
PlentyOfFish - 6 Billion Pageviews And 32 Billion Images A Month  - yarapavan
http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/12/27/plentyoffish-update-6-billion-pageviews-and-32-billion-image.html
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jedberg
I'm not sure I believe this and here is why:

At one point Highscalability covered the reddit architecture, but he didn't
actually talk to anyone at reddit about it, and got a lot of it wrong.

I tried to contact him and get it fixed, but he never responded to me.

So I have to wonder where these numbers are coming from.

~~~
toddh
Jedberg, I'm sorry I didn't respond, but I don't have a record of getting an
email. Corrections are always welcome. A lot of articles are summaries from
multiple sources, so they aren't made up (I'm not sure how I would even do
that), and the sources are always referenced somewhere. But of course I could
screw up. And I don't make an effort to contact people anymore because seldom
is there a contact point and they rarely respond or follow up. Which is why I
rely so heavily on existing materials like blog posts, presentations, slide
decks, forum threads, and whatever else I can find.

~~~
jedberg
I tried to contact you through the form on your site. Regardless, I wasn't
accusing you of making things up, I was just stating that sometimes you don't
use very reliable sources (like blog posts that may also be unreliable).

I don't work at reddit anymore, so I can't speak to their setup, but if you
ever need help with an article on Netflix, let me know!

~~~
JanezStupar
Do an article on Netflix!

NAO!

~~~
packetslave
What does "NAO" mean?

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masonhensley
It means "now" as in... please write the article NAO, I CAN'T WAIT ANY
LONGER!!!

~~~
packetslave
Oh, sorry, I suppose I'm used to people writing like adults here.

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elchief
I interviewed with them in their Vancouver offices. They are near the top of
the Harbour Centre downtown, and have a crazy beautiful view of North
Vancouver and the mountains.

I would say there were about 15 people in the office at the time (1.5 years
ago)

Markus is a slightly weird Rain Man kinda guy, but is obviously very smart. A
bit smug, though likely deservedly.

He has a hot girlfriend, that is the head of marketing or something.

It was a three on one interview, which isn't very welcoming. No whiteboard, no
code writing. Kinda glad I didn't get it, actually.

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citricsquid
"POF has one single employee: the founder and CEO Markus Frind. Makes up to
$10 million a year on Google ads working only two hours a day. 30+ Million
Hits a Day (500 - 600 pages per second)."

I find this more interesting than the parent article; although it seems clear
hiring more people helped them expand (and handle that expansion) a lot, a
single employee/founder doing that much is crazy impressive.

From: <http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture>

~~~
rokhayakebe
Does POF still have one employee?

~~~
rfolstad
Nope we've got a handful now and we're hiring! <http://www.pof.com/careers>

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peterwwillis
So around 2.3k HPS monthly average. Assuming an average peak is 10 times that,
23k HPS seems a little little high but doable for a handful of servers (after
load balancing and caching come into play).

One note says "everything is dynamic, nothing is static" which sounds weird if
they're using Akamai for anything but images. Images are claimed to be served
at 100K HPS, which would be difficult for a handful of servers, especially
with the dynamic content on top of it. It comes down to caching and hardware
as usual.

~~~
jaylevitt
You can do a lot more than asset caching with Akamai; they have stuff from
"edge-side includes" all the way up to your own J2EE at the edge.

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ck2
He used to post on webmasterworld as he was developing the site.

Some interesting stuff. And it's on IIS which blew my mind.

    
    
       webmasterworld.com/profilev4.cgi?action=view&member=markus007

~~~
henrikschroder
> And it's on IIS which blew my mind.

I think that says a lot more about you than about IIS. It's mature software,
why wouldn't it perform on par with other mature webservers?

~~~
27182818284
It isn't to say a lot of people thought it was impossible, but it is just very
unheard of. Anecdotally, most of the people I know hadn't heard of it either.

Slashdot, Facebook, Wikipedia, etc were the very large sites talking about
what they used over the years and it was all about the open source stuff like
Apache, PHP, etc.

Then I found out, on HN, that POF used IIS and it was mind blowing. You would
think even Microsoft would promote its successful uses more like that. Until
POF, I too had assumed IIS was only for 1,000 to 50,000 enterprisey setups. I
didn't think it _couldn't_ be used per se, but I just hadn't ever heard of it
being used that way until POF either.

~~~
ck2
Here's another mind-blower: enom runs the largest IIS server farm in the world
(at least they did up to a few years ago)

Can't find a direct link but I remember that little factoid because it
surprised me.

I don't mean customer servers sold as services, this was before then, it's
their own server network.

~~~
philjr
I don't know what enom is like anymore, but when I used enom back in 2006 to
2009 I wouldn't have used them as a poster boy for anything technology
related. Sporadic API failures, unexpected "lost" registrations etc. etc. If I
had to choose again, I'd be choosing OpenSRS

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d3ad1ysp0rk
I will be more impressed when they stop storing plain text passwords.

~~~
boonez123
It's almost as impressive as the UI.

~~~
ww520
Another point in function over design, just like Craigslist.

~~~
danilocampos
Not really. Contrast the cluttered mess that is PoF to OkCupid, which has
decent usability and reasonable information architecture. OkC's design is also
better at extracting the right information from more users more consistently,
meaning the resulting corpus of data is more complete. Which makes for a
better product, since it's easier to find the sort of people you'd be into.

PoF is successful in spite of its questionable design, not because of it.

~~~
reinhardt
Sounds like a _worse is better_ case study.

~~~
eftpotrm
Or an example of the network effect overriding other condsiderations. PoF got
big before OKC did, so that's where the people are.

Even with that factor though, I found PoF borderline unusable after a little
experimentation and stopped using them in favour of OKC. I can't believe I'm
the only one like that, or that there aren't some who simply dropped off PoF
into nothing.

If that crappy site can extract value at such a high level, I'm sure a few
reasonably small tweaks could extract significantly more.

~~~
smokinn
Yes and no.

At the scale pof operates at you have to A/B test everything because some
things are very counter-intuitive.

My favorite anecdote of his (tried to find it on his blog but google is
failing me) was when he briefly fixed the problem I hated most about the site:
the aspect ratio of the profile pic thumbnails being off.

What happened is that it cost him lots of money. And the explanation as to why
makes sense too: when the aspect ratio is messed up people can't tell at a
glance what the person looks like so they click through to people's profiles a
lot more instead of just scanning the top bar/search page. When your business
model is based on page impressions getting people to load more pages means you
get more money.

So in that case at least it's better for his pocket to have something that's
obviously broken (and easy to fix) on the site.

~~~
eftpotrm
If your business model is dependent on being just awkward enough to use that
you generate extra page impressions but not awkward enough that you drive away
traffic, to borrow an aviation term you're flying awfully close to coffin
corner. Particularly when you're dependent on network effects; if enough
people start discovering something that's less awkward for them (such as OKC),
the network effect will start working against you and you're suddenly _so_
2004 with a database of inactive users and a reputation for being awkward to
use. Plus, if you're dependenet on awkward usability inherently generating
more pageviews, surely by definition those pageviews are also more rapid so
the time each ad is being displayed to each user is lower, so the savvy ad
buyer would also be paying less.

Now, I could make the case that PoF has ridden the wave for long enough to
build Markus enough money that if it all fails tomorrow he's still made for
life and only really lost pride, but....

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DevX101
Frind was making $10 million USD per year when he had 1.2 billion page views.
If his revenue scales directly to pageviews (which I think it does), he should
be bringing in about $50M per year.

Not bad.

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rsanheim
...and yet the site is one of the most unusable, unfriendly, and unattractive
dating sites out there.

~~~
dhughes
Add to that a total bitch-fest, cliques, heavy-handed mods.

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yarapavan
A more detailed post on PlentyOfFish architecture -
<http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture>

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gopi
I know Markus from good 'ol webmasterworld days when he was a active affiliate
marketer. He is really a bright guy and POF's initial growth was mainly from
SEO (until the network effects kicked in).

If i remember correctly until a few years ago the site ran on a single
webserver and db server!.

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sayemm
Love his post on how he got it all started: "How I Started a Dating Empire" -
[http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-
started-a...](http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/14/how-i-started-an-
empire/)

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badclient
So he makes about a tenth of a penny per pageview?

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jaequery
i dont know how he did it with a name like plentyoffish and to do it all by
himself, let alone from canada. that man has skills.

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gdhillon
Does anyone know the technology stack used for front and backend by POF?

~~~
GFischer
It used to be based on IIS and ASP.NET (one of the biggest Microsoft success
stories on those technologies).

Edit: from <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlentyofFish> they used ASP.NET 2.0
and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 in 2007.

~~~
gdhillon
Thanks. I just checked their pages are .aspx which is Microsoft ASP.Net.

