50 Million…

Last month marked the first Time I passed 50 Million dailly pageviews and 50 Million monthly visitors, basically passing all the milestones i’d ever set for the Site.    So I started thinking about what new milestones I should set.   I turn 30 in May  so I figured its about time I own my own place,   after going hunting for places  at the start of the month I was shocked at the prices,   between  1,200 and  $3,000 a square foot making downtown vancouver more expansive than New York.   At any rate about about a week of searching I found the perfect sprawling place on the water.    Today I went and withdrew far to many millions and closed the transaction.      So this weekend I get to move into my new place,  the patio alone is 1,200 square feet which is far larger than my current apartment,  its going to be a real change.

$38 Million for BlackPlanet.com MiGente.com, and AsianAve.com

Copied from paidcontent.   The URL on paid contents post starts with 419..  419 is another way of saying  black african scammers.   That is a pretty funny,  especially after I spent half the day  tracking down nigerians 

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CommunityConnect, one of the oldest social networks around (since 1996) which has been focused on different ethnic groups, has been sold to a non-obvious buyer: Radio One, the radio network focused on African-American and urban listeners, has bought it for about $38 million. CC owns BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, and AsianAve.com, and says has over 20 million members. Ben Sun, CCI’s president and founder, will continue to run the company.

RadioOne has about 53 radio stations located in 16 urban markets in the U.S. Additionally, Radio One owns Magazine One, which owns Giant Magazine, interests in TV One, a cable/satellite network programming primarily to African-Americans and others.

Rothschild was the banker for Radio One; Bear, Stearns was the banker to Community Connect.

Spammers Randomate and Captchas

Spammers can crack any captcha on any site now in a matter of seconds.     There are even sites like http://www.captchakiller.com  which allow you to break captcha’s  using API’s.     I was able to break  All of americansingles sites captches in a matter of seconds,  my own and every other dating site I could find.    Now we get a lot of losers like Art Harrison at Randodate are using automated programs to break captchas on my site and attempt to create thousands of fake profiles and spam their site all over.   But the most annoying are by far the russians and other spam groups which are really stepping up their attacks lately.   

Does anyone have one of these automated spam bots?  I’d love to get my hands on one so I can test and figure out how they work.     Post a link below or send me an email if anyone knows of any.

Google Bigtable

This is a really really big deal. 

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/04/source-google-to-launch-bigtable-as-web-service/

You will get access to massive amounts of computing power for cheap.   Might be interesting for me to use it to process some of my data that i’d have to construct a data cube for normally.

Onlinedatingpost

After reading David evans secret to creating  successful dating sites I am left wondering if any new players will enter the market.

3 Years ago david was promoting niche sites as the future of the industry,  now 3 years later are any niche sites making money on a grand scale  other than Jdate?    Even Jdate makes peanuts  and doesn’t come close to the  $300M plus made by match.com and Eharmony.

Now david is writing about Zoosk and are you interested saying they are the next big thing because they have so many “users”.    Sure many of these ”apps” have users  but they have no real way of making money from them.   As Noah from Okdork points out  if you have 100 Million page impressions a month  on Facebook you are lucky to make $10,000.  Now a site like eharmony gets 400 million pageviews a month and makes over $20,000,000 a month

 Even worse facebook apps seem to suffer from fads,  users of facebook view apps as entertainment.  When you create programs that are for entertainment  users will always want to flock to something newer and cooler.  Now if facebooks payment platform goes live and these dating apps start charging  what will happen?   I think no one will use the paid apps and it will make facebook subject to all these bogus dating laws that have come out.  

To make matters worse  dating sites in the US are facing  some  7 or 8 different patent infringement lawsuits,   is facebook going to be subject to all of these?   I think that facebook apps will be an ATM machine for patent trolls going forward.   Nothing is easier than setting up a shell company creating an app and then sueing facebook for patent infringement with a different shell company.

 I’ve always told David the reason for my success was doing the opposite of whatever he posted on his blog.   :)  Sites that are trendy today are rarely the ones that get huge and make money in the long run.   A good example of this are webcam dating sites  which seem to be trendy every 3 years.  Woome is virtually identical to the sites from 2002 in terms of functionality with a slightly better user interface.    The problem with them  as back in 2002 is the majority of people use them as entertainment and the chat sessions involve a vast amount of nudity.

SSD Image Server Array.

On the weekend I went and deployed my first Sold State Drive Array.     15  Mtron 32GB  SSD drives in a MD1000  enclosure.    Plentyoffish has a lot of images on every single page, unlike most dating sites.    As a result i’m serving  5,500 images per second at peak and  50-60,000 new images being uploaded per day.    Anyone else doing anything fancy with image serving ?   Aside from the database,  images are the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to running the site.

Bebo Numbers…

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080313/bebo-by-the-not-so-big-numbers/

2006.    $ 7 million revenue  3 Million EBITDA.
2007     $20 million in revenues  $5 million in EBITDA.

Bebo has  12 Billion monthly pageviews which comes out to about  1.7 million dollars a month  or 14 cents CPM site wide.   Looking at comscores numbers,  Bebo’s traffic has been declining since last June.   Bebo’s strongest market is the UK and the currency exchange rate right now is 2:1.

“Projecting outward, the company estimated–remember, these are not actual numbers, but a best guess by Bebo execs–it would have $50 million in revenue and $10 million in EBITDA in 2008; $117 million in revenue and $48 million in revenue in 2009 and $193 million in revenue and $92 million in EBITDA in 2010.”

Given that the traffic at least according to comscore has been declining since last year I don’t see how bebo could hit 50 million in revenue  unless Yahoo is forking over a ton of money for Bebo’s inventory in the UK.

Google Admanager.

Google soft released Google Admanager today.    It works extremely well,  for some reason all the important features aren’t even discussed in the WSJ article or elsewhere on the web.   I expect once released fully  it will become the biggest ad server in a short amount of time,  because if you use adsense and don’t use it you will miss out on making more money.

Bebo Sold $850 Million

Bebo sold for 850 million to AOL this morning.

Compete.com says  bebo had 19 million visitors in the US last month  compared to Plentyoffish’s  29 million.   Bebo’s  year over year growth in the US was 3%.  At 19 million monthly visitors Bebo is the 3rd largest social network in the US..   Looks like a winner take all situation in the US for social networking.

True.com’s new advertising.

David writes about trues new advertising here…   This time its all about T&A  they don’t even bother showing faces.

http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2008/03/truecom-no-more-faces/

I think this year  we will see a lot of dating sites try harder and harder to stay in business and push more towards adult like sites.