PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait For a Huge Success

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The Wall Street Journal

PORTALS
By LEE GOMES

PlentyOfFish Owner Has the Perfect Bait For a Huge Success
May 23, 2007

The headquarters of what may be, on a per-capita basis, the busiest, most profitable site on the entire World Wide Web is on the 16th floor of a brand-new Vancouver building with panoramic views of the nearby Canadian Rockies. It happens to be the apartment of 28-year-old Markus Frind, the owner and sole employee of PlentyOfFish.com, a free online dating site and a model for the next generation of Web entrepreneurship.

Lots of people run Web sites by themselves. But it's likely that no other solo venture runs at the scale of PlentyOfFish. For the week ended April 28, it was the 96th-busiest Web site in the U.S., according to the HitWise tracking service. That means it has more traffic than some of the Net's best-known destinations, such as Apple.com. Busy Web sites like these usually require scores of people: technicians, certainly, to keep the servers running, but also programmers, marketers and the rest. Mr. Frind says people often don't believe him when he says PlentyOfFish is all his.

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The site was done without much of a plan, though Mr. Frind was intent on finding out how far he could get keeping it entirely free of charge. Most other dating sites charge anywhere between $20 and $40 a month for membership. The site became popular in Canada and, later, in the U.S. Mr. Frind says he doesn't know exactly why. There are now 1.2 million active members. HitWise says it's one of the five-busiest dating sites. Nielsen/NetRatings says that by some measures, such as the time its members spend on the site, it ranks second after eHarmony. How does he do it? In large part, by keeping things simple. The graphical design ranges from rudimentary to nonexistent. No wonder, since Mr. Frind did it himself. The site also won't win any J.D. Power awards for customer support. If you write in with a problem, the odds are long about hearing back from either Mr. Frind or his girlfriend, Annie Kanciar, who helps now and then answering emails.

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When you have that kind of traffic, you can make money three ways: via Google's small text ads, with bigger banner ads and through "affiliate marketing," where other sites pay you for sending them customers. Mr. Frind does all three -- and does very well. A few months back, he posted on his blog a picture of a check from Google for nearly $1 million for a two-month period. Google confirmed the check was for real. Mr. Frind says the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year; lest even more competitors get onto his success, he declines to be more specific. That puts him ahead of some of the Web's best: Last year, each Google employee generated an average $1 million in sales.

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