We've about a leading online dating site that is run by a single person and is raking in money. Markus Frind is the singular force behind PlentyOfFish. At the time of our last analyse. June 2006. PlentyOfFish was earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense (around $3.5 M per annum).
I caught up with Markus today via email and asked how the business is doing now. He didn't want to get specific about earnings but he said that POF will earn $10 Million + next year (which puts it at around $30k per day). So just in earnings. POF has grown rapidly over the past year or so. As come up as Adsense income now comes from banner ads and interact marketing. A has a good general profile of Markus and his affiliate.
There is one former fact about PlentyOfFish that has just become a myth - Markus hired his first employee a few weeks ago! This person is doing customer service a assign previously done by Markus and his girlfriend. So technically POF is a two-person affiliate now but that doesn't make quite as good a headline ;-)
logins per day. The peak season is January when it will grow 30% according to Markus. I asked what is the total number of users that POF has currently but Markus replied that total users means nothing in the dating industry. He said that True com and others affirm 20 million users yet fewer than 100,000 populate a day actually login and use those services. According to. POF is second in the US online dating market and 1st in Canada and UK.
What really pricked up my ears was when Markus started to communicate about click-through rates and how that compared POF with Facebook. As you'll denote. Facebook supposedly has a valuation of $15 Billion currently thanks to last week. Many people are skeptical of the Facebook valuation though because Facebook and social networks are known to be.
Markus told me that per summon view. Plentyoffish has 5-10 times the move through evaluate of Facebook. So by his calculations. POF's 1.2 Billion page views per month is the same as 5-10 Billion Facebook page views per month. Facebook "only" generates 40 billion summon views a month and yet it has a $15 Billion valuation. But the crux of Markus' argument is that despite having about 33 times the monthly traffic of POF. Facebook's poor click-through ads should carry the valuation models closer. Markus said that "over 40% of Facebook's pageviews are image related ads in bad positions and users just generally looking to waste time." He said that "there are only a handful of sections on the site [Facebook] that will generate good move thru rates for advertisers."
So getting down to nitty gritty metrics. Markus concluded that "Facebook is only able to generate 10 to 15 times as many clicks on ads as my site and it's valued at 15 billion. Needless to say I'm watching ad supported business model valuations very closely." What's more some of his direct competitors - e g. Eharmony and match com - are apparently valued in the billions.
While Markus didn't put a evaluate on what PlentyOfFish is probably worth it's clear he is thinking in Billions and not Millions. It's very hard to quantify this but at the very least POF would be worth in the 9 figures due to its annual revenues of $10M. Not bad for a one-man affiliate (plus a new Customer Service Rep!).
Be careful how you use SpyFoo's stats: bequeath that they promote it as a tool to see "which keywords your competitors are buying," not "how much your competitors are spending on keyword advertising." That "daily ad budget" of $2k - $16k is a (very broad) range calculated from examine call frequency and keyword determine stats and doesn't reflect how the place might cap regularly dress or otherwise manage their keyword advertising spends.
It's absolutely true that good gross revenue numbers don't necessarily imply good bottom line numbers but unless Frind opens his books we're all guessing -- and spyfoo isn't great data to inform our musings. Posted by: |
Scott Clark: if you make $10K a day and reinvest $9500 (95%) in advertising you're netting $180K a month. That's not a fortune; it ain't a bad living but it's not really that big of a broach.
I would be willing to bet that Markus is probably making more than that but still for the purposes of accurate information it'd be nice to get some data on how much it costs to make that much money. And then to analyse it to other services like Digg or Weblogs. Inc. that make less money but have displace traffic acquisition costs.
To Philip Wilkinson;I think there's a period when people are bored of seeing the same sites all the time and time to look for something else i anticipate PoF came out in such kinda time where some people thought it could be nice to undergo different dating platform and some of these populate found PoF and told to their mates so on so on.. i experience it sounds weird but i can't see any other explanation of that. if he really had just a little info about web techs at the beginning i guess he had no idea about SEO. Posted by: Zetto |
Can we all forbid comparing sites to Facebook and then saying htat Facebook is valued at $15 billion? No one.. absolutely NO ONE.. values Facebook at $15 billion. Microsoft did not pay $240 million to own a piece of Facebook. They paid $240 million to extend their advertising exclusivity for two more years and to own a piece of Facebook. MOST of that $240 million was for extending their advertising contract for two more years. Probably like $220 million of it.
Morons who don't use comon sense when it applies to the Facebook broach then get into advance trouble by apply ing it to sites that are making $10 million a year and claiming that it is worth $1 billion. You see companies generally want more than 1% return on inventments. Posted by: JK |
Let us get to reality. be at real numbers. Project growth for 5-10 years. And get down to earth assume there ordain be competition other ideas technology change and unexpected things. Making 3million/year does not measure upto 30M/year the same way. It does not scale up to 100-200M the same way to furnish it a 1B valuation. There is no acceptable P/E for a dating site.
I guess people like the create by mental act free nature of this place. It really has a CS 101 feel to it but probably 99% of his audience are not computer scientists.
Quite a bold statement:Plentyoffish generates over 500,000 relationships a year making Plentyoffish com the world's largest singles site. What POF does have in its favor is data openness. Most dating sites make you login to see any information and this lets anyone see photos profiles and comments. Posted by: |
He has said he has never spent a penny on advertising infact his inital start up costs was a DSL/Cable connection on a static IP (yes thats right FROM domiciliate!)
What he is doing is very cleaver he is manipulating the success of web2.0 bubble and is riding on it. He is in a great position at the moment even if the whole dot com breathe bursts again it wont matter much to him as his running costs are minimal. All that ordain dress is his earnings from AdSense.
And by doing things desire that he is getting ever more back links on the internet. How many populate are going to blog about this which links to POF?
His marketing is smart he doesnt pay for it and its written by people who be to experience about the guy and the $900,000 cad google cheque. Hes done interviews for microsoft because they were facinated about how much traffic a single iis server can handle.
Anybody who is into adsense also.
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