On David Beisel's post about vertical social networks, the founder of plentyoffish.com, a guy named Markus, left a somewhat irrelevant comment about his service. But, it was also quite insightful:

I've revolutionized the social networking/Dating space. The algorithms i've developed have allow me to create a massive site with less then 1% of fixed costs that other sites have.

I am the largest 1 person internet company and I've been cash flow since day one, in the last year i've captured 60% marketshare in canada and just started rapidly growing in the USA. In the last month alone i've increased my average visitors per day by 100,000.

I have more traffic then americansingles.com and true.com combined. Each company has over 200 servers and over 150 employees each. Most Executives in this space have a hard time grasping the fact that I could walk in fire them all and replace the entire operation with a handful of my servers and 2 hours of my time a day.

There is a massive paradigm shift going on right now. The cost of developing and growing a site to massive sizes is growing to 0. The big talk about web 2.0 is the fact that hardware costs, bandwidth costs and software costs have dramatically fallen. What people haven't really realized yet is that in "web 3.0" companies like mine and future companies will need a fraction of the employees they currently do and that is going to create some amazing sites/business models and eliminate the need for most VC/funding.

Did I say insightful? I meant inciteful.

Plenty Of Fish is certainly challenging the "old guard" of online dating sites. That is, if an industry that is less than 10 years old could be called "old guard".

How is Markus challenging the subscription fee dependent online dating industry? He's borrowing a play from the playbook of the social networking sites. He's making it all free:

Plentyoffish.com is a 100% FREE online dating site and constantly changing based on your feedback, and you will notice everything on this online dating site is done so that you can meet people you have personally selected, and you can do it quickly. For example, we are the only major dating site that allows users to block messages from whole groups of other users they aren't interested in. No other dating site would do this as more individual contacts means more money.

Duh! The only thing most social networking sites are missing is a critical mass of people that are single and looking. Or even if they have that, it is difficult to determine whether someone is actively looking or not. Even still, myspace and facebook have a very active group of people that use the service to "hook up", as well as do more traditional dateing.

So, are dating sites with subscription fees a dying breed? Certainly not yet. But, it is just a matter of time.