scobleizer, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: It's not the fact that these sites are ugly. Consider further. The winning formula is that the sites appear anti-commercial, humble, and non-pushy. These sites appear to users like a person or group of smart people doing them a favor without hawking too hard to them. Most users don't realise that Craigslist makes $10 million+ a year from charging for job postings in a handful of cities…the average user never posts a job. Craigslist just looks like a cool nerd doing everyone a favor. How refreshing. Same deal with Plentyoffish. And Google? A lot of very smart, passionate, 'do no evil' nerds.
OPW — Mar 7 — TRUE moves up one spot to take 3rd spot from eHarmony. Plentyoffish moves up two places to 5th place. Webdate vaults back onto the top 15 taking 10th spot.
OPW Interview — Feb 21, 2006 — I met Markus at iDate2005 and barely gave him the time of day; a hokey little site called Plentyoffish. I have a lot more respect for him these days. Plentyoffish is free and has snuck up on the Canadian market and now he is sneaking up on the American market.
What's your background Markus?
Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient.
Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?
I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.
How do you make money?
I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn’t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started this in March, 2003 and I haven’t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.
How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?
My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops. It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.
Who do you regard as your top competitors?
I’m really competing with Match.com. In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I’m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada.
Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?
Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.
What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?
Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com.
CNN — Feb 13 — According to Jupiter Research, more than 17 million people viewed online personals last year, and about 2.5 million paid for them. (It's usually free to browse; the money kicks in when you want to connect with someone.) There are several major sites to choose from, including Match.com, eHarmony, Yahoo! and the aptly named Plentyoffish.com. As part of a CNN Radio special, CNN Headline News anchor Erica Hill and I hosted a radio show discussing online dating PODCAST. FULL ARTICLE @ CNN INTERNATIONAL
Mark Brooks: OKCupid and Plentyoffish.com are the big freebie sites these days. Sexsearch.com is next in line to adultfriendfinder in the casual dating space.
Jan 29 — Plentyoffish.com is advertising on radio in 17 cities in the USA and on TV in Canada!?! Their revenue comes entirely from advertising, mostly from Google ad spots. – Mark Brooks (btw, this is the 1000th post on OPW)
Jan 14 — Hitwise – Plentyoffish moves up one spot to displace singlesnet. Manhunt.net jumps in at 10th spot. First time I've heard of them but it looks like they've been around for a while according to Alexa's 2 year graph. MSN Match and PerfectMatch move down three spots to 13th and 15th spots respectively. Hotornot climbs one spot to #12.
Nielsen Netratings – myYearbook moves up two spots to 5th place and Mate1 bumps down two spots to 7th. Tagworld, Tickle's Lovehappens and Crush Calculator spring onto the scene at 8th, 10th and 14th spots respectively and LoveAccess moves up four spots to take the 11th spot. Perfectmatch moves down one spot to #12 and eCrush gets bumped from 9th to 15th spot.
Alexa – Singlesnet moves up to 6th spot bumping Date.com to #7…and that's it. Only one change.
Dec 27 — The November rankings are live (see left bar). Nielsen has tidied social networks Myspace, Facebook, hi5 and Friendster out of their online dating rankings, leaving Yahoo Personals (1), Match (2) and TRUE (3) with the November 2005 top spots.
Not much change with the Alexa rankings. Plentyoffish and Friendfinder bump Date.com down two spots to #6. For the social networking rankings Facebook bumps Friendster out of the top 3. Myspace now leads the social networking category, followed by Hi5 and Facebook.
TRUE trumps American Singles on the Hitwise top 15 rankings for November and takes the #5 spot. Singlesnet moves up one spot to #7 and wrestles Plentyoffish and adult oriented Mate1 down one place. MSN leans on it’s online dating and moves up five full places to take the #10 position. Niche site Blackpeoplemeet impressively moves up a spot to #11 and Perfect Match gets squeezed out to #12. Youngsters online dating site, Hotornot, moves up a spot to #13. – Mark Brooks
