PlentyOfFish.com: Canada’s #1 Dating Website
Amit Chowdhry | Tuesday October 24, 2006 | 9,996 views
In 2003, Markus Frind wanted to test his ASP.NET skills by developing a free online dating service. Markus makes $10,000 per day from ads and has 600 million page views per month. Markus is currently operating PlentyOfFish in his Vancouver apartment, is not accepting any venture capital money, and gets some help from his girlfriend.
PlentyOfFish.com is now the 23rd most popular website in Canada according to Alexa. PlentyOfFish believes that its success roots from remaining 100% free. As Markus states on his website, “I was tired of seeing faceless corporate dating sites preying on singles. Finding love is not about handing over a monthly fee to a dating site that only care about making sure you stay another month to pay them again [source].” PlentyOfFish has also automated its services with personality matchmaking based on search behavior.
AlexaRadar, a website that uses Alexa traffic ranking and other data for growth rankings, displays that PlentyOfFish is the 2nd fastest growing website in Canada, right behind kijiji.ca and right above Amazon Canada.Â
Mike Jones, the CEO of Userplane, a communication software company stated that “Since the inception of our relationship with PlentyofFish we have seen unequaled growth in their usage of instant messaging. Markus has consistently stayed in the top 5% of our customer list, and I personally follow his blog daily, as his insight offers real-world examples of sites building major user bases with innovation and cunning.” Userplane was acquired by AOL recently. Markus writes a blog on web 2.0 startups called The Paradigm Shift.
Analysts are expecting that PlentyOfFish will top the Australian market for Internet dating websites and will maintain a strong threshold in USA. PlentyOfFish currently holds the title at being the #1 Internet dating website in Canada. PlentyOfFish is currently growing at a rate of 40% in terms of Daily Reach in Canada and 38.5% growing rate in USA. PlentyOfFish is currently ranked 626 overall on Alexa.
Given that I am on India time right now and it is around 12PM here making it around 11:30PM-2:30AM in Canada and USA, there were still over 12,000 people logged on. PlentyOfFish is utterly simple to use and has many forum discussions that has been consistently growing rapidly as well. Other features on PlentyOfFish include Dating Advice and a picture rating section that ranges from Fish Again to Catch Again on a 1-10 scale.Â
The interesting part of PlentyOfFish is that it has surpassed some of the biggest Internet names in Canada according to Alexa Radar rankings. With PlentyOfFish being the #2 fastest, Amazon is at #3, Live.com is at #7, YouTube is at #8, Wikipedia #9, Google #10, Digg #14, Flickr #15, and Facebook #18. Canadians really do know how to support their resident entrepreneurs.
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