Some people put down Marcus as just the lucky guy and POF as an ugly undeserving website. The reality is that running even a semi-successful dating website for

Some people put down Marcus as just the lucky guy and POF as an ugly undeserving website. The reality is that running even a semi-successful dating website for 12 years straight is a huge huge achievement. Dating websites have almost 30% customer churn each year which means you constantly have to figure out how to get new customers. This problem becomes much harder because entry in the market is easy enough that any one can one-up you anytime. There is not much stickyness or virality like FB. All these makes dating business very difficult to run successfully with large margins. The thing is that Marcus has conveniently downplayed the required effort in playing this game. He has projected image that he just worked few hours a week to check servers and then going back to other things in his life. I would bet reality wasn't exactly like that. To ensure new customer acquisition, you must make sure your website constantly pops up high on Google for most popular dating queries. This means lot of SEO+marketing work. My guess is that Marcus purposely made his story very attractive for newspapers to report without paying for any PR which gave him links and boosted his ranking. His competitors are known to spend massive fortune and efforts on marketing just to stay relevant. Now that deal is done, it would be good time for Marcus to actually disclose the true story :).