Plentyoffish.com Owner Makes a Splash Posted June 16th, 2006 in Monetization

If you read anything about making money online, you have probably heard of Markus Frind who owns Plentyoffish.com, a very large free dating site. It was a couple of months ago that he came out of nowhere and began promoting his Adsense income being more than $10,000 a day (no, that wasn’t a typo).

As you can imagine, some were estatic and some were skeptical about his earnings. I figured it was reasonable that he could be making close to $4 million a year with Adsense due to the fact his site has an Alexa ranking in the top 1,000, WebSearch currently ranks him at 330, and HitWise has his site as the 5th largest dating site on the web. While I was impressed with the claim, I don’t like to share this stuff with my readers until there is some actual proof. Within the past week or so, not only has markus offered up some proof, he has also started blogging.

If you do the math here, you will find that $901,733 CAD is equivalent to $810,894 USD. This check is for 2 months of Adsense earnings, which makes his daily Adsense earnings a whopping $13,000+.

Here is a portion of his latest blog post:

Fast forward to 2003, I had been jumping jobs every couple of months from one sinking ship to another. I had just joined a new company with 30 employees on Dec 1st of 2002, by the time Feb rolled around 15 people had already been laid off and I started to worry. I started thinking about finishing my site and learning asp.net at the same time and I wondered why people didn’t come rushing to join. I quickly started building my site and actually made it somewhat functional although most pages where in asp, others in asp.net. Somehow I ran across this site http://www.cre8asiteforums.com, once there I was introduced to the concept of SEO, boy did that open my eyes. I started exchanging links with everyone and anyone and finally got a bit of traffic. Then I sat back and waited for the famous google dance, the once a month update. At the start of March google updated and I got pagerank, but still not much traffic and I made my first post here asking for help.

At the start of March I had ~40 members my site was running off my home machine, people where complaining I didn’t allow image uploading so by mid march I had added image uploading. You can see how absolutely horrible the site looked here. By the end of March my site went viral and started growing 2 to 5% a day and it was off to the races from there. I was still developing on the live site/home machine and I always prayed nothing would crash.

Then at the end of June Adsense came out up until then I had no real way of monetizing my site. I had a single affiliate program but it didn’t even make $40/month. I went and added Adsense pretty quick, I made a whole $5.63 cents my first month, but that was more then enough for me to realize that I wouldn’t go broke running the site and I could make a business out of this with enough traffic. In my evenings I started working really hard on my site learning asp.net trying to convert my hastily put together asp pages to asp.net and trying to add more pages/functionality. I was doing the Beta thing before it was cool. I was updating/building the live site every couple of minutes, if the site crashed I didn’t really care, only took a few seconds to fix it.

I once again complained in my thread about my sites lack of SEO results it was September of 2003, I had 10k signups now and only a ~100 visitors a day from google and other 2,000 unique visitors a day from who knows where. By the time October rolled around my site was rolling, I quit my job at the start of the month and FINALLY went and bought a little server and moved my site to a hosting provider at the end of October. Still can’t believe I ran my site off my home computer for the first 8 months.

My short description leaves a lot out, but basically I spent every waking minute when I wasn’t at my day job reading, studying, and learning. I picked out “enemies” and did everything I could to defeat them which ment being bigger then them. I refused to accept defeat of any kind, and I constantly forced myself to test new things. I never tried to perfect anything it didn’t matter if things didn’t work 100% as long as it was good enough I would move onto the next thing. In 2003 the dating market was growing 80% a year unlike the -10% in 2006 so growth was a LOT easier. When 2004 rolled around and word of mouth REALLY kicked in and as they say the rest is history.