I heard David Drummond, Google's General Counsel, speak at Stanford Law School yesterday. Drummond was ostensibly there to talk about some of the legal issues facing Google. He did talk a bit about the difficulty of complying with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in an environment where content owners seek to enforce their rights through Google rather than directly with the infringing sites. He also addressed questions from the audience about the subjective nature of Google's page rankings when it determines that a website has attempted to manipulate page rankings. But Drummond spent the better part of his time talking about what has made Google successful.
Drummond pointed to 4 factors as the key to Google's success:
1. Technology. Along with its innovative approach to page ranking, Google is a purpose-built hardware company, building all its own servers from components it buys directly for their manufacturers. According to Drummond, Google now operates the world's largest distributed computer system.
2. Business Model Innovation. By perfecting the nature of targeted ads, Google not only has created a highly effective revenue generator, it has produced what it hopes to be a better experience for its users. It is Google's goal to make their targeted ads at least as relevant and useful to users as the search results themselves.
3. Brand. According to Drummond, a European study recently determined Google to be the number one most recognized worldwide brand. Indeed, Google has become a verb ("I can't wait to get home and Google him") which poses real challenges to a company seeking to protect the strength of its mark.
4. Focus On The User Experience. Product decisions at Google are driven by optimizing for the user experience first and for revenue second. The folks at Google firmly believe that the better the user experience, the more easily money will follow.
I believe that all of these are important factors in developing any great technology company. Powerful customer-focused technology with an eye towards making money -- that's pretty much the formula. Even brand, which can be prohibitively expensive to develop ahead of customer traction, will likely follow product leadership. Google's success isn't rocket science, it's just good old fashion company building. Good for them for the discipline. It's an excellent model to follow.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Exclusive Interview with PlentyOfFish.com creator and owner, Markus Frind
As I reported a few days ago, Markus Frind, the owner of the free dating site PlentyOfFish.com has been pulling in $10,000 a day from Adsense. What is even more remarkable is that he is single handedly (with a little help from his wife) running one of the largest dating sites on the internet. I asked him if he would like to do an interview for the blog, and he agreed.
In 2003 you made a post on WebmasterWorld where you said you were making $40 a day. At what point, either before or after this, did you recognize that you could generate a livable income, and beyond, through your own websites?
I knew the day adsense came out that i would be able to make a lot of money, suddenly here was this revenue stream i could actually build a business on. My site at that point only had a few hundred visitors a day and it was only a few months old. But my growth was steady and I could plot on a graph exactly how much traffic i’d have in 4 or 5 months in the future. This was the same time where i started doing mass anti competitive intelligence, i blocked anyone with the alexa toolbar from signing up and anyone using comscore. I figured if i was to have any chance i would need to stay completely under the radar, if no one knows you exist then no one is going to counter you or clone it.
What was the biggest obstacle you have faced since starting PlentyOfFish.com and how did you overcome it?
I wouldn’t say I had any real obstacles, growth is steady and you have a good 2 or 3 months lead time on when things will start to become an issue. I spent a good 3 months of the last 12 months on vacation. I suppose that the biggest issue has always been performance, In order handle 14-15 million pageviews a day on 4 servers you have to constantly tweak the database, as execution paths etc change as the database grows and load increases.
You started PlentyOfFish to learn and expand your skills. When did you begin treating the site as a business?
I was making around 4k a month off the site and i quit my job to do it full time. At the same time i learned how to do PPC, affiliate marketing , SEO etc. Basically i tried to learn as much as possible, adapt it to my needs and move on.
You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?
Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user. Blend ads into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do. There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want. You will never have the worst design and never the best, but through testing you can always improve.
I’ve noticed some resentment by promotors and owners of paid dating sites. They fear that once a customer gets a taste of free dating they will never pay a monthly fee, thus destroying the online dating industry as it exists today. Do you think they should be threatened by PlentyOfFish.com?
Many of the owners/promoters of these niche sites basically are people who had no clue about the internet and got in the market during the .com boom and lucked out onto a viable business model. Since then they have lived in a bubble with relatively little competition. The large sites are worried, but they have always faced stiff competition. For the most part the industry wants to ignore the fact i exist and they are just hoping that I will go away, so they don’t have to explain to investors why profits are vanishing.
I think in the future paid dating will account for 5 to 20% of the over all online dating market, currently 68% of my membership in the United states has paid for a dating site in the past, draw what conclusions you will.
Do you have a vision of what the internet will look like 5 years from now, and if so, can you describe it?
Adsense and YPN will be standard components of any business models. There will eventually be a massive market place where you just select a age range, city gender etc and your ads will be shown to people matching your demographics. More tools will be developed to track users intentions and monetize them. If you own a site about horses and someone was thinking about buying a car a week ago while searching the net, your horse site may display car ads. We will eventually see online ads approach the ROI of offline ads or even exceed them as monetization of intentions\preferences takes hold.
In 2003 you made a post on WebmasterWorld where you said you were making $40 a day. At what point, either before or after this, did you recognize that you could generate a livable income, and beyond, through your own websites?
I knew the day adsense came out that i would be able to make a lot of money, suddenly here was this revenue stream i could actually build a business on. My site at that point only had a few hundred visitors a day and it was only a few months old. But my growth was steady and I could plot on a graph exactly how much traffic i’d have in 4 or 5 months in the future. This was the same time where i started doing mass anti competitive intelligence, i blocked anyone with the alexa toolbar from signing up and anyone using comscore. I figured if i was to have any chance i would need to stay completely under the radar, if no one knows you exist then no one is going to counter you or clone it.
What was the biggest obstacle you have faced since starting PlentyOfFish.com and how did you overcome it?
I wouldn’t say I had any real obstacles, growth is steady and you have a good 2 or 3 months lead time on when things will start to become an issue. I spent a good 3 months of the last 12 months on vacation. I suppose that the biggest issue has always been performance, In order handle 14-15 million pageviews a day on 4 servers you have to constantly tweak the database, as execution paths etc change as the database grows and load increases.
You started PlentyOfFish to learn and expand your skills. When did you begin treating the site as a business?
I was making around 4k a month off the site and i quit my job to do it full time. At the same time i learned how to do PPC, affiliate marketing , SEO etc. Basically i tried to learn as much as possible, adapt it to my needs and move on.
You appear to be an advocate of simple, quick loading designs. Do you think that there are any other elements of web site development that developers are looking at wrong and may be counter-productive to their success?
Function over form to build an emotional connection with the user. Blend ads into content, No flashing crap, make the site useful. Basically all those things that everyone knows you are supposed to do, but very few people actually do. There is no magic bullet, but you should always test new designs or new text etc to get the result that you want. You will never have the worst design and never the best, but through testing you can always improve.
I’ve noticed some resentment by promotors and owners of paid dating sites. They fear that once a customer gets a taste of free dating they will never pay a monthly fee, thus destroying the online dating industry as it exists today. Do you think they should be threatened by PlentyOfFish.com?
Many of the owners/promoters of these niche sites basically are people who had no clue about the internet and got in the market during the .com boom and lucked out onto a viable business model. Since then they have lived in a bubble with relatively little competition. The large sites are worried, but they have always faced stiff competition. For the most part the industry wants to ignore the fact i exist and they are just hoping that I will go away, so they don’t have to explain to investors why profits are vanishing.
I think in the future paid dating will account for 5 to 20% of the over all online dating market, currently 68% of my membership in the United states has paid for a dating site in the past, draw what conclusions you will.
Do you have a vision of what the internet will look like 5 years from now, and if so, can you describe it?
Adsense and YPN will be standard components of any business models. There will eventually be a massive market place where you just select a age range, city gender etc and your ads will be shown to people matching your demographics. More tools will be developed to track users intentions and monetize them. If you own a site about horses and someone was thinking about buying a car a week ago while searching the net, your horse site may display car ads. We will eventually see online ads approach the ROI of offline ads or even exceed them as monetization of intentions\preferences takes hold.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
From 10 Hours a Week, $10 Million a Year
Markus Frind, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.
For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.
There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.
Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site first became popular among English-speaking Canadians. Popularity among online daters in many United States cities followed more recently, and with minimal spending on advertising the site. According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.
Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a “trivial” issue that did not bother users.
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive. Somehow, the site instantly replenishes the lost customers and attracts many more to boot.
No one heads to Plenty of Fish for the customer service, which is all but nonexistent. The company does not need a support structure to handle members’ subscription and billing issues because the service is entirely advertising-based. Its tagline is: “100 percent free. Put away your credit card.” For hand-holding, users must rely on fellow members, whose advice is found in online forums. The Dating & Love Advice category lists more than 320,000 posts, making up in sheer quantity what it lacks in a soothing live presence available by phone.
The principal customer service that Plenty of Fish provides is responses to complaints about possibly fraudulent identities and to subpoenas and search-warrant requests. Last year, Mr. Frind hired his first, and still only, employee to handle these requests, freeing him to attend to adding new servers when required and tweaking code. “Most of the time, I don’t need to do anything,” he said.
To keep his site’s forums free of spam, Mr. Frind has refined a formula for analyzing customer feedback and arriving at a determination of whether a given forum post is spam and should automatically be deleted. He has also devised some new software twists that enable him to offload work to his customers, letting users review the photos that are uploaded to the site.
Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.
Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish’s volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers’ enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: “Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it’s free.”
For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right.
There’s much to be admired in Mr. Frind’s entrepreneurial success. But his site, now almost five years old, has some unfinished patches and irritating quirks and seems to come from the Anti-Perfectionist School of Design.
Mr. Frind built the Plenty of Fish Web site in 2003 as nothing more than an exercise to help teach himself a new programming language, ASP.NET. The site first became popular among English-speaking Canadians. Popularity among online daters in many United States cities followed more recently, and with minimal spending on advertising the site. According to data from comScore Media Metrix for November 2007, Plenty of Fish had 1.4 million unique visitors in the United States. In December, Mr. Frind said, the site served up 1.2 billion page views, and page views have soared 20 percent since Dec. 26.
Spending time at Plenty of Fish is a visually painful experience. Wherever a row of members’ photos is displayed, which is most pages, many of the faces are elongated or scrunched because Mr. Frind has not taken the trouble to write the software code that would automatically resize frames or crop photos to prevent distortion. When I asked him why he had not addressed the problem, he said it was a “trivial” issue that did not bother users.
A blasé attitude is understandable, given that Plenty of Fish doubled the number of registered customers this past year, to 600,000, Mr. Frind said, despite the fact that each month it purges 30 percent of users for being inactive. Somehow, the site instantly replenishes the lost customers and attracts many more to boot.
No one heads to Plenty of Fish for the customer service, which is all but nonexistent. The company does not need a support structure to handle members’ subscription and billing issues because the service is entirely advertising-based. Its tagline is: “100 percent free. Put away your credit card.” For hand-holding, users must rely on fellow members, whose advice is found in online forums. The Dating & Love Advice category lists more than 320,000 posts, making up in sheer quantity what it lacks in a soothing live presence available by phone.
The principal customer service that Plenty of Fish provides is responses to complaints about possibly fraudulent identities and to subpoenas and search-warrant requests. Last year, Mr. Frind hired his first, and still only, employee to handle these requests, freeing him to attend to adding new servers when required and tweaking code. “Most of the time, I don’t need to do anything,” he said.
To keep his site’s forums free of spam, Mr. Frind has refined a formula for analyzing customer feedback and arriving at a determination of whether a given forum post is spam and should automatically be deleted. He has also devised some new software twists that enable him to offload work to his customers, letting users review the photos that are uploaded to the site.
Mr. Frind says that close to 50,000 new photos come in every day, each one of which needs to be checked to verify that it is an actual person and that it does not not contain nudity. The work would be costly if Mr. Frind relied on a paid staff to do it.
Fortunately for him, there seems to be an inexhaustible supply of humans eager to look at pictures of other humans, and Mr. Frind taps his customers to carry out the reviewing, gratis. Some have made it their principal pastime. Among Plenty of Fish’s volunteers were 120 who last year evaluated more than 100,000 images each. He explains his volunteers’ enthusiasm for the work as an expression of gratitude: “Lots of people feel like they want to give back to the site because it’s free.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)