$4 million a year in AdSense?
 

you probably know about this, but if you don't:

http://www.plentyoffish.com

making around $400k a month with adsense

probably even more with other affiliate programs

up to 5 million pageviews an hour

and amazingly all runs on four servers.

here's some technical info of how he runs it, direct from the site owner - pretty amazing stuff:

quotes might be a little out of context as copied from another forum

surprised no one's replied. personally i thought this shit was fascinating...

dating is the shit in internet!

Interesting.. wish I knew how he did all that optimization.

Where does all the traffic come from.. shesh!

That's really interesting..

since it's free I guess a lot of type ins and referrals

maybe he managed to get some publicity for the site too

smokeythebear seems to know quite a bit about it and mentioned the owner buys a load of cheap adwords clicks too

out of interest, just done a google search and he's #3 for free dating

Wow, I need to push forward redevelopment of my crappy little dating site. It has 6,200 profiles and currently makes about $40 a month through adsense. :1orglaugh

god damn.....

That's pretty impressive. I wish I could put adsense on consumptionjunction. :(

Simple works best.

You could if you were involved in Google Adsense Premium.

adsense is probably a risky move on a site like that. google can cut him off at any time just because some editor randomly visits his site and sees and adult themed images, adult keywords, etc.

he did an awesome job on the automation, but i would be shitting my pants waiting for a $400k check from adsense, which may or may not come a month after the end of the month

apparently he's the biggest earning adsense affiliate in canada. I guess they've taken a very good look at his site and it's probably very unlikely they'll pull the plug on him

ahh. well, if they've taken a "very good look" then they'll probably buy the site soon. lol

thanks for sharing, btw, great read.

btw, how old is that guy? he talks a bit funny (to=2)

amazing - 10,104 users on right now

don't know that, sorry

Just found an interview with him:


Online Personals Watch Interview-CEO of Plentyoffish.com, Markus Frind
http://onlinepersonalswatch.typepad....ersonal_1.html

What's your background Markus?

Computer programming. I went to a Technical Institute for a few years and then worked for a few dot com companies. Every one of them went under after 6 months. I was a developer of websites and databases; nothing glamorous. I was really good at making things efficient. They threw me from project to project making things super efficient.

Why did you decide to offer plentyoffish for free?

I originally created the site because I had to learn asp.net and I didn?t want to buy a book, so I created the site and I just kept adding things to it that I liked. I had to continue to learn new things and it just kind of became a dating center; it wasn?t meant to be an actual site. Then I wanted to learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), so then I read up on SEO and I integrated that into the site and taught myself. Then it just kept growing and every time I wanted to learn something, I would add that to the site. Eventually it just became a huge thing.

How do you make money?

I make money off the ads upselling to other sites. It doesn?t need much money to run. The site does about 13 million pages views a day, making it one of the top 5 sites in Canada of any site and in the top 60 or so in the region according to Hitwise. I started this in March, 2003 and I haven?t kept track of the registrants, but my traffic has grown 12 fold in 12 months overall in both markets.

How can you afford to do radio and TV advertising?

My costs are next to nill Look at American Singles. According to their quarterly reports they spend a million dollars a month just handling servers. I spend about $15K a month tops. It is cheap to advertise on radio if you have none of those other costs.

Who do you regard as your top competitors?

I?m really competing with Match.com. In Canada, I started at 3% last year and I?m sitting at over 50% market share and in the next 6 months I will double the size of the dating industry in Canada.

Are you at all worried about other major players or new entrants starting up with free sites?

Not really. A lot of VC?s are throwing around a lot of money and probably have funded some of the other free sites, but I have so much of a head start that I don?t think there?s much they can do. Google and Yahoo would only affect me little if they went free, in fact I think they would help me rather than hurt me. If the average dater is using 3 dating sites, they are probably currently using Plentyoffish and Match and Yahoo. If Google comes in and offered a free site, most of the paid dating sites like Match and Yahoo would get pushed out of the market. I took a poll today that says that over 55% of my members are paying members on other sites or have been in the past.

What's next for plentyoffish in 2006?

Plentyoffish is already blazing the trail. All the other dating sites are attempting to go niche, whereas plentyoffish is the only site that segregates the database on the spot, so no individual user has access to whole database. When they login and create their profile, the database is refined and they only access to a limited subset. So basically, as soon as you sign up, a niche is created around you. You only have access to that specific niche. Currently, no other site is doing this. This is like creating a niche site on the fly. If you logon and you don?t want to see ?smokers?; every person on there that is a smoker will get filtered out of the search results and no smoker will ever be able to message you. This is specifically the reason why people leave the big sites or the niche sites, because a lot of the people that they don?t want to message them are messaging them. If you filter them in real time, the brand power of a large site will blow away a billion niche sites. No one will remember a tiny niche site and they won?t have the brand to be able to compete. 2006 is setting the stage for a show down with Match.com.

10,000+ users online now? wow.. wonder if I can sneak a few links in on that forum.

Yea thanks for posting it :thumbsup

It sounds like he is a very very smart guy

markus is about 28.

Went to school (post secondary) with him here in Vancouver. Hell, even worked with him at a few of those .coms he talks about in his interview. He started POF back when we were working for this half-assed online shopping mall. The worst part is..... he asked me to help him when he was first starting to port to .NET from ASP, and I was too lazy to sit down and teach myself. I could have been part (a small part, but when its that big....) of the empire.

Can honestly say none of us ever expected anything like this out of the guy. Hard to not feel totally jealous sometimes of everything he's done, but he's definitely earned it all. Guy is a damn genious at whatever he does.

Was telling me the other day that adsense had to skip a month on his payments, so the next month he got a cheque for 900k!!!!! Friggin hell!

Google has even had him come in to explain to their people who adsense works. Think about that for a minute.

And its not all POF in the empire. ;)

great to know. thanks. had no idea he was so young.

holy shit.

hahahaha. what a guy.

just copied from MSN.

------------------

Martin says:
heh. you're famous on GFY now
Markus says:
www dot site-reference dot com/articles/Website-Development/The-Surprising-Truth-About-Ugly-Websites.html
Markus says:
just saw that to
Martin says:
hahaha. you're famous everywhere
Markus says:
its all planed
Markus says:
i'm getting good at creating hype
Martin says:
ya, i can tell
Markus says:
I put this out this morning
Markus says:
www dot prweb dot com/releases/2006/3/prweb360802.htm
Martin says:
shit guy.


bah. not enough posts to post URLs

wow, thanks. saw his thread on WMW and thought that to share that sort of info, he must want the publicity. wonder what his bigger plan is ... maybe to sell the site? I don't know

here's a copy of the press release you linked:



First Major Website Run By An Artificial Intelligence

Plentyoffish.com, one of the largest websites in the world with over 400 million page views a month, is nearly completely run by an Artificial Intelligence.

(PRWEB) March 20, 2006 -- Plentyoffish.com, one of the largest websites in the world with over 400 million page views a month, is nearly completely run by an Artificial Intelligence.

In 2004 Plentyoffish.com was growing in leaps and bounds and CEO and sole employee Markus Frind had a decision to make: He could either hire hundreds of employees and convert to a paid service like all his competitors, or develop an AI to run the site.

"It was an impossible technical challenge and one that I couldn't pass up," says Frind. Today, the site's AI does the same job that other sites have hired 200 to 600 employees for. "It is really amazing, you wake up in the morning and think wow I can't believe I created that," remarks Frind.

The site's growth continues at a torrid pace. The online dating site Plentyoffish.com is exceptionally strong in Canada where, according to stats, Canada, more than 1.2% of the population aged 20 to 24 and .8% of the population 25 to 44 use Plentyoffish.com on a daily basis. In the United States Plentyoffish.com may not yet be the dominate player but it has gone from nowhere to 5th position, according to hitwise.com, in less than a year. "Given our current 10% monthly growth rate we expect to be the dominate dating service in the United States in under 1 year," Frind says.

About Plentyoffish.com

Having grown exponentially since its conception in March 2003 Plentyoffish.com is now the only major website run by an AI and a single human. Plentyoffish is the only dating site with 400 million or more monthly page views that has less then 200 employees.

Please no inquiries from venture capitalists, marketers, or partnership opportunities.

Not sure I'm ready to buy into his AdSense revenue proclaimation. I spent some time on his site and have yet to see a single AdSense advert.

Looks like the usual scraper type sites in a way.
www.arthistoryguide.com
www.fantasies101.com
www.traveltocanadanow.com
etc..

are you kidding? It's all over the place.

It's all over the thing

maybe you've got javascript disabled.

scraper sites need adsense clicks too :winkwink:

That's a great read. Thanks for the link.

lol definitely.. and a lot of times I prefer those simpler sites.

hahaha yep

nice, i will be copying that plan

i dont think it will work as well

Ahh.. I had AdBlock in FF enabled. Still, (now that it's disabled) - don't see that many links for AdSense there.

some pages are packed heavy

Indeed, the guy must be a genius

:2 cents:

right place, right brain, right time

I dont understand who would put adsense on a dating site likethat....there are better ways

Yea, the guy seems to be a smart fellow.

sounds like the guy needs a hug.

POF is a great site! I've been dating tons of women from there! Thanks Markus!

Very interesting...

haha I was thinking the same

Definitely. Adsense is the easy way out for most sites. But then again, most siteowners barely have a clue how Adsense really works so you can't expect them to know how to utilize those other ways to get paid.