Match.com Adopts Ad model and adsense…

Had to happen eventually  Match.com the online dating leader is starting to use adsense.  Collaboradate.com has a screen shot.    I was surfing around match.com and noticed some banner ads to victoria secret amoung other places.

The online dating magazine has a writeup of Date.com CEO Here.  “Date.com’s advertising revenues have doubled in the past few months to 10 percent of total revenue partially because the company can target an advertiser’s products to almost any demographic based on user profiles”

I think that the best  us free dating sites can hope for is to earn 5% of what we would earn as a paid site.  Since people have seen my adsense earnings,  dating sites have widely started adopting ads.  This is a good thing as the 10% extra revenue that dating sites makes  goes straight to the bottom line, and when ebita is negative or under 10%  that makes a huge difference to the bottom line.

Washington Post On People making truckloads from adsense….

Washington Post has a piece on people making a lot of money from adsense.

Some of those mentioned are

PodcastDirectory.com $30,000 to $40,000 a year

David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard, two 20-year-olds in Louisville, say they collect $100,000 a month from their year-old site, Freeweblayouts.net.    (Might want to get rid of popups which are against googles TOS)

SeatGuru.com $10,000 to $20,000 a month  and another 10 to 20k from direct sales.

Like i’ve said before  industry after industry is being invaded by little 1 or 2 person companies that are more then happy with making a living per year of sites they love.    People keep talking about web 2.0  which no one cares about in the real world,  Adsense/YPN is what is truly changing the web,  and at the end of the day the ideas that will change/decide the future of the internet  is those ideas that make money.  

Adsense/YPN  is where the action is,  they are the platform/foundation of the future web.  
Thousands of sites have come out of nowhere and changed entire industries in the last 2 years,  another 2 or 3 years and many of these  10-20k sites are going to be making a LOT more money and be a lot bigger.  

Like I said in my other post I call this new trend “Web 3.0″  and I think we can sum up as  ”Good bye Venture Capitalists” and good bye “Paid Services” and good luck existing if your company has more then 5-10 employees.

Limelight Gets $130 Million For a system that doesn’t work.

I’m amazed at the companies that get funding.   All that limelight does is offload a lot of serving issues but at the same time it dramtically slows down your sites response time.

Here I am pinging limelights  Myspace image domain.  I am using Telus which is the largest telco in western canada…

Pinging myspace-414.vo.llnwd.net [69.28.154.221] with 32 bytes of data

Reply from 69.28.154.221: bytes=32 time=106ms TTL=56
Reply from 69.28.154.221: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=56
Reply from 69.28.154.221: bytes=32 time=104ms TTL=56

ping images.plentyoffish.com
Pinging cache.peer1.net [69.90.111.120] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 69.90.111.120: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=59
Reply from 69.90.111.120: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=59
Reply from 69.90.111.120: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=59

I am using a caching network in canada,   The  Response times are over 14 times faster then myspace.    Is it really any wonder that American companies don’t grow as fast outside of the US?   By using a company like limelight you are esentially crippling your service outside of the USA. 

Just for fun i’m going to ping  Userplane which is in the same datacenter as myspace.

Pinging www.userplane.com [8.3.208.201] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 8.3.208.201: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=246
Reply from 8.3.208.201: bytes=32 time=38ms TTL=246

I tested limelight  for a day,  I had sooo many complaints across Canada and such brutal response times compared to what i previously had I had to revert back Asap.  

Maybe they can use that money and build a system that actually works.  

Hotornot Claims $15,000/day+

Hotornot.com claims to beat my adsense earnings and earn more profit in the following post.  comment 39.

Given they are charging $5.95 a month that have offices etc, that means they have over 80,000 paying subscribers.   I guess all those  rating/matching sites may actually have a future.   They are doing pretty good for a 4 page site 

Web 2.0 is mass market, Web 3.0 is the transformation of Industries in the long tail.

Techcrunch profiled 13 dating sites today.  It reminds me just how far ahead of the pack I am,  if you add all the other 12 dating sites profiles together excluding googlebase you will get close to the number of users currently logged into plentyoffish.com

Some of these sites are failures before even launching.  Sites like engage.com have taken 5 million plus in funding and for them to ever get that money back is extremely hard.   On the other hand you have 1 or 2 person sites profiled that have never taken money and if they earn 2k/month  they would be very happy the owners would consider it a success.  The VC funded ones will of course want 10 fold returns and if they don’t get it the site will be considered a failure.

It is kinda cool hearing many of these sites saying I was their inspiration for starting.  I remember creating my site like it was yesterday, and I remember the day adsense came out,  I added that to my site in the first few days.   As has been said elsewhere after that I kicked off the free site revolution.

I’ve inspired others to create great sites in other industries,  like this one.  I’ve also received emails from many developers saying they are now launching and building free sites to take over their little niche.  The free model funded by adsense is going to invade every conceivable maket and in many cases take them over. 

Mike of techcrunch has labeled many of these sites  web 2.0.  I think these are web 3.0 companies.   The poster children of web 2.0 have been agile teams like myspace, ficklr, youtube etc companies which have been transforming the extremely large niche’s.   What we are going to see next is small groups of people transforming the niches/Industries that make up the long tail. 

Running major sites on a staff of 1 or 2  is something that is been unheard of until this year.  The non vc funded sites profiled are run by only 1 or 2 people and its unlikely they will need many staff going forward.   Late 2006 and 2007 is going to be defined by startups offering free services monetized via adsense.   The “Free Site Revolution”  is going to turn many million dollar industries into  $50,000 a year industries.

I think we can sum up web 3.0 as  ”Good bye Venture Capitalists” and good bye “Paid Services” and good luck existing if your company has more then 5-10 employees.

300+ social network startups in less then 2 years.

Seems every day now you hear about another social network startup.   From what people in the industry have been telling me there are between  300 and 400 new social networking/dating startups in the last 2 years.     Only 4 or 5 of those sites will be around in another 4 or 5 years.

In the last week alone  I’ve seen a bunch of free dating sites/social networking hybrids.    Paird.com, engage.com and justsayhi.com.   Of course none of these sites stand any chance of success.    The reason is very simple,  there is a 30% turn over per month for online dating sites.    Social networking sites don’t have a high turn over,  if you sign up a million people in a year on something like facebook,  you have  800,000 active users at the end of the year.   If you sign up a million users on a dating site in 12 months  you have 80,000 active users at the end of the year if you are lucky.

Myspace recently commented that one of their fastest growing segments was ages 35+,  these users are signing up in the millions and in the process the core dating demographic is leaving dating sites.    I notice this in a big way on my site,  competing against social networking is very very hard.   Users used to sign up to a dating site,  leave after 3 months and then come back 5 months later to do it agian.   Now users sign up to social networking sites and when they are single again they start dating people off the social network and don’t make the effort to sign up to a dating site again.

So what does the future hold?  A lot of carnage,  a  good  250 startups in the social networking/dating space going bellyup in the next 2-3 years.

Random things on the beach.

Now this is cool…

Hampton Beach, NH

Google’s Secret billion dollar revenue stream.

Ever wonder how Ask Jeeves ACTUALLY makes money?   Well they do it via the massive adware/toolbar/mysearch install more commonly known as smileycentral.com.  If you read through this articleon ask jeeves acquisition of Myway, mysearch.com etc  you will see that it doubled their market reach in search and revenues.   This means ~30- 50% of Ask Jeeves current revenues are tied to adware/smilie/toolbar installs among other things.  

Its easy to detect if users have this installed as the user agent is changed to funwebproducts.   For plentyoffish visitors from the USA, there is a 13% chance that your computer is infected.  About a year ago smilecental  reached 11% of US traffic.

As you may guess installing toolbars on peoples machines by sneaking them in somehow is insanely profitable.   These companies are earning well over $20.00 per toolbar user per year. Google says they earn an average of $16.00 per user,  but a toolbar users tends to be double the average as they are regular users not casual users.  

Toolbars are the major battlefield that NO one wants to talk about.  Everything being done today by Microsoft, Yahoo and Google is to get their toolbars on peoples machines.  Google did a deal with Sun, Dell and firefox to push their toolbars.   From the above news release  I suspect Ask.com is currently getting ~30-50% of its revenues from its toolbars, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google are probably at 20%+ of revenues.   

The longer Microsoft delays windows vista the larger Googles toolbar install base becomes and the more google is dependent on toolbar revenues.    When windows vista launches googles toolbar install base will vanish somewhat and with it a large part of its revenues. 

The real question is when is Myspace going to stop screwing around and create custom toolbars for its users?   Considering that myspace was born in the “dark side” of the web, it should be a no brainer for them?

Make $10,000/day by spamming google base to death.

This older post shows how spamming AFF on googlebase can net you 10 grand a day. Since then Google has really clamped down on the rules.

Right now, it seems to be just Date.com, Loveaccess.com and meetme.hotornot.com spamming on a daily basis. They seem to be uploading 10’s of thousands of profiles letting them expire in a few days and then uploading another set the next day.

Google has added many new fields and is nearly a full dating service now. A second ago i searched and it even included height, although not now. Here is a screen shot.

Google romance is real and they are trying to turn google base into a search destination,  once that happens  who needs dating sites?  Google can just fill up their database with people who come to the site and want to sign up.

Right now its only the third tier dating sites spamming, but i suspect other sites are going to join in and write programs to spam googlebase on a per minute timer so they always show up first.

 **Update**

Seems that its not date.com uploading profiles its a bunch of affiliates.   The fact that someone is scraping date.com data and then converting it to a format that can be uploaded is disturbing. 

Link here

Worlds Largest Speed Dating Event Gets even Bigger.

Its been a busy week, we moved the event to the Hamilton Convention center  and another 2000 guests have pre registered bringing the total to over 5,000.  At this point there are no venues larger in sourthern ontario so we will have to cut off signups.

It will also be exciting to finally have the media see that plentyoffish is hands down the largest dating site in Canada.  It has been hard to get noticed because of Lavalife’s 5 million a month marketing budget.

We only need a few hundred people to set the speed dating record,  but this is going to set more then a record.    As it stands now Plentyoffish will host the largest singles event ever held in North America, a good 10 to 20 times larger then anything held by Match.com, Lavalife, True.com, Cupid.com/predating.com etc.

Looking at the event, it is amazing how many people have signed up,  and whats more amazing is we have over 100 volonteers to do stuff for this event.     Even stranger,  I’ve created a massive dating site that normally takes 200-400 people to run at this size.  At the same time I’ve created the largest singles event network (measured by how many people attend events/month),  something that second place predating.com needs 80 part time people to run.