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$4 million a year with Google AdSense
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| CygnusX |
Just read this amazing text about a 28 year old guy from Canada, who owns and runs www.plentyoffish.com, one of the biggest free dating sites in Canada.
He makes around $400.000/month with Google Adsense alone. His site amazingly runs on only 4 servers :eyes:
It's a lot of text, but definitely worth the read if you're interested in this kind of stuff :) I find it incredibly fascinating. The guy's a genius!
| quote: | I have 4 servers.
1. DB server
2. Web server, handles 1 million pageviews an hour at peak. No static pages at all, way to slow. All pages are Gzipped on the fly.
3. Mail Server. Handles 1 million emails/day and also has a webserver that handles a Instant messager. That translates to 4-5 million polling pageviews/hour at peak.
4. Image server, Like all major sites it serves images to a massive content distribution system/cache.
5. Outbound traffic is 70 to 100mb/sec If it was uncompressed it would probably run at 140mb/sec
I have a sort of a AI, that i built that handles the site for me. When you've got 2 years of steady growth you can build something super fancy to automate problems as they come up. I don't have a single competitor with under 200 servers and 200 staff. |
| quote: | I had a hybrid of asp and asp.net for a while. The more i learned asp.net the more pages i ported over and all new stuff was in .net.. Took me a while
In public filings by match, americansingles, myspace, friendster etc they all have the same pattern. They all need huge numbers of servers to accomplish anything.
Taken from a public filing of matchnet PLC Jan 2003, when they had sub 9 million pageviews/day.
"we currently own approximately 300 web servers, 40 database servers and 12 file servers"
The fact that my site has 10 to 20 times the technical complexity of their sites due to location based searches on every pageview and 14 million pageviews a day gives you an idea of what i've accomplished. Not to mentional all those above mentioned companies have 200 to 600 employees each.
At the end of the day, its all about algorithms and AI and not about platforms/languages.. |
| quote: | I know its hard to believe, whenever i'm exposed to new things it takes me a while to believe
My db is quad dual core opteron with 32GB/ram. Unlike the other sites i don't have a bunch of 8 way servers. I've got the db CPU & disk bound! (you don't see that often)
My other servers are just ~$3k machines with 2 CPU's. Nothing special. Image server is just a server deadicated to storing and serving images.
All the stuff on optimization i learned on my own. I spent 2 months rewriting a billing system for one of the worlds largest companies. They had a 32 CPU db maxed... I got the run time from 45 days down to 2 minutes. I had to deal with impossible fun stuff like select statements causing deadlocks because there was so much traffic.
From 1990 to 1995 some professors used several super computers and hundreds of computers to find a string of prime numbers. I spent half a year writing a program that made the search thousands of times faster by storing numbers in multipul dimensions and then scanning all dimensions at the same time via a wheel factorization sieve. I found a bigger string of numbers in under 2 weeks on a single machine. Its all public.
Those 2 things taught me how to optimize.... I don't want to get into 2 many tech details because competitors would give anything to know what i'm doing. A few have even asked to lisence my software.
As for wikipedia & forums serving, those are extremely trival you could do 12-60 million pageviews a day off nearly any server as long as you have the drives to handle IO, or some kind of html cache. Also last i read Webmasterworld had 10 or so servers? |
| quote: | Keeping my site fast and running is one of my smallest issues.
1. Approving and editing 20,000 images/day
2. BLocking 1000 nigerian russian scams, escorts etc per day.
3. Blocking fake accounts, trouble makers etc.
4. 100k+ edits/modications/day
5 to 10% of yahoo's and the industries total signups are scams escorts etc. I'd guess these guys steal on the order of $100-400 million per year from the industry. |
| quote: | | 99% is done by the site AI. |
| quote: | I don't use a load balancer, i've only got one web server serving up the site. I figure in the future round robin DNS will allow me to scale further and still use session data.
My Gzip is turned on, when I turn it off my bandwidth doubles.
As for why it doesn't work for you I don't know what to tell you. I went into the metabase and added aspx and html to the compression settings and then just followed the rest of the tutorial for turning on compression on microsofts site. Don't try and compress images on the fly? |
An interview with the guy :
| quote: | What's your background Markus?
Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient.
Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?
I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn’t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn’t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.
How do you make money?
I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn’t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started this in March, 2003 and I haven’t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.
How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?
My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops. It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.
Who do you regard as your top competitors?
I’m really competing with Match.com. In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I’m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada.
Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?
Not really. A lot of VC’s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don’t think there’s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.
What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?
Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don’t want to see ‘smokers’; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don’t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won’t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com. |
A news article :
| quote: | First Major Website Run By An Artificial Intelligence
Plentyoffish.com, one of the largest websites in the world with over 400 million page views a month, is nearly completely run by an Artificial Intelligence.
(PRWEB) March 20, 2006 -- Plentyoffish.com, one of the largest websites in the world with over 400 million page views a month, is nearly completely run by an Artificial Intelligence.
In 2004 Plentyoffish.com was growing in leaps and bounds and CEO and sole employee Markus Frind had a decision to make: He could either hire hundreds of employees and convert to a paid service like all his competitors, or develop an AI to run the site.
"It was an impossible technical challenge and one that I couldn't pass up," says Frind. Today, the site's AI does the same job that other sites have hired 200 to 600 employees for. "It is really amazing, you wake up in the morning and think wow I can't believe I created that," remarks Frind.
The site's growth continues at a torrid pace. The online dating site Plentyoffish.com is exceptionally strong in Canada where, according to stats, Canada, more than 1.2% of the population aged 20 to 24 and .8% of the population 25 to 44 use Plentyoffish.com on a daily basis. In the United States Plentyoffish.com may not yet be the dominate player but it has gone from nowhere to 5th position, according to hitwise.com, in less than a year. "Given our current 10% monthly growth rate we expect to be the dominate dating service in the United States in under 1 year," Frind says.
About Plentyoffish.com
Having grown exponentially since its conception in March 2003 Plentyoffish.com is now the only major website run by an AI and a single human. Plentyoffish is the only dating site with 400 million or more monthly page views that has less then 200 employees. |
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| flavdave |
| Is that $4 million in US dollars or Canadian dollars? Because if that's Canadian dollars that's about equal to like $0.17 American. |
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| jonze234 |
| quote: | Originally posted by flavdave
Is that $4 million in US dollars or Canadian dollars? Because if that's Canadian dollars that's about equal to like $0.17 American. |
:stongue:
thats a pretty good article. |
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| Falcon-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by flavdave
Is that $4 million in US dollars or Canadian dollars? Because if that's Canadian dollars that's about equal to like $0.17 American. |
4 million CAN$ = 3.44 million US$ |
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| THE_Chris |
| quote: | | Web server, handles 1 million pageviews an hour at peak. |
Wow there are a lot of desperate Canadians out there |
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| Falcon-X |
| quote: | Originally posted by THE_Chris
Wow there are a lot of desperate Canadians out there |
hahahaha I thought the same thing. |
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| CygnusX |
| quote: | Originally posted by Falcon-X
4 million CAN$ = 3.44 million US$ |
I think it's 4 million US$, because Google pays out US$. |
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| Swamper |
| quote: | Originally posted by THE_Chris
Wow there are a lot of desperate Canadians out there |
:rolleyes: The site caters to more than just Canadians, and while there is a large % of the youth population online in Canada it is still a drop in the bucket compared to that in the USA...
He did a lot of interesting things to get where he is, specifically SEO and a large # of indexed pages in Google, Yahoo and the like... The majority of claims I read in here are new to me, with regards to his past anyways - but - the numbers are accurate and he does bring that much in - well, actually more, $10k a day. There is a big thread posted by him on Webmasterworld. |
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| jdat |
| quote: | Originally posted by flavdave
Is that $4 million in US dollars or Canadian dollars? Because if that's Canadian dollars that's about equal to like $0.17 American. |
And the clueless comment of the day goes to you my friend! :rolleyes:
| quote: | Originally posted by THE_Chris
Wow there are a lot of desperate Canadians out there |
I am willing to bet the numbers are much higher in the US and in many other countries. Online dating sites is far from being just a Canadian thing. |
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| flavdave |
| quote: | Originally posted by jdat
And the clueless comment of the day goes to you my friend! :rolleyes:
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Jokes McGee. |
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| jdat |
| quote: | Originally posted by flavdave
Jokes McGee. |
You do realize that the Euro is much powerful then the Dollar and has been for quite some time? |
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