MappingTheWeb //

Who’s the king of the net? You can argue for any number of individuals from Tim Berners-Lee to Michael Arrington to Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but let’s get down to the facts. Who runs the single most successful website (in terms of page views) on the Internet as a one-man operation? Markus Frind.

Say what? Who on earth is that? I mean let’s be honest - he’s not exactly a household name.

Markus Frind is a one-man wrecking machine. He has single-handedly disrupted the world of online dating with a super-easy-to-use, free dating site - PlentyOfFish. Don’t be deterred by the simple interface and lack of colourful graphics. This dating site packs a mean punch and more importantly, a huge user base. The main differentiating factor of the site over other competitors (i.e. Match.com, Date.com, LavaLife) is that the service is entirely free and revenue is driven through ads. This lowers the barriers to entry for anyone looking to sign up.

Now let’s talk about what everyone cares about: PlentyOfFish averages 20 million page views per day or 600 million per month. With Google Adsense running on the site, Frind averages approximately $10,000 a day in revenue from ads alone. Pretty incredible considering he averages a dismal .50 CPM. If he were to somehow increase the relevance of the ads to the page or topic AND/OR place one or more ads per page, the man would be a ridiculously filty rich man. As it stands, he already makes a pretty penny and traffic shows no signs of slowing.

Markus, who lives in Burnaby (a suburb of Vancouver), is in his late 20s and enjoying life. He has no intention of maximizing his ad dollars as he is comfortable where he stands. He is a great man and I’ve had the opportunity to chat with him on a few occasions. He is very humble and thankful. To get a glimpse into the life of this online dating mogul, watch this Global News exclusive. Mark Evans also provides a great profile of Frind at Maple Leaf 2.0.

He is the true image of entrepreneurship as he handles everything from tech support, to marketing, to server issues, to graphics, and so on. However, it has been said that his girlfriend does give him a hand with some things and a few volunteers have helped out as forum moderators. Click here for more information about the company from Wikipedia.

The evolution of the site will be interested to watch. I wish this Canadian Internet guru all the best.