
Monthly revenue breakdown of PlentyOfFish's early days - markuspof
http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2014/05/12/adsense-breakdown/
======
patio11
Welcome 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
Seconded. (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-...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/10-years-since-pof-
blew-up/)

I particularly love that the blog is still using the default Wordpress theme
from years ago. :)

~~~
collin128
The 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
Being in your same bootstrapped situation for 18months... I'm curious about
what's your company about/name.

------
JeremyMorgan
This 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
I 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.

~~~
eevilspock
[EDIT: Two immediate downvotes and neither has the courage to explain why.
Wow. Is the inconvenient truth hitting to close to home?]

Relying on ad revenue is a moral failing.

 _Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can
buy shit we don’t need._ – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads
deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product[1]. The rationalization
that allowing ads allows you to give your product free to users is a self-
serving shame-allaying delusion[2].

[1] Even an ad that tells no outright lie is lying if it is selectively tells
a partial truth. The moral test is whether you sell that product with the same
pitch to a friend who does not have money to blow. Would you leave out the
cons of your product and the pros of a competing one? Would you use
psychological tricks to convince your friend she needs it, even though in
honesty you know she doesn't?

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773)

~~~
patio11
_Anyone who is truly honest with themselves will admit that 90 to 99% of ads
deceive and manipulate people into consuming a product_

My most effective ad incoming, prepare for the perfidy.

    
    
      Make Bingo Cards Quickly
      Create word bingo to fit any theme.
      Try now, no download required!
      www.BingoCardCreator.com
    

It is for a SaaS application which makes word bingo cards.

Can you suggest how the ad is deceptive and/or manipulative? If it helps, I'll
supply context: it is almost guaranteed to show on pages which talk about
making bingo games in an elementary school (or similar) setting.

I spent about $8k last year showing this to ~4 million teachers, homemakers,
event planners, and other people interested in topics like Halloween bingo. (A
particular thing that it does.) This resulted roughly 80,000 of them visiting
a landing page which offered them free bingo cards for their email address.
Roughly 20,000 of them took me up on that. Somewhere around 500 of those 20k
decided they liked their free bingo cards so much they wanted to pay for the
product which I sell.

I have a pretty good idea of where that $8k ended up. Approximately $3k of it
subsidizes operations at Google, a company which you may have heard of. The
other $5k subsidizes content creation at a few thousand sites across the
Internet. Some of them are honestly not net value providers. Many of them are.

One of my most successful ad placements, for example, is on a hobbyist site
created by a teacher and her husband. It offers many free printable activities
and is ad supported. It's been lovingly maintained since the late 90s or so.
My rough approximation of their annual ad revenue is "it would make for a
pretty nice teacher's pension in any state."

It is very not obvious for me that anyone would be better off if that team
decided to take down their site to avoid the moral impurity of advertising.
Their users would lose access to many useful, free printable activities. I'd
lose access to a large group of great prospects for my product. Many teachers
would fail at their goal of playing classroom bingo with their students
tomorrow. Their kids would be sad.

~~~
eevilspock
You don't negate my point because:

\- I did not say 100% of ads are lies

\- You don't prove that you could have done better through product reviews and
word of mouth (which is now web-scale via social media), especially in a world
where you didn't have to compete with other products that make false claims
through advertising.

\- You didn't refute my claim (via the footnote link) that if people paid up
front for Google, the other content creation sites you mention, as well as the
hobbyist site, that it would actually be cheaper for everyone, both on a
monetary and social cost-basis.

And wow, over 50% of the cost of your product went to advertising! In a world
where people discover things via web-scale word-of-mouth (e.g. social
networks, product review sites, recommendations from field- or topic-specific
authoritative websites), your product would be 50% cheaper, and even cheaper
than that considering people would not waste money buying products due to
dishonest ads.

Yes, we are in a sort of catch-22. Because people are so used to getting their
web for free (even though as I point out that is an illusion), a huge majority
of us would have to boycott ads to change the system to where non-ad-supported
business models could thrive. But those of us who dare to do it first, before
that critical mass is achieved, are likely not to survive.

But a seemingly insurmountable catch-22 doesn't mean it isn't messed up and
not worthy of critique. Remember, history is replete with such situations.
When we all lived under totalitarianism, a small number of people could rule
over a vast majority only because to unite people into a rebellion, you have
to speak up, but if you speak up, you're head gets cut off.

Change is hard.

~~~
abk
He doesn't negate your points because there were none to negate. Well, except
for that clearly accurate "90-99%" figure you quoted. Your personal crusade is
not a rebellion, and no one is trying to cut off "you're" head.

Sure, we all agree that deceptive advertising is deceptive. That's wrong, but
not all advertising is bad. I think you'll be surprised to find out that 95%
of people (yay, making up numbers is fun!) actually don't mind that google
tracks their activity so they can show more relevant ads. I typically don't
click on them, but hey, more relevant ads still makes my overall experience
better and I really don't care if we get there because some of my search
history was (relatively anonymously) logged on some of google's servers.

Also yes, word of mouth leads a lot of people to discover new products, and
may be cheaper than traditional advertising in dollar amounts, but it's likely
a much greater time investment that may not even pay off in the end. Likewise,
patio11 could pay the hobbyist site, and google, and any other "legitimate"
advertising platform directly but I think the time commitment to find those
valuable platforms, enter into an agreement with them, and deal with all the
associated details may not be worth it for him.

In the end, it's about finding a cost-effective way to get your products in
front of its audience. That may be "word of mouth" (and I don't want to get
into that debate, but product review sites tend to be more misleading, biased
and corrupt than a lot of ads), or it may be ads. To each his own, but you
don't need to condemn everyone who doesn't share your overly idealistic views.

------
gabemart
I 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)

~~~
funkyy
What 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
I didn't realize PoF doesn't use Adsense any more, but I was more interested
in letting HN users know in case they were inspired to share the same kind of
data and risking having their accounts suspended.

------
Theodores
I 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-
plent...](http://adage.com/article/madisonvine-news/miracle-whip-plenty-fish-
tap-lady-gaga-s-telephone/142794/)

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?

~~~
NamTaf
I wanted to ask exactly this question (I'd typed it out and everything!) so
thank you for finding that info!

------
programminggeek
Plenty 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.

------
boonez123
From 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
> 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.

------
tobobo
Doesn'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
I'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)

------
aw3c2
Ugly, quick, potentially false graphs:
[http://i.imgur.com/T5czvPO.png](http://i.imgur.com/T5czvPO.png)

------
bambax
Hard 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
These 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.

------
theboss
This 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...

~~~
crdoconnor
I'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.

------
axefrog
I'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
For 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
From 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
> 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
Not 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.

------
redmaverick
Just 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
ux != ui

~~~
NIL8
There is a lot of wisdom in your comment!

------
sosuke
I 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.

------
downandout
So, 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
Probably 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
Thanks 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/17yKe82aozcBegNs2YfPU...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17yKe82aozcBegNs2YfPUm9iQvy10kqMZ0fRNpOSaheU/edit?usp=sharing)

If you'd prefer that this not be made public please let me know.

------
mattbarrie
What was the biggest thing you did to grow big so fast?

~~~
adventured
He 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
You know, I was thinking that too... but then again, the crazy rise of Tinder
really surprises me. They're conquering mobile.

~~~
freyr
Mobile shook things up. Zoosk got in early, and they're consistently among the
top grossing apps. Tinder's taking off too.

------
portlander12345
I got on their extremely raunchy, six-email-a-day mailing list without my
consent and couldn't get off. Fuck them.

------
holgersindbaek
I could fall in love with that screenshot :-).

Is the revenue in relation to visitors still as big today?

~~~
us0r
I would say significantly more since he is running his own ad system.

~~~
sebii
Click rate could be down.

------
sayemm
"How I made a million in 3 months" by markus007 -
[http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13958.htm](http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/13958.htm)

------
sytelus
So 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 :).

------
hiphopyo
What happened between Jun and Jul 2003?

~~~
enraged_camel
I'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
its when I first added adsense, the start started getting real traffic back in
March of that year.

~~~
simplemath
>When you paid spamnets to bombard your url to millions of inboxes?

------
andrelayer
My question would be how you went from 500 pageviews to ~180K in a month at
the beginning?

------
grecy
I 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
In 2008, SSD Array was deployed to handle images.

[http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-
serve...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/ssd-image-server-
array/)

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...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/upgrades-themes-date-
night/)

~~~
spyder
Another 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...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/pof-takes-67-of-
mobile-dating-market-share/#comments)

------
jareds
Markus 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.

------
NIL8
I 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.

------
jayflux
POF still (since I last checked) store their passwords in plain text, so for
that reason I cannot give it praise

~~~
level09
and how would you go about checking that ?

~~~
jayflux
2 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
For a long time it actually sent you your password in an automated email _once
a month_ just in case you happened to forget it.

~~~
amenod
This attitude might actually be the difference between them and lesser known
competitors. (not that I think it's OK)

~~~
30thElement
When this originally came up people were saying that, they use it as a
reminder to keep using the site. But you can get the same benefit using a
login link or something, no need for all the security issues.

~~~
stormbrew
Yep.

The email itself is actually a call to action, it's telling you your new
matches. And it's actually weekly. It looked like this before:

    
    
        Hello yournamehere,
    
        Thank you for signing up on MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS XM.
        Remember your password is *****.
    
        http://www.plentyoffish.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.
    
        View your latest matches here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/viewmatches.aspx
    
        1. You can now easily check your messages via a cell phone.
        2. Latest signups -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastsignup.aspx
        3. Users online in your city -- > http://www.plentyoffish.com/lastonlinemycity.aspx
        4. If you have found your match you can delete your account in the help menu.
        5. Read your new emails here --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/inbox.aspx
        6. Who checked out your profile? -->http://www.plentyoffish.com/whoviewedme.aspx
        7. Compatibility Test to Measure Chemistry --> http://www.plentyoffish.com/poftest.aspx
    
        http://www.plentyoffish.com
    

At some point the password line was just replaced with:

    
    
        http://www.pof.com is larger than all other free dating sites combined.
    

So they didn't even have to make it a login link.

------
leonhuu007
Don't know how you do it Markus but POF is awesome.

------
huangc10
this is insane. hats off to your Markus.

