Plenty of Fish

Markus Frind is the CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a dating site. I just read on his blog that his site is #13 in the US (according to hitwise). I wouldn’t necessarily find this noteworthy, except for two things.

First, PoF keeps appearing on my radar. A couple years ago it was when Scoble noted that the site was wildly successful despite being ugly:

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He’s Google’s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

(The design hasn’t improved much since, and is still a poster child, along with craigslist, for the anti-design movement.)

Then, a couple weeks ago, PoF popped up in my aggregator again, this time when Jeff Atwood noted that the site serves up all this traffic on just a handful of servers.

Second, Frind pretty much runs the show himself. From his post above:

I still haven’t hired a tech guy to watch over the servers, that will be the first thing i’ll do in 2009, getting tired of running every aspect of the site except customer service myself!

So if we take the hitwise numbers at face value (and I don’t know anything about them), they put these entities in the upper echelon: MySpace, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and… Markus Frind. Impressive.