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Take a look at this video of them from a year (or so ago). Very cool Guy K with Markus and others.
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/02/panel_of_we...
there. And Drew Curtis of Fark is hilarious.
In this blog post, Markus says that his Adsense click through rate had dropped 60% in two months as a result of the clickable area changes made to Adsense ads. What that suggests to me at least is that a lot of his clicks were accidental, which is usually due to deceptive ad formating or ad positioning.
Maybe there's something else going on, but there has always seemed to be something strange going on with Markus's claims.
I don't really doubt his revenue claims, although he's been throwing around the same revenue numbers for something like 2 years now... However, I suspect there is a lot more to the story than Markus would like us to believe.
Fake it until you make it as they say.
There are 2 types of people in silicon valley, those who made a ton of money, and those who wish they did. I swear the later category has read some kind of business for dummies book and every time I do something that isn't "correct" they lecture me on the correct way of doing things.
The reason is simple, 2 years ago I was getting calls from other dating sites saying, Sell to us now or we will crush you completely by launching competing free sites. Every major site had consultants coming in telling them to go free before it was to late. Second tier sites were barely profitable in most cases and had nothing to lose by going free
So rather then compete with companies like match or eharmony with billions in the bank as a free service I just released my numbers. After all Plentyoffish is an absolutely massive site and no one in the industry believed I was making so little money. That made it real hard for other sites to get funding, and for paid sites to BS their investors and sell them on the idea of going free.
So what happend? Allegron, RSVP.com.au, datingdirect, lavalife, zencon and a bunch of others All got sold after looking at going free and seeing it wouldn't work. Lavalife and Questpersonals even launched Free Dating sites to try and compete head on. Those all failed.
No one else has figured out how to create a site the size of plentyoffish with under $30 million a year in tech related costs. Combined that with the fact revenues would be so small the big sites backed off, for now.
In the end there are well over 100,000 dating sites at any time, and about 3,000 of those get enough traffic at any one time to be tracked by hitwise and others. Having another few thousand sites started by people who thought they could get rich was a far better option then competing head on with dating sites that had unlimited money.
Also with compete, quantcast and others out there, any idiot could go and multiply pageviews * CPM and come up with a revenue estimate. Not to mention many dating sites buy CPM ads on my site.
with such a small infrastructure, Markus -- or they seem to assume
that if you were really doing that well you would have cashed out by
now.
I'm not sure if that comment was directed at me but for the record I'm very happy with the company I run :)
My point is, that if other dating sites our floundering, don't chime up and clue them in. Stay silent and let them crash around you.
Google only talked about their ad revenue when the had to go public.
In fact that might be the most interesting story of all -- the practically free cost of customer acquisition (at least if you don't count the piece of the pie Google and the ad networks take, which the publisher never sees anyway). Didn't Match.com spend almost $175 million on ads last year (more than half of their 2006 revenue)?
Have you tried typing "dating" into Google? There's a POF ad right there.
But he could do well without AdWords, the site is sticky and I'm sure he gets plenty of organic traffic. Revenue makes sense based on numbers, and with smart caching and limited DB calls the load could be handled by only a few servers.
Besides, one nice benefit (or goal?) of releasing the numbers means stories like this, which mean free publicity and page rank boost.
Again, Mark, if you read this note, I just want to say how smart you are.
Again, thank you for sharing his successful story.
Jenny.
Nice and impressed.
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This error (HTTP 400 Bad Request) means that Internet Explorer was able to connect to the web server, but the webpage could not be found because of a problem with the address.
Any thoughts appreciated