---
title: "Plenty Of Cash for one-man band PlentyOfFish.com"
date: 2006-06-10
author: "Richard MacManus"
categories:
  - name: "ReadWriteWeb"
    url: "/category/readwriteweb.md"
tags:
  - name: "2006"
    url: "/tag/2006.md"
---

# Plenty Of Cash for one-man band PlentyOfFish.com

Markus Frind is an interesting character, who has left some [provocative comments](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/personalized_cl.php#comment-2038) on Read/WriteWeb before. He claims he’s earning $10,000 per day from Google Adsense from his dating website, [plentyoffish.com](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.plentyoffish.com/). These claims have been [ vigorously challenged](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/05/08/plentyoffish-marketing-101-when-all-else-fails-just-lie/) by some, but external data sources (e.g. see [this comment thread](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6524)) do seem to back him up. Recently Markus has been trying to convince me to post something about the fact that he is running **a huge scale** website and earning lotsa money ***all on his own***. His story *is* interesting enough to post, so I’ve relented.

Markus is basically a one-man band running a website that, by his latest traffic figures, is **two and a half times bigger than digg.com**. [Digg.com gets](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/digg_phps_scalability_and_perf.html) 200 Million page views per month, but Markus [says plentyoffish gets 500 Million](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/10/microsoft-aspnet-20-performance/):

> “The site(plentyoffish.com and Forums.plentyoffish.com) serves ~500 million pageviews a month and does so using 1 DB server and 1 Web Server which is a far cry from the industry standard of 300+ servers for a site of this size.”

Digg [uses](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/04/digg_phps_scalability_and_perf.html) 3 web servers and 8 small database servers. Recently I asked Markus via email how much work he puts into the site on a daily basis. His reply:

> “It is around 2 hours of work a day and that stays steady because as the site grows i automate more and more. Some of that work I get my girlfriend to help me with, she is far more diplomatic when answering mean emails. From what I can tell i should have no problem running it by myself even if it gets to 3 times its current size.”

On the hardware side, Markus gave me these details:

> “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”

So Markus has managed to set himself up very nicely with his Web operation. OK it is a dating site (sex sells!), but even so it puts the success of some of the more prominent web 2.0 blogs and sites into context, doesn’t it? Or as [Markus himself put it](https://web.archive.org/web/20111030075629/http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/06/09/how-to-make-a-lot-of-money-online-via-adsense/): “I think its time people stop hyping web 2.0 crap and start promoting real ideas that have real business models.” Not sure I agree with that sentiment, but I guess you can’t argue with the scale of success Markus has achieved.

As for what he is doing with all his money and free time, he said he’s traveling a lot! OK, Markus has made me well and truly jealous 🙂 But congrats to him for the success. As for me and my humble blog, I’d just like to get to 1 million page views per month (*real* page views, not the inflated rss and bot-infested figues a lot of people bandy about!). That’s what *I* call ramping up – sad isn’t it 🙂

*Originally published on ReadWriteWeb ([archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20020204040018/http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/plenty_of_cash.php))*