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"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Da

"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to $10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)." I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive. From: http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture

saurik 15y ago
You might enjoy this article, then (I read it in a physical copy of Inc. a few years ago, and remember really liking it). http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...
blurbytree 15y ago
...and anyone here can make a comfortable income from adsense. Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.
- citricsquid 15y ago
  Not sure your point, I make my income from advertising (well company does and pays me, same thing right?) my fascination was with the single employee part.
  - blurbytree 15y ago
    Oh definitely. I was just pointing out that it's a very viable model for anyone here to copy, contrary to the advice of most here.
- chc 15y ago
  Nobody's saying it's impossible — just that like many other possible sources of revenue, such as lottery tickets, it isn't very dependable. If you're able to get 200 million pageviews a day, all sorts of avenues for making money are open to you. For most prospective businesses, though, "I will get 200 million pageviews a day and be able to maintain it practically by myself" is not a very safe assumption to make.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Does POF still have one employee?
- rfolstad 15y ago
  Nope we've got a handful now and we're hiring! http://www.pof.com/careers http://www.pof.com/careers
- citricsquid 15y ago
  No, they have a jobs page (http://www.pof.com/careers/ http://www.pof.com/careers/) and it lists director of technology. Another user posted above an inc article saying that he had 4 employees in 2009 and planned for 30, so maybe he has 30 now!
ams6110 15y ago
Also from that link: No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops. and... In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen. I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.
- boyter 15y ago
  Had the same experience. You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun. I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.

saurik 15y ago

You might enjoy this article, then (I read it in a physical copy of Inc. a few years ago, and remember really liking it). http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rolling-in.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/20090101/and-the-money-comes-rol...

blurbytree 15y ago

...and anyone here can make a comfortable income from adsense. Do not believe the hivemind here that advertising based income isn't possible.

citricsquid 15y ago
Not sure your point, I make my income from advertising (well company does and pays me, same thing right?) my fascination was with the single employee part.
- blurbytree 15y ago
  Oh definitely. I was just pointing out that it's a very viable model for anyone here to copy, contrary to the advice of most here.
chc 15y ago
Nobody's saying it's impossible — just that like many other possible sources of revenue, such as lottery tickets, it isn't very dependable. If you're able to get 200 million pageviews a day, all sorts of avenues for making money are open to you. For most prospective businesses, though, "I will get 200 million pageviews a day and be able to maintain it practically by myself" is not a very safe assumption to make.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Does POF still have one employee?

rfolstad 15y ago
Nope we've got a handful now and we're hiring! http://www.pof.com/careers http://www.pof.com/careers
citricsquid 15y ago
No, they have a jobs page (http://www.pof.com/careers/ http://www.pof.com/careers/) and it lists director of technology. Another user posted above an inc article saying that he had 4 employees in 2009 and planned for 30, so maybe he has 30 now!

ams6110 15y ago

Also from that link: No built in components from ASP are used. Everything is written from scratch. Nothing is more complex than a simple if then and for loops. and... In the process of getting rid of ASP.NET repeaters and instead uses the append string thing or response.write. If you are doing over a million page views a day just write out the code to spit it out to the screen. I think this goes a long way to explaining how this is all running on IIS on a seemingly "small" hardware infrastructure. Last company I worked for reimplemented a "classic" ASP app which was mostly in-page SQL statements calling stored procedures, with Response.Writes building the HTML. The new implementation, in ASP.NET, used .NET components, an ORM, an elegantly abstracted object model, agile methodologies, etc. It was slower than sludge compared to the old app.

boyter 15y ago
Had the same experience. You can get too carried away with abstractions in .NET. Where I work it was the norm to have multiple layers, abstractions, frameworks etc... A consequence of this was 30 minute build times etc... I think the people working on the stuff initially just wanted to play with every language feature under the sun. I ditched it all for a few simple layers (mostly MVC with LINQ to SQL) and as a result the application takes 2 seconds to compile, is very fast at runtime, and has no magic going and is easy enough you could hand it over to a junior developer to maintain.