Plenty Of Cash for one-man band PlentyOfFish.com
Markus Frind is an interesting character, who has left some provocative comments on Read/WriteWeb before. He claims he's earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his dating website, plentyoffish.com. These claims have been vigorously challenged by some, but external data sources (e.g. see this comment thread) do seem to back him up. Recently Markus has been trying to convince me to post something about the fact that he is running a huge scale website and earning lotsa money all on his own. His story is interesting enough to post, so I've relented.
Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is two and a half times bigger than digg.com. Digg.com gets 200 Million page views per month, but Markus says plentyoffish gets 500 Million:
"The site(plentyoffish.com and Forums.plentyoffish.com) serves ~500 million pageviews a month and does so using 1 DB server and 1 Web Server which is a far cry from the industry standard of 300+ servers for a site of this size."
Digg uses 3 web servers and 8 small database servers. Recently I asked Markus via email how much work he puts into the site on a daily basis. His reply:
"It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as the site grows i automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to 3 times its current size."
On the hardware side, Markus gave me these details:
"I have 4 servers.
1. DB server
2. Web server, handles 1 million pageviews an hour at peak. No static pages at all, way to slow. All pages are Gzipped on the fly.
3. Mail Server. Handles 1 million emails/day and also has a webserver that handles a Instant messager. That translates to 4-5 million polling pageviews/hour at peak.
4. Image server, Like all major sites it serves images to a massive content distribution system/cache.
5. Outbound traffic is 70 to 100mb/sec If it was uncompressed it would probably run at 140mb/sec"
So Markus has managed to set himself up very nicely with his Web operation. OK it is a dating site (sex sells!), but even so it puts the success of some of the more prominent web 2.0 blogs and sites into context, doesn't it? Or as Markus himself put it: "I think its time people stop hyping web 2.0 crap and start promoting real ideas that have real business models." Not sure I agree with that sentiment, but I guess you can't argue with the scale of success Markus has achieved.
As for what he is doing with all his money and free time, he said he's traveling a lot! OK, Markus has made me well and truly jealous :-) But congrats to him for the success. As for me and my humble blog, I'd just like to get to 1 million page views per month (real page views, not the inflated rss and bot-infested figues a lot of people bandy about!). That's what I call ramping up - sad isn't it :-)
3 TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.readwriteweb.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2685
FOLLOW RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
You can't really agree with him, yet, as Web 2.0 is very central to what you do. But I certainly agree with him, and as many of the Web 2.0 companies go to the wall after they continue to make no revenue, his rather simplistic opinion is likely to play out. (Of course, there are certainly Web 2.0 gems who will be successful, but as with most markets, they will be the minority.)
Posted by: Peter Cooper | June 11, 2006 5:28 AM
Good strategy for redundancy, having one server for each function, hope they never has any hardware problem, or the 10K a day will quickly become none.
How exactly do you do maintenace on your system with only 1 server. If you have to patch the OS say, even if the server is offline for say 20 minutes, the whole site is down? What a wonderful user experience!
Also, whilst the pageview numbers with Digg may well be comparable, with Digg's Ajax features, I'm sure the interaction between the user and server are MUCH higher on Digg.
Posted by: Mubashar Iqbal | June 11, 2006 6:45 AM
I do like his central message: less is more, small is big, and simple business models is how you make money online.
However, one major problem he has is that 90% of his advertisers are paid dating sites, the very model he's blowing up. Eventually, many many of these sites will go out of business, as they're all pretty much going after the same crew of (indelicately put) losers in love. So if your revenue source and your audience is totally undiversified, it leaves you open to shocks in the market.
Posted by: ted | June 11, 2006 11:21 AM
Peter, I was more not agreeing with his black and white sentiment of dismissing all things about the new Web (2.0, two-way web, chmod 777, whatever). Which btw I'd argue FeedDigest is a very good representation of.
Of course when it comes down to it, success on the Web has (and always will be) about how many page views/impressions your site gets - 2.0 or not. And nobody can argue with 5 million per month :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | June 11, 2006 2:54 PM
I agree with Mubashar. Markus has chosen to scale up instead of scaling out. A bad bad choice in my opinion. Scaling up is almost always unsustainable and a more costly option (although i would figure that maintenance would be simpler)
Posted by: Janson | June 12, 2006 6:40 AM
I have 5 or 6 servers that sit around and do nothing, I will use them when needed. Easier to buy stuff in bulk and keep the hardware the same etc etc so when you do need to scale out you don't run into hardware problems.
Janson I have yet to meet a single company that recommends scaling out instead of up first. Also comparing diggs infustructure to plentyoffish is pointless, its comparing apples to oranges. Digg has next to no complexity and requires next to no resources to serve up a page.
Posted by: Markus | June 12, 2006 12:11 PM
he has PageRank = 5 - could it be true for the website with millions page views per month?
Posted by: milliondollar | June 12, 2006 1:56 PM
Him and his girlfriend... hmm that's 2 people running the show, not one as he claims!
Its very impressive, but still not the only one. I have met other people from other sites around the world that do similar numbers in the arbitrage and classified area and are also run by a small teams of 2-3 people.
Jekoo, Adoos, Vivastreet, Gomeo, etc..
Posted by: John | June 12, 2006 8:05 PM
Uh, this story has more holes than Swiss cheese.
Redundancy? Load balancing? HA? All pages dynamic (funny)? So many page views and 1-2 people can handle email in 2 hours/day? No spammers to catch and punish? And why would one give away such gold? Idle servers? Wouldn't one use them for another site and double the money? Funny, funny.
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | June 12, 2006 11:22 PM
Btw. this is what I think is a good business model:
http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/?permalink=
Mike-Arringtons-Business-Model.html
Posted by: Otis Gospodnetic | June 13, 2006 12:15 AM
If he's making all that money, why is he bugging you to promote his site?
Posted by: Greg | June 13, 2006 9:23 AM
I would be careful about his comments about only him and his girlfriend running the show. He has numerous moderators that also do a lot of the work.. censuring forums... banning users... deleting accounts
before you judge this site a success story I sujest you join it and see what is reallying going on within it. There is a lot of fighting... liars... frauds.. children (yes I have seen them as young as 13 opening profiles there)
beneath the shinny surface lies a dark underbelly
Posted by: Barry | June 19, 2006 8:02 AM
I agree, with all that money he's making perhaps he should look into hiring someone to ensure the dating site protects minors who try and use it.
Posted by: Bella | June 22, 2006 4:16 AM
For the last two years I've been working on a special project re on-line dating. Have tried a number of different sites, proving most of them are pretty well functioning.
POF is however a big challenge to me. By spending hours focused on the forums during the last two months, figured how it worked. To be fair, the layout design is extremely user frinedly. Problems are the contents do not appear logically. Another time by posting my genuine bikini shots allocated on different regions, barely got any response....shame on me :-)
Glad that the project has reached the final stage. That said, my conclusion for on-line dating is fairly optimistic. For sure there's no free lunch, definitely a no paid, no gain service for mature adults only. And play safe.
Posted by: Salamander | June 25, 2006 11:32 AM
Forget Google page rank, doesn't tell you much. The real test for traffic is Alexa. He has an alexa traffic rating of 672. That is INCREDIBLY good. My experience tells me, sites with an alexa traffic rating of 50,000 do about $500 usd a month run rate in google ads... I don't know 100% sure how this scales, but my gut feeling is that a 10,000 alexa rating would yeild around $1500 a month... 1000 would yeild maybe $10k a month, and a 600 would yeild maybe $20-$30k a month in runrate ad revenue. If anyone has more experience with how alexa ratings contrast with google run rate revenue, please let me know... my feelings are just that, a feeling, I don't have any real evidence of these numbers.
Posted by: Jeff | July 2, 2006 11:06 AM
Common wisdom suggests that 2-3% of people click on text-based ads. So we'll use 600,000 visitors per day (what is currently on the site) x 0.03 for funzies = 18,000 clicks per day... nice! $10,000 / 18,000 clicks = about $0.55/cents revenue per click, pretty sweet. It doesn't sound too far off, I thought impossible... but hey, nice work! What stumps me is that I believe its only on ONE banner, at the top of the very first page... its the only I could find but I only went on PlentyOfFish for a few minutes. I just signed up for AdSense ;) hah!
Posted by: Boomtrek Travel United Kingdom | July 5, 2006 9:25 PM
Whatever has happened he made the site and made some money, true or not about the 10k
I also made a site to get in contact with people, date,... all by myself called Me Tarzan You Jane http://www.MeTarzanYouJane.eu
And no I'm not a company, and yes I also started this to learn some aspx. I normally programmed asp but wanted to change to a newer more powerfull language.
The site has it's share of members in Europe but the rest of the world can also follow now because everything is translated in english.
So guys and girls if you want some real honest site, no fake entries, blogs on the internet just real stuff then support me and sign yourself and your friends up. All free.
Not happy, then contact me via the site and let me now what bothers you and most of the time in the past after hearing something I also implemented new wishes or enhanced the site.
Posted by: Jean Paul | July 24, 2006 2:41 AM
way to go plenty of fish! that server setup is mad impressive for a site of that size.
Posted by: gratis saker | July 24, 2006 7:29 AM
I don't know anything about business models but as a user I must agree with Barry on post #12. The in-fighting on pof defies belief, and I for one hope it will be their downfall. The moderators are small minded, faceless bullies who are 'never wrong'. Never dare say a word about pof on the pof site or these bullies wil rain fire from the sky upon you.
I joined the site (lasted about a week), posted a comprehensive profile and added a fully clothed pic. I also added a link in my profile to another forum I use (not allowed, it would seem). I started to post, probably about 20 posts, and began to take part.
One day when I went to post I got a message, something like "You have a link to another site in your profile. Your posting rights have been suspended. Remove this link or be banned". I removed the link, apologised, and the posting rights were re-instated.
I then committed the ultimate crime. I questioned the rules. Withing minutes my account had been banned and every post I had made was gone. There were threads with people answering my posts, but the posts they were answering were not there anymore.
When I did a name search for my account it came up with the message: "Deleted for breaking TOS, common reasons are; Duplicate accounts, fake pictures, porn, harassing others, banned country, escorts, scams, previously banned and a host of other reasons".
(Duplicate accounts) I only ever had the one account.
(Fake pictures) It was a very tasteful, fully clothed picture.
(porn) ? Beats me.
(Harassing others) I had never contacted ANYBODY privately and all my posts were tasteful.
(Banned country) I'm in th UK.
(Escorts) I'm not an escort. I was looking to meet people, which is what I thought the site was about.
(Scams) ? beats me.
(Previously banned) It's the first and only account I ever had.
(and a host of other reasons) ? Well, I suppose I did post a link in my profile.
I thought I might be in the minority but when I started to search I found hundreds of cases where people were deleted for no reason. There's a lot of ill feeling about pof out there.
Posted by: Female | August 10, 2006 2:22 AM