Plenty of Fish: Small Back-End, Big Valuation?

We've previously noted the success of Plenty of Fish, the free dating site operated by Markus Frind that manages huge traffic on a minimalist infrastructure. Read/Write Web has an update that examines the potential value of PlentyOfFish.com in an environment in which Facebook is valued at $15 billion. While other bloggers are warning about the emergence of a get-rich-quick bubble mentality, RWW's Richard MacManus reports that Frind now says his site is on track to earn $10 million this year from a combination of AdSense, banner ads and affiliate marketing.

The headline wonders whether Plenty Of Fish would be worth $1 billion in the current climate. "It's very hard to quantify this, but at the very least POF would be worth in the 9 figures due to its annual revenues of $10M," MacManus writes. One factor is that Plenty of Fish appears to get much better performance from its ads than social networking hubs like Facebook and MySpace, according to Frind.

Frind says his site gets 1.2 billion page views a month, and 500,000 average unique logins per day, which are handled by a handful of servers and the use of Akamai's content delivery network. High Scalability has additional details on the architecture and load balancing supporting PlentyOfFish.com.