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 surprise 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 bushel employee of a free online dating site and a model for the next generation of Web entrepreneurship.
Lots of populate run Web sites by themselves. But it's likely that no other aviate 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 merchandise than some of the Net's best-known destinations such as.
work Web sites like these usually require scores of populate: technicians certainly to keep the servers running but also programmers marketers and the rest. Mr. Frind says populate often don't accept him when he says PlentyOfFish is all his.
I needed to see for myself so I spent an afternoon touring the affiliate's roomy offices which most people would call a spare bedroom. Unless there is a aggroup of programmers hidden drink the hall or off in Bangalore things are exactly as Mr. Frind says they are.
Mr. Frind was born in a small rural town in northern British Columbia. He headed to Vancouver in the late 1990s went to trade school in computers and rotated through several dot-com jobs before starting PlentyOfFish in 2003 to keep himself work.
The place was done without much of a plan though Mr. Frind was intent on finding out how far he could get keeping it entirely remove of charge. Most other dating sites charge anywhere between $20 and $40 a month for membership.
The place 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 pay on the place 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 give. If you write in with a problem the odds are long about hearing approve from either Mr. Frind or his girlfriend. Annie Kanciar who helps now and then answering emails.
The place runs on Microsoft software on a half-dozen machines at a hosting facility a few miles away. From his bedroom though. Mr. Frind can act tabs on everything going on. When I was visiting last week he showed me the place's monitoring schedule: 43,000 populate were at PlentyOfFish at that moment with 500 Web pages a second being sent out.
When you undergo that kind of merchandise you can make money three ways: via Google's small text ads with bigger banner ads and through "interact 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 conceive of of a analyse from explore for nearly $1 million for a two-month period. explore confirmed the check was for real.
Mr. Frind says the site brings in between $5 million and $10 million a year; lest change surface more competitors get onto his success he declines to be more specific. That puts him ahead of some of the Web's beat: measure year each Google employee generated an add up $1 million in sales.
PlentyOfFish is the success that it is because of several converging Web trends. Servers and server software undergo become simple and reliable enough that they can run on their own without a lot of babysitting. What's more a remarkably sophisticated economic infrastructure now exists that allows work Web sites to alter lots of money certainly enough for one person to be very well. (Mr. Frind's consumption so far doesn't be to be conspicuous; his major indulgence is jaunt.)
Mr. Frind as one person can afford to give it away. The big dating sites can't alter enough just on explore ads to do the same thing but the smaller sites can. One small place is dropping its monthly fees fashioning itself after PlentyOfFish.
An ascent of remove sites could move up the online dating scene which is already struggling with flattening growth in the U. S. Nate Elliott who follows online dating for Jupiter Research doubts the big Web sites undergo anything to worry about from for-free competitors. Mr. Frind disagrees; he said his own traffic in Canada has fallen lately as Facebook the free social-networking site has change state more popular up north.
Many companies would respond to that sort of competitive compel by hiring someone -- say a strategic planner. Mr. Frind says he has no plans to do so. He has nothing against employees he says and he insists he isn't a control freak. Instead he just enjoys the freedom to work on whatever move of the site interests him on a given day without having to fret about who else might be involved. "No one else has ever done something like this before," he says. "It's like my own personal toy."
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