Plenty of Fish Blog
plentyoffish.wordpress.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2007
Markus Frind, founder of PlentyOfFish, wrote about running the dating site largely alone, including traffic, revenue, and AdSense income.
What HN saysHN commenters cite it for traffic figures, such as billions of page views weekly, and as an example of bootstrapped success.
56HN people shared it
27linked it in comments
55stories submitted
1.4Kstory points
10 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1The True Story Behind PlentyOfFish.com -- Straight From The Horse's Mouth6 people · 15 points · first shared 2007 · 7 comments on HN
- 2Blog written by Markus of PlentyOfFish.com - (one-man company is the largest(?) AdSense publisher)4 people · 3 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 3The web is dead, It's all about mobile3 people · 18 points · first shared 2012 · 7 comments on HN
- 432 Billion images a month.3 people · 3 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 5Monthly revenue breakdown of PlentyOfFish's early days2 people · 483 points · first shared 2014 · 131 comments on HN
- 6Plenty of Fish Hacked2 people · 164 points · first shared 2011 · 97 comments on HN
- 72008 was a good year, now #13 in the US.2 people · 36 points · first shared 2008 · 41 comments on HN
- 8Markus Frind sets his aim on "making 100 million a year instead of just millions"2 people · 13 points · first shared 2007 · 5 comments on HN
- 9I deleted Julian Assange’s account.2 people · 11 points · first shared 2010 · 4 comments on HN
- 10Digital 100, most valuable boot strapped company2 people · 8 points · first shared 2012 · 2 comments on HN
- 11Match.com Success Rates published.2 people · 3 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 12PlentyOfFish Founder says Social Networks are Stealing Dating Site Users2 people · 2 points · first shared 2007 · discussion on HN
- 1310 years since POF blew up2 people · 1 points · first shared 2013 · discussion on HN
- 14Cited in the fields medalnobel prize in math2 people · first shared 2007
- 15Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers1 people · 165 points · first shared 2010 · 109 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
us0r · 2015-03-23
Not sure if you have updated info but according to his blog he was at 2 billion page views per WEEK back in 2012.
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/
drb311 · 2014-05-12
Seconded. (And Patio11, I've been stalking you...)
Another highlight, showing how POF early on was all about surprising and obvious innovations (presumably at the expense of polish, as noted elsewhere in the thread). If you're bootstrapping, polish is not your friend. Risky innovations are.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-pof-blew-u…
I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme from years ago. :)
sayemm · 2014-01-27
It's missing 2 really big ones...
- Craigslist: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/craigslist-valuation-80-million-…
- Plenty of Fish: http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/04/digital-100-most-valuable…
staunch · 2007-05-23
"The site became popular in Canada and, later, in the U.S. Mr. Frind says he doesn't know exactly why."
He's being dishonest here, but if that journalist was worth anything they'd have discovered he's an SEO guy:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/
raju · 2007-05-18
There's Avi Bryant of dabbleDb.com at http://smallthought.com/avi/
And of http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/ of plentyOfFish.com at http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/
bruceb · 2015-07-14
He is one of the original open disclosure type founders:
Here he post his ad-sense earning for a couple years:
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/adsense-breakdown/
Here is the post with the $900k(CAD) check from google (which bounced!)
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/07/small-companies-google-a…
andre · 2014-05-12
In 2008, SSD Array was deployed to handle images.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-server-array/
2009 brought more upgrades, including move to HP ProLiant DL785 with 512 GB of ram and 32 CPUs and SQLServer 2008 and Windows 2008, and In the next week we will be upgrading our image serving, we are nearing 10,000 images served per second and existing stuff just isn’t cutting it. We will be moving our 200 million images over to RamSan
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/upgrades-themes-date-nigh…
spyder · 2014-05-12
Another interesting thing:
"This month we will be building out our CUDA cluster to have 147,000 GPU cores to allow us to better predict who you will date."
From:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/pof-takes-67-of-mobile-da…
27182818284 · 2013-10-27
There is data that indicates that even filling out longer pieces of text and forms is on the rise. places like Plenty of Fish has real data about who is willing to fill out forms with a mobile devices and the numbers were surprising (to me at least)
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/the-web-is-dead-its-all-a…
Similarly after that article was published, I saw the analytics of a large university and could see the amount of mobile use increasing (thought not as dramatically as POF) with tasks as complex as filling out a college application.
In the end, I'm surprised, but yes, people fill out dating profiles, college applications, and even Hacker News comments from mobile devices more and more.
stickfigure · 2012-02-29
citricsquid · 2011-12-28
Probably here http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-images-a-month… which he cites in the article ;)
sjs · 2011-03-25
Plenty of Fish served 2m pageviews / hour with one server.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/02/09/aspnet-and-iis-2-million-…
grumo · 2011-01-31
Marcus taught himself ASP.net http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/
His story is pretty remarkable considering POF was a one man operation until recently.
dannyv · 2011-01-31
Chris Russo says he didn't dump any data.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/plentyoffish-hacked/#comm…
quickpost · 2011-01-22
Markus Frind is also doing some pretty huge volume on a Microsoft stack with plentyoffish.com...
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/microsoft-aspnet-20-perfo…
michaelbuckbee · 2010-08-01
There may be others, but a class action lawsuit was brought againt Yahoo! Personals for their use of sockpuppets in converting free to paid accounts.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/yahoo-class-action-lawsui…
akamaka · 2010-03-24
Whenever I read about Digg's infrastructure, I think of Markus Frind's comments from back in the day. He's the guy who built plentyoffish.com single-handedly. A lot has changed since 2006, but at the time he said that Digg had the worst infrastructure of any major site. A fascinating read, because his basic point is still very relevant today:
"Digg is doomed unless they fire their tech staff." - http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/10/08/digg-is-doomed-unless-the…
greatreorx · 2009-01-08
I don't see how anyone can read this blog post by Markus from 2006 about faking site traffic rankings and not think his current traffic stats are severely manipulated.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/competitive-intelligence-…
I'm not saying I don't respect what Markus has done. I just don't think his stats are anything near what is reported.
rms · 2008-12-20
Early SEO (when it meant a lot more than it does now) + the network effect. An incredible success, and as strong an outlier as ever exists.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/
zkinion · 2008-04-13
Don't forget the upcoming google bigtable, which changes that graph quite a bit:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/google-bigtable/
ed · 2008-01-18
Hey may not be a web designer, but he's certainly not an idiot.
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/30/cited-in-the-fields-medal…
yubrew · 2007-10-30
He does radio ads[0] and tv ads on shows like "The Bachelor"[1]
[0] http://onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/01/plentyoffish_ra.h…
[1] See comment from Reddiance http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/yahoo-to-surge-in-2007/
adrianwaj · 2007-10-19
Markus says: "My short description leaves a lot out, but basically I spent every waking minute when I wasn't at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out "enemies" and did everything I could to defeat them which ment being bigger then them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. I never tried to perfect anything it didn't matter if things didn't work 100% as long as it was good enough I would move onto the next thing. In 2003 the dating market was growing 80% a year unlike the -10% in 2006 so growth was a LOT easier. When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history."
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/
nickb · 2007-04-14
Data and growth is impressive but the monetization and financial perfromance of Facebook is one of the worst:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/14/new-monetization-hype/
and look at numbers here:
http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:thoUwXzOOQsJ:valleywag.com/tech/ad…
dawie · 2007-03-19
zkinion: here are 2 posts about this:
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/09/03/making-money-online-stats…
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/08/24/youtube-is-already-wildly…
joshwa · 2007-03-16
don't miss the previous post about how his growth is stagnating...
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/03/14/changing-direction/
cs702 · 2016-08-29
The most impressive thing about Markus Frind is that for years and years his startup was just one person working a few hours a day to manage a few servers. At one point he managed to become a top-20-in-traffic website while still running doing everything except customer support by himself:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/my-scaling-hero/
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2012/10/
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2011/12/27/32-billion-images-a-mont…
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.ht…
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/2008-was-a-good-year-now…
https://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-empire/