THE GLOBE AND MAIL - Feb 10 - When Markus Frind
sat down at his home computer in 2003 to build a website, he had only
one goal: to teach himself a programming language. But a decade later,
his programming exercise has grown into one of the largest dating sites
in the world, with ~50M registered users visiting POF more than 430M
times each month. In Canada alone, ~400K people log in every day.
Q: How does Plenty of Fish’s matching system work?
Markus Frind:
We look at hundreds of thousands of people who left the site in
relationships and we look at what combinations of attributes made them
successful. For instance, we know that a doctor will never date a
carpenter.
Q: Do you have any interesting statistics that relate to Canada specifically?
A:
Edmonton and Calgary have a lot of singles. It’s mostly because those
are singles towns; with the oil boom and whatnot it’s harder to meet
people.
Q: Does the site see any patterns, such as dips or spikes, over certain holidays?
A: We see 15- 20% increase from two days after Christmas and it goes all the way until the Wednesday after Valentine’s Day.
Q: What have been the biggest changes to the site lately?
A:
~60% of our users now access the site from mobile. We also launched top
prospects a few weeks ago, which shows all the people you have
communicated with and then we predict which one of those you’re most
likely to enter into a relationship with and also stay in it.
