Almost half a million dollars in AdSense revenue per month -- is that even possible? It just seems incredible to me. I'm not calling Markus a liar or anything like that -- I just find those kinds of numbers amazing for what is essentially a one-man show.

I agree. I hear about things like this all the time (albeit rarely in this magnitude), however I've never know or met anyone who could generate anything close to this. It is tantalizing, though.

Mathew, i've completely changed the rules of the game. :)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=plentyoffish.com%2C+lavalife.com%2C+americansingles.com&ctab=2&geo=all&date=2006

Lavalife makes 100 million a year, americansingles makes 60 million a year.

At any rate check the links to ranking sites in my blog. Plentyoffish is now the 3rd largest dating site in north america after match and yahoo.

You live in ontario, ask around and see how many single people you can find that haven't heard of plentyoffish.

"I just find those kinds of numbers amazing for what is essentially a one-man show."

I guess it pays to have your customers do the heavy lifting ;)

Markus - the interesting conundrum I see to the AdSense model for a site like yours is you essentially have to advertise for your competitors in order for the ads to generate revenue.

Although I guess if you look at it on the flip side your competitors are essentialy paying you to operate :) I guess the interesting thing would be to see how many of the users that click out still return/register on your site.

Ryan -- That's the part of Markus's story that I find fascinating. As you say, his competitors are paying him to operate.

Where other sites might block competitors' Adsense buys, Markus has recognized that the most targeted visitors -- and highest CPCs -- he is likely to get are those people searching for personals sites. And he's got those visitors in spades.

I guess it's the "Free" component of his model that makes it possible since it makes it easy for users to maintain a profile on his system and, if they want, pay another site. (If you're going fishing might as well take the biggest net you can)

The risk I see though is if AdWords ever (not sure if it does already) gives users the opportunity to block their ads from showing up on certain sites/URLs. How hard would it be for the competitors to turn that tap off if they start to see lots of click-throughs but minimal conversions?

Its not as easy as people think,I am not the only free site I am just bigger then all of the others combined. Webdate.com tried being free 2 years ago, it crashed and burned they were spending close a million a month. It converted to paid and tried to get into cell phones. There are also other free sites that have recieved millions in VC money and are attempting to compete with large teams & server farms.

About 15 years ago some math professors went and created a program that ran for a couple of years on super computers, and hundreds of computers, after all that effort they found a sequence of 22 primes. A few years ago I created the concept of a multi demensional wheel sieve, I beat their record on a single computer in a couple of days. Ram speeds have not changed much since 95. I then recruited people to use there machines and set a bigger record. http://primes.plentyoffish.com

At any rate plentyoffish contains many technical innovations that gives me a massive technical advantage and I can compete on a level that was considered impossible.

As for daters, they tend to sign up to 3 sites. All these other sites know I exist and often want to make direct deals.

I think this really just highlights the importance of SEO. PoF ranks #1 on GOOG for most dating terms. If you can rank #1 for a generic or high volume term, you can get an enormous amount of traffic.