[NVTimports]

The owner of plentyoffish.com states he dropped his tech cost from 1 million/month to 15k/month?

"What i’ve done is automate the job of hundreds of people, and dropped the technology costs from 1 million/month to ~15k/month. Once all these other social networks/dating sites figure out what i’ve done these sites are going to go from barely profitable to making 10’s of millions a year in profit."

Anyone have a clue how he did that?

[bbalfour]

Where did you find this quote? I'd like to read the whole article.

But great thread. Lets see if all of us here at YE can brainstorm on this.

[bbalfour]

I went and took a look at the website. I've read about this site previously as well. It is basically him and his wife who run the site. They do a lot of moderation of the posts and profiles to keep junk out of there.

Here is my thinking.

There are really only a few main costs a social networking site like this have.

1. Server costs to handle the heavy page views and load of a social networking site.

2. Staff/Labor to moderate all the posts and listings to keep junk out

3. Programming costs of the site

So lets break each one down:

1. He has implemented an incredibly simple and non-graphic design. This dramatically decreases the load on the servers. But this is obvious and can't be what he is talking about.

If his solution relates to the load on the servers it has to be something special on the backend. Any thoughts on what this could be?

2. He has stated before in other articles that him and his wife are the only ones that moderate this site. I thought there would be some type of automatic moderation system where users could flag innaprorpiate content, but when I looked through the site I couldn't find anything.

In addition this type of system is nothing new or revolutionary.

3. I think he programmed the original site and hasn't done much to it since. So I'm sure the programming costs are very minimal. But I don't that is enough to go from $1 million a month to $15k per month.

Any other thoughts?

[NVTimports]

http://gigaom.com/2006/03/20/social-notworking/
in the comments section

Well he never had technology cost of 1 million/month, his cost is 15k/month but it would be intesting to know how he avoided the 1 million/month mark.

[NVTimports]

Does plentyoffish own any servers?

"Plentyoffish at the moment works because the operating costs are still fairly low so advertising can couver it. But if i had to spend anywhere near the million a month match.com and americansingles are spending on hardware/software there is no way i could keep the site free. Each of those sites has around 200 servers. Aff has 500 servers with some costing 200 grand + each."
http://www.corante.com/dating/archiv...entyoffish.php

[NVTimports]

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