Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

luvbird21 — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 18:47:09 -0000

Calling from UK .Very impersonal site system generated welcome from Marcus and then you find you Profile has been obliterated (apparently this happens for no reason from time to time POF says) You try to find out why and you are ignored. Marcus you are very shallow and another example of someone whos made his money and couldnt give a s...

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

pock — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:08:16 -0000

i am onmy way to ANOTHER PLANTY OF MONEY Sorry no Plenty of fish

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Sean — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 18:01:54 -0000

For some reason POF appears to be unavailable as of 28 Feb 2009? The message I have been receiving all day is: The Web Page Can Not Be Found,
More information

This error (HTTP 400 Bad Request) means that Internet Explorer was able to connect to the web server, but the webpage could not be found because of a problem with the address.

Any thoughts appreciated

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Pretty — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:55:46 -0000

I agreee with you.
Nice and impressed.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Anonymous — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:12:27 -0000

The owner and the mods have a lot of disrespect towards the users. You see this displayed in the suggestion forums and any other forum where we get to interact with them. Snotty attitudes. And lots of control issues. They disallow chatting in the forums which is how many people get to know whether or not the want to befriend or date someone. They are big on rules and don't seem to care about pleasing the people who have made Markus rich. And I've read on the site that the mods don't get paid. My God, how stingy. If you're rich Markus, pay the people who help run your site.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Malcolm Lambe — Sun, 04 May 2008 13:13:58 -0000

He's an amazing guy. You do know that Marcus Frind is a mathematical genius? Check out Marcus & the 23 Primes

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

George — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:06:39 -0000

"but try searching for any online dating term and I don't think you'll see any PoF ads."

Have you tried typing "dating" into Google? There's a POF ad right there.

But he could do well without AdWords, the site is sticky and I'm sure he gets plenty of organic traffic. Revenue makes sense based on numbers, and with smart caching and limited DB calls the load could be handled by only a few servers.

Besides, one nice benefit (or goal?) of releasing the numbers means stories like this, which mean free publicity and page rank boost.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

jenny — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:59:55 -0000

Woh, Mr. Markus is the top sample that I am impressed in my life. He has a master mind in marketing and managing his site by himself.
Again, Mark, if you read this note, I just want to say how smart you are.
Again, thank you for sharing his successful story.
Jenny.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

TicTac — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:04:19 -0000

So let me get this straight. Based on the info out there, your site started in 2003 as a way for you to learn .NET after being out of college for only a few years, and somehow you've stumbled upon an architecture compromised of a few servers that would cost others $30 million/year to operate? I think you have every right to be proud of what you've accomplished, but call me skeptical for not buying that.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Daniel Gibbons — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 17:46:50 -0000

As Markus indicates, it's hard to see how his revenue could be any less with that number of page views and the plethora of ads on the site. There have been other cheap shots speculating that he's spending all the money on google ads to drive traffic, but try searching for any online dating term and I don't think you'll see any PoF ads.

In fact that might be the most interesting story of all -- the practically free cost of customer acquisition (at least if you don't count the piece of the pie Google and the ad networks take, which the publisher never sees anyway). Didn't Match.com spend almost $175 million on ads last year (more than half of their 2006 revenue)?

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Markus — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:35:08 -0000

by saying nothing they would have all converted to free. By publically stating my revenues were far below what they thought I undercut their reasons for going free.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Kevin Burton — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:35:03 -0000

Markus.

I'm not sure if that comment was directed at me but for the record I'm very happy with the company I run :)

My point is, that if other dating sites our floundering, don't chime up and clue them in. Stay silent and let them crash around you.

Google only talked about their ad revenue when the had to go public.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

mathewi — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:27:02 -0000

I guess people just can't believe that you can run a site that large
with such a small infrastructure, Markus -- or they seem to assume
that if you were really doing that well you would have cashed out by
now.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Markus — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 22:18:03 -0000

I've got no idea who this guy is, but the same thing happens every single time a story is printed.

There are 2 types of people in silicon valley, those who made a ton of money, and those who wish they did. I swear the later category has read some kind of business for dummies book and every time I do something that isn't "correct" they lecture me on the correct way of doing things.

The reason is simple, 2 years ago I was getting calls from other dating sites saying, Sell to us now or we will crush you completely by launching competing free sites. Every major site had consultants coming in telling them to go free before it was to late. Second tier sites were barely profitable in most cases and had nothing to lose by going free

So rather then compete with companies like match or eharmony with billions in the bank as a free service I just released my numbers. After all Plentyoffish is an absolutely massive site and no one in the industry believed I was making so little money. That made it real hard for other sites to get funding, and for paid sites to BS their investors and sell them on the idea of going free.

So what happend? Allegron, RSVP.com.au, datingdirect, lavalife, zencon and a bunch of others All got sold after looking at going free and seeing it wouldn't work. Lavalife and Questpersonals even launched Free Dating sites to try and compete head on. Those all failed.

No one else has figured out how to create a site the size of plentyoffish with under $30 million a year in tech related costs. Combined that with the fact revenues would be so small the big sites backed off, for now.

In the end there are well over 100,000 dating sites at any time, and about 3,000 of those get enough traffic at any one time to be tracked by hitwise and others. Having another few thousand sites started by people who thought they could get rich was a far better option then competing head on with dating sites that had unlimited money.

Also with compete, quantcast and others out there, any idiot could go and multiply pageviews * CPM and come up with a revenue estimate. Not to mention many dating sites buy CPM ads on my site.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Ted — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 20:30:13 -0000

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/01/04/ho...

In this blog post, Markus says that his Adsense click through rate had dropped 60% in two months as a result of the clickable area changes made to Adsense ads. What that suggests to me at least is that a lot of his clicks were accidental, which is usually due to deceptive ad formating or ad positioning.

Maybe there's something else going on, but there has always seemed to be something strange going on with Markus's claims.

I don't really doubt his revenue claims, although he's been throwing around the same revenue numbers for something like 2 years now... However, I suspect there is a lot more to the story than Markus would like us to believe.

Fake it until you make it as they say.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Joe Hunkins — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 19:55:18 -0000

I'm a big fan of Markus as well. PlentyofFish is a great example of using the medium in a simple and powerful way, and puts the lie to the notion that success requires careful planning and big capital. He did it his own simple way, and won big. I'm also starting to wonder if it might have been helpful to be *out* of the Silicon Valley loop as Markus was.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

mathewi — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:12:02 -0000

Thanks, Mukund. That's a great video -- some great companies in
there. And Drew Curtis of Fark is hilarious.

Re: Plenty of Fish equals Plenty of Money

Mukund Mohan — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 22:49:58 -0000

MI
Take a look at this video of them from a year (or so ago). Very cool Guy K with Markus and others.

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/02/panel_of_we...