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Monthly revenue breakdown of PlentyOfFish's early days
- leonhuu007 12y agoDon't know how you do it Markus but POF is awesome.
- patio11 12y agoWelcome to HN, Markus. Please consider sticking around -- many folks here could learn a lot from you. (We have very different businesses but I've been quietly Internet-stalking a lot of your work for years.)
- drb311 12y agoSeconded. (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-up/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-... I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme from years ago. :)
- simonebrunozzi 12y agoI've been "stalking" patio11. :)
- collin128 12y agoThe motion carries. Markus will spend more time on HN :) Marcus, you shared a great talk a few months ago at Launch Academy and it really helped me get through a difficult period in starting my company, thank you. I had just bootstrapped my company for 20 months (read: hadn't had a paycheque in 20 months), now we're month 24 and things are rolling quite nicely (read: paid myself in April!!!!).
- soci 12y agoBeing in your same bootstrapped situation for 18months... I'm curious about what's your company about/name.
- marktangotango 12y agoDefinitely a fan, met my wife on pof, have a 1 yr old and one on the way! Cheers!
- JeremyMorgan 12y agoThis is the type of stuff us HN folks need to focus on.. POF is your classic "started in the garage" success story. No fancy trendy offices, no upfront VC investments, no trendy website with no product etc. This is true entrepreneurship. POF is the Google of dating sites, it came in to fill a need already being filled by "big money" and simply did it better, and gave it away free with revenue from advertising. Personally I love seeing something like that work.
- nekopa 12y agoI agree with everything you said except I would love to see more success stories that aren't based on the ad revenue business model. So many great new ideas come out, and then they slap ads on them to make money. It'd be nice to see some other experiments on how to extract cash from a business.
- 001sky 12y agoCompare that his first 12 clicks earned > 15,000 song downloads. 12 clicks->ca$7.60 [1] 15,000 downloads->us$4.20 [2] _______________ [1] June 2003 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725657
- s9ix 12y agoJust to clarify, the linked article refers to plays, not downloads - changes the dynamic a bit, but still a crazy stat nonetheless.
- User9821 12y agoI wish I had his click-through rates. I earn about $50/day from AdSense, sending them a million impressions. POF earned $2,500 for that same number.
- iancarroll 12y agoYou should consider switching to a network like BuySellAds.
- holgersindbaek 12y agoI could fall in love with that screenshot :-). Is the revenue in relation to visitors still as big today?
- axefrog 12y agoI'd be quite curious how the AdSense revenue has dropped off since 2006, as the platform has evolved a lot since then, not to mention people have had a long time to get used text-based contextual advertising.
- simonz05 12y agoFor a gaming site we run CPC is not close CA$0.5, more like CA$0.08. I'm also curious as to how this has developed for Plenty of Fish since 2006.
- brc 12y agoFrom my earlier reading on this site, essentially the other dating sites bid up ads quite highly, presumably because the lifetime value of a dating customer is quite high for a paid site. It was a lesson I'll always remember - if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar. You get to effectively monetize their users by providing an advertising channel.
- mandeepj 12y ago> if you're going to build an ad-revenue-based site, then do so in a field where there are major players throwing around big money on adsense or similar It is not field based. Every company has their own bidding budget. Take any field, you will be able to find clients who are ready to pay higher CPC than avg because they have money
- brc 12y agoNot really. The same person as a customer will have different lifetime value to a company in different industries. That is dependant on the stickiness of the product, the sticker price, and the nature of the product. Credit Cards and Insurance will always have higher CPC than florists. That's inherent, and that's what I mean by choosing the field carefully.
- jayflux 12y agoPOF still (since I last checked) store their passwords in plain text, so for that reason I cannot give it praise
- level09 12y agoand how would you go about checking that ?
- jayflux 12y ago2 reasons... 1. Letters of my password are shown to me with asterisks inbetween. 2. users used to get their own password sent back to them when they forgot it, rather than being forced make a new pass. Although to be fair I don't think they do 2 anymore You only have to google it to find other users saying the same thing.
- stormbrew 12y agoFor a long time it actually sent you your password in an automated email once a month just in case you happened to forget it.
- jere 12y agoInteresting. If you were to do that, it'd be much easier to send a login link.
- amenod 12y agoThis attitude might actually be the difference between them and lesser known competitors. (not that I think it's OK)
- stormbrew 12y agoWell, really, I think the big difference at the time was just that it was free. OKCupid was a later followup on the same idea, but most dating sites at the time were pay-to-message at best. You find very different people on PoF than on the pay dating sites. Or even than on OKC, which forces you to expose more of yourself to become visible.
- Theodores 12y agoI saw 'plentyoffish.com' on the Lady Gaga video 'Telephone'. I just Googled that product placement and, allegedly, site visitors went up 15% as a result of that incidental appearance in that particular video: http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/miracle-whip-plenty-fish-tap-lady-gaga-s-telephone/142794/ http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/miracle-whip-plent... If that is a true statistic then, regardless of what was paid to get that product placement, the return is quite phenomenal compared to the click through rates of online advertising. If Markus is listening, it would be good to know more details on how that success came about and worked out. Also, cheeky joke question, for all that effort put into a dating site and with all that money made, did you get any good dates out of it?
- gabemart 12y agoI believe it's against the Adsense ToS to share any data except gross earnings. However, I find these data very interesting and am personally glad you shared them. Quote: 9. Confidentiality You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without our prior written consent. "Google Confidential Information" includes: (a) all Google software, technology and documentation relating to the Services; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Property performance as pertaining to the Services; (c) the existence of, and information about, beta features in a Service; and (d) any other information made available by Google that is marked confidential or would normally be considered confidential under the circumstances in which it is presented. Google Confidential Information does not include information that you already knew prior to your use of the Services, that becomes public through no fault of yours, that was independently developed by you, or that was lawfully given to you by a third party. Notwithstanding this Section 9, you may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments resulting from your use of the Services. https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms https://www.google.com/adsense/localized-terms
- aleem 12y agoIs there any good reason for not allowing this? It doesn't make sense to bar publishers from sharing their CPCs.
- alandarev 12y agoAn ability to sue a company they do not like for any arbitrary reason.
- funkyy 12y agoWhat they will do? Ban his account? #1 PoF dont use Adsense anymore. #2 This was 8 years ago - I believe any legal action couldn't be taken for such a long ago by Google as their policy changed dozens of times and this will bring more advertising for them rather than damage their business.
- gabemart 12y ago
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- StavrosK 12y agoI wanted to see how hard it was, so I tried it, and the CAPTCHA was fairly straightforward, it wasn't even difficult. I got it first try, maybe you didn't notice you ONLY need to type the letters under the circles?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- aw3c2 12y agoUgly, quick, potentially false graphs: http://i.imgur.com/T5czvPO.png http://i.imgur.com/T5czvPO.png
- redmaverick 12y agoJust checked out PlentyOfFish.com The UI has a distinct 90's feel to it. If you check out okCupid, it looks more up to date. May be this is the craigslist of dating sites.
- Nilzor 12y agoux != ui
- NIL8 12y agoThere is a lot of wisdom in your comment!
- hiphopyo 12y agoIn the same way many musicians would argue that music was better in the 70s, one could argue that UIs were better in the 90s because there were less options and trends to confuse developers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bambax 12y agoHard to argue with such numbers... However I just created a test profile and the experience is less than stellar (many items in the French site appear in English, and I just received an email with the following title: "&&recievername%% résultats du test POF", etc.) Obviously, users don't care for those kinds of details; what we'd like to know is: what do users actually care about? (in general, and specifically for a dating site)
- rushabh 12y agoThese sites work on network effect, pretty similar to social networks, I guess. It helps to get a reasonable product quickly out there that does not compromise too much on the user experience and privacy. In India there is a job site called naukri.com that has horrible user experience, but is still the number one job site. But it works and does the bare minimum without much issues. It would be tough for anyone to crack that market without non-trivial capital.
- mattbarrie 12y agoWhat was the biggest thing you did to grow big so fast?
- cpncrunch 12y agoThat's what I was wondering too. The site went from 493 pageviews in the first month to 182404 in the second month.
- adventured 12y agoKeep in mind that's just the ad views, not the analytics for the entire site. If he began testing AdSense briefly in June, it wouldn't show the traffic the site had in May. His site from archive.org reveals some interesting things: (from april 2003) https://web.archive.org/web/20030422063613/http://plentyoffish.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030422063613/http://plentyoffi... At the top of the page are links to promotional systems. I'm guessing he basically used link exchanges, similar to how imgur used a traffic exchange (mgid.com) to dramatically bolster its early start. https://web.archive.org/web/20030423171521/http://www.thefreesite.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030423171521/http://www.thefre... and: https://web.archive.org/web/20030420035505/http://www.alovelinksplus.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030420035505/http://www.alovel... and: https://web.archive.org/web/20030420102231/http://www.singles-online-dating.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030420102231/http://www.single...
- adventured 12y agoHe knocked over one bowling pin to start: he conquered the Canadian dating market, started locally and moved across the border. That can't be replicated again in the dating market, it's hyper saturated now, but that concept holds true for most any market and for most any product or service: you have to conquer that first market.
- sayemm 12y agoYou know, I was thinking that too... but then again, the crazy rise of Tinder really surprises me. They're conquering mobile.
- programminggeek 12y agoPlenty Of Fish is one of those things where they caught lighting in a bottle and kept it there for a decade. It would be easy enough to get a site to millions of pageviews and let it die on the vine. It would also be easy to hire too many people and feature creep yourself into irrelevance. It takes a great combination of luck and skill to take the early success and sustain it.
- NIL8 12y agoI remember when you posted that check along with the exciting details. It was very inspiring for those of us fighting giants. Thanks for the update.
- sosuke 12y agoI remember spending a couple of years working on duplicating his success. Though I had fun it was ultimately a failure, and it seems obvious now just how much PoF's success was a combination of Markus's own talent and being a first mover.
- tobobo 12y agoDoesn't seem like anyone has actually used POF here so I'll put it out there—it's the trashiest, most annoying dating site I've used.
- Falling3 12y agoI've used it and had plenty of good experiences. I went on about have a dozen dates and ended up making some good female friends. There really is a wide range of people on there. (disclaimer: I'm a male)
- newaccountfool 12y agoYour clearly not one of the DTF people, so many PoF is not for you.
- boonez123 12y agoFrom a technical level POF is not that great. From a UI perspective it's pretty good. From a aesthetic design perspective it's up there with Craigslist. Working at POF is like working at McDonalds. It's temporary. Pay is anemic for even the people who control the site, so they'll bounce once something better comes along. In terms of running a company, I would prefer a style more like the guy who started MineCraft. Ie. Million dollar bonuses, really creating a corporate culture! Making employees live their dreams.
- kisielk 12y ago> Working at POF is like working at McDonalds. It's temporary. Pay is anemic for even the people who control the site, so they'll bounce once something better comes along. I don't think that's necessarily correct. I know people who have been working there for quite some time and enjoy it.
- portlander12345 12y agoI got on their extremely raunchy, six-email-a-day mailing list without my consent and couldn't get off. Fuck them.
- sayemm 12y ago"How I made a million in 3 months" by markus007 - http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13958.htm http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13958.htm
- grecy 12y agoI went through a few pages of the blog, and I didn't see anything on the hosting/hardware makeup of the site. Does anyone know how it's hosted to handle that kind of traffic? (I'm just curious) Thanks!
- andre 12y agoIn 2008, SSD Array was deployed to handle images. http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-server-array/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-serve... 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-night/ http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/upgrades-themes...
- spyder 12y agoAnother 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-dating-market-share/#comments http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/pof-takes-67-of...
- huangc10 12y agothis is insane. hats off to your Markus.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jareds 12y agoMarkus is POF accessible to screen reader users? I remember attempting to use the site several years ago with my screen reading software and was unable to do so.
- andrelayer 12y agoMy question would be how you went from 500 pageviews to ~180K in a month at the beginning?
- hiphopyo 12y agoWhat happened between Jun and Jul 2003?
- enraged_camel 12y agoI'm wondering this too. It looks like within the span of twelve days he went from a handful of page views to almost two hundred thousand.
- markuspof 12y agoits when I first added adsense, the start started getting real traffic back in March of that year.
- simplemath 12y ago>When you paid spamnets to bombard your url to millions of inboxes?
- downandout 12y agoSo, based on these numbers...he's doing ~$25M/mo today? I know he runs his own ad system now, but presumably he would be doing as well as he was doing with Adsense or better (or he would go back to Adsense).
- fleaflicker 12y agoProbably not--the eCPMs you could get on AdSense in 2006 are way higher than today. This is true of all ad networks in general--the amount of available inventory has exploded in recent years, reducing prices.
- vikramhaer 12y agoThanks Markus! It's great for the community to have data like this to learn from. I've tabulated the image for anyone interested in looking at it as a spreadsheet, which can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17yKe82aozcBegNs2YfPUm9iQvy10kqMZ0fRNpOSaheU/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17yKe82aozcBegNs2YfPU... If you'd prefer that this not be made public please let me know.
- theboss 12y agoThis might be a dumb question. How did you go from less than 500 page views to more than 180,000 page views in a month? That's the real secret here...
- blantonl 12y agoRight place right time? Couple that with a network effect, and what you saw is a classic example of the above.
- crdoconnor 12y agoI've seen this question asked before and Markus was kind of coy about answering. I had a feeling there was some sort of spammy element to it. Maybe something involving link stuffing or comment spamming. Whatever it is, he doesn't seem too keen on revealing it.
- sytelus 12y agoSo it appears that if you can build something that gets 2 million page views, you can probably live off of just ad revenues from AdSense. The rough cost of click seems to be fluctuating around 0.25-0.50c but gets stabilized to almost a dollar later. I guess people usually don't think about the fact that when you click on a ad, you just made someone pay a dollar to someone :).