PlentyofFish.com is a 100 percent free online dating site created by big fish Markus Frind that has made some waves in the blogosphere this week. A recent Markus Frind interview transcript was posted by Andrew Johnson and it drive home the point that a successful web site can be run with limited resources - bootstrapping if you will. Markus Frind runs one of the largest dating sites on the web with the help from his wife.
According to the interview PlentyofFish.com has been raking in $10,000 a day in Google ad revenue via the Adsense program. Wow, that is $300,000 a month on contextual ads! It wasn't always that successful though, Markus it built up slowly from $40 a day in 2003. Markus's strategy was to stay under the radar so that no one cloned his service as he organically grew the dating service by blocking Alexa and comScore from tracking the site. Dave Evans may have called it early in his PlentyofFish.com post from back in January 2005.
The story of PlentyofFish.com loosely reminded me of the way that Craig Newmark and Craigslist rose to prominence - organically and with limited resources. It is stories like these that give entrepreneurs and product developers alike something to keep striving for.
Do you know of a similar story you would like to share?
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Tracked on Mar 26, 2006 6:50:05 PM
» Making Millions Under The Radar With Google Adsense At PlentyOfFish.com from Nancy P Redford's Practical Marketing Tips
Can you imaging having a site that pulls in an amazing 10,000 a day in contextual advertising revenue. Well that is exactly what Markus Frind creator and owner of the free dating site PlentyofFish.com earns from Google Adsense. He has gone from a meas... [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 27, 2006 12:20:52 PM









I own several web sites and one of them is an online dating service called ezdate123. I am familiar with Plenty of Fish and I must say it is a very good site. Even though we are competitors I admire Markus and his business. I do wish him the best and continued success.... Mike/ezdate123
Posted by: Mike | Sunday, April 02, 2006 at 09:55 AM
All foolishness is all you put out! no quality or substance --just a vicous extreme of bastardizations--sticky blog cancer---clean up yur act!
Posted by: jay walsh | Wednesday, April 05, 2006 at 02:12 AM
I have been discussing with Justin Komhyr about his plans with eDate.com. I too like pletyoffish and think it's a great website. Markus has done a great job.
I just thought that I would let you know about eDate.com and keep a heads up for it. It too is a free dating site and Justin has assured me that it will be of the highest quality over the next few months.
I do much marketing on the internet for dating sites and www.edate.com has caught my eye. Justin has informed me that membership has already increased 5 x's in the last 3 months and when they release there new design he expects a much higher membership rate.
Let's all keep are eye's on www.eDate.com.
Posted by: sharon | Monday, April 24, 2006 at 10:04 PM
I have been discussing with Justin Komhyr about his plans with eDate.com. I too like pletyoffish and think it's a great website. Markus has done a great job.
I just thought that I would let you know about eDate.com and keep a heads up for it. It too is a free dating site and Justin has assured me that it will be of the highest quality over the next few months.
I do much marketing on the internet for dating sites and www.edate.com has caught my eye. Justin has informed me that membership has already increased 5 x's in the last 3 months and when they release there new design he expects a much higher membership rate.
Let's all keep are eye's on www.eDate.com.
Posted by: sharon | Monday, April 24, 2006 at 10:05 PM
I think the reason plentyoffish.com is doing so well, is that they have more than 17,000 pages linking to them, on the web. I also think that http://linkupdating.com is a great altenative.
Posted by: Sam | Sunday, September 17, 2006 at 06:04 PM
The Friends-Friends-Friends is a premium website for the prople to meet up, get to know new
and old frinds, and mingle in a forum that’s made just for them.
Posted by: Sushil Raghav | Thursday, January 25, 2007 at 07:55 AM
Plenty of fish was good to start with, I moved on to http://www.kisscafe.com better quality, better spam control and just a better experience so far.. NO DATE BAIT like the damn paid sites.
Posted by: Rogertaht | Saturday, April 28, 2007 at 10:32 PM
Plenty of fish is not bad, but I really hate the interface, it is too 1997..to my liking is http://www.plixr.com , it is free dating site as well, has a web 2 look and you can upload unlimited amount of pictures!
Posted by: Raskalz | Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 03:40 AM
I don't see how it's possible that POF is making $10,000 bucks a day with Google Adsense. There's only one ad link on the home page and the regular ads are very poor. Sorry, but there's something FISHY to this story. I think this is just a link for POF as the other sites linking to this page. (hey I'm also a free dating site.. check ME out!!) Nothing more. Fake
Posted by: Tito | Friday, March 14, 2008 at 02:14 PM
I've been on Plaentyoffish, and while the forums are over-run with crazy people hurling insults left and right with tight back pocketed moderators the site still seems to do well on one of the most horrific search systems I've ever encountered.
I went to casualkiss.com and devilsown.org for their free services.
Posted by: Cloridan David | Tuesday, May 06, 2008 at 05:24 AM