Edition #47 – 5/08/2006
I’ve been thinking too small.
I had something else planned for today, but I have to share this with you NOW because it’s truly inspiring and it relates directly to several things I’m going to be teaching you over the next two months.
This interview was posted just 5 days ago (I stumbled upon it last night), and it features Markus Frind who runs the largest free dating site in the world. I’m not going to post his URL because I’m not an advocate of his site, but you will see it on the interview page.
The interview is posted on the Podcast Network and you can listen for free at:
(Link no longer available – not sure why they took it down)
It’s 30 minutes long, and worth listening to the entire thing (I listened twice).
This guy is making $10,000+ per day from AdSense, and he alluded that his site is profiting $6 Million per year. OK, so he gets 15 million page views per day, so it’s HUGE…but don’t be intimidated. He runs the business ALONE, and he says it typically takes about 1 hour per day.
When asked about how much money his site is generating he says,
“It’s not really that much…” and then explains how his site fits into the big picture of AdSense/Context ads on the web.
By his estimates, there are a LOT of people making a LOT more money than him. Here are some more great quotes from the interview:
“Most of the top people who make money on the internet have gone from doing affiliate programs to now building websites, or buying domains and putting up massive amounts of ads on them…”
“Other people have gone from making spam sites, to actually making sites with a lot of content, because it generates huge amounts of money…”
“There’s pretty sites, and then there’s not so pretty sites, and depending on the market you’re in, the not-so-pretty sites will often drop the nice ones.”
“The companies I’m competing with… they each have 300-400 employees. Here I am, a single person doing everything they are and more–and generating a lot of money. So other people in other areas can go out and create sites by themselves, and get massive amounts of money.”
“I bet in 3-4 years from now there’s gonna be very few companies on the internet who have more than 20-30 employees..because people like me can undercut them by huge margins.”
“Once the (Yahoo type) branded ads come out on Google, we’re going to see the CPM rates double across the board, so we’re in for some exciting times.”
When asked what his typical workday looks like…
“Probably an hour of work and 6-7 hours of reading. I really don’t have a lot of work unless there’s problems or I get a ton of traffic out of nowhere.”
Markus Frind’s advice for those getting into the business…
“Just read, read a lot. Read about marketing, affiliate programs, that kind of stuff.”
Unfortunately, Markus didn’t have any specific suggestions of titles to read (or what he spends 6-7 hours a day reading).
As always you can leave comments here in the blog.
Have a great day!
Don’t believe everything you read online.
http://www.shoemoney.com/2006/05/08/plentyoffish-marketing-101-when-all-else-fails-just-lie/
Hmmm, I’ll have to do some more research after seeing that scam report. I’ll admit, the only real “verification” I did was to look around the blogosphere and see that there were many people confirming the reports.
I’m still leaning toward believing him though. Look at these traffic graphs…
Here’s his rank compared to the White House:
Here it is compared to other dating sites dating.com and friendfinder.com:
In his interview he basically said it’s just been in the last couple years that the site has taken off, so if the guy was only making $30/day before he started his dating site, it’s believable.
Also, I looked deeper into Shoemoney’s comments, and it appears that Markus posted in 2003 on Webmasterworld that he was making $40 a day. So that would give plenty time for his site to grow and his story to still hold up. Also, he allegedly hired others to scrape dating profiles to build his site, and then issued fake press releases. I have no idea if that’s true, but if it is, it could totally work. Scraping the profiles is obviously a slimy thing to do, but in business they do say “fake it till you make it” because it works.
If you look at the traffic numbers on Alexa, I think $10k/day is very feasable. Because keep in mind this is the type of site where people view many, many pages. He has an integrated hot-or-not style of ranking mechanism which I’m sure boosts the page views too. His Alexa rating shows an average of 14-17 page view per user which is very high (almost as high as eBay). Google averages 6.7 page views per user.
With that much traffic, it would be hard not to make money… I will see if I can get ahold of Markus and see what he has to say.
Yeah, either way it seems like a bit of a controversy.
Yes I agree… and controversy is good for blogs 😉
Hopefully I’ll be able to get ahold of Markus and get some solid answers for my readers… I left him a message earlier.
I called back but no one was around.
1. I’ve never heard of this shoemoney before april, someone on webmasterworld pointed his site out.
2. I’ve never emailed him or talked to him in any other way.
3. I posted before that i blocked alexa and comscore from measuring my sites traffic, companies like hitwise (gets nightly logs of 20 million US internet users) and ranking.websearch.com (13% of internet users) weren’t blocked. Even though i blocked Alexa my new traffic per day was still enough to put me in the top 2000 sites.
If you check out charts from the other ranking systems you will realize plentyoffish is in the top 50-80 sites in terms of pageviews in both the USA and world wide and has been for a while.
http://ranking.websearch.com/TrankTrend.aspx?url=www.plentyoffish.com&period=12&size=2
Here are some old stats on my advertising page. http://www.plentyoffish.com/advertising.aspx Any major affiliate or marketer on the web would have something like hitwise’s keyword data or their charts.
In canada 2% of online singles use my site on a dially basis, its HUGE here.
Searches for plentyoffish.com across the Yahoo network.
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
Dec 2005 145811
Jan 2006 172997
Feb 2006 183935
March 2006 202580
Basically Shoemoney is just some looser with no credability looking for attention/traffic by making outragous claims. LIke come on, why would I email someone who runs a blog no one ever reads? And on top of that why on earth would anyone promote a dating site on a blog that has mostly men reading it? Scraping other sites, trying to hire bloggers, all that is bullshit and crap he made up. The guy is clearly lieing through his teeth although I haven’t got a clue why. Any half assed marketer would look at traffic stats from various sources and conclude this guy is an idiot.
Hey Markus, How’s good old BC? I lived in the Vancouver area for 3 years…awesome place. Thanks for getting back to me. Sorry, I was by the phone all day and then I happened to be putting the kids to bed when you called. Figures 😉
For my readers… I can attest that this is the real guy, as shown by his IP (and caller ID on my phone).
So Markus, I’m not sure if it was ever your intention, but you sort of became an AdSense guru overnight. And along with that, you acquired some skeptics.
To me its clear that if you’re getting the traffic, you’re making the money. But I think it’s hard for some people to grasp because they just see the dollar amount you’re claiming, and don’t understand the direct relationship between the traffic and the income.
Maybe we could silence your critics once and for all by offering some proof in terms they understand… like dollars instead of visitors. Is there any chance you could post a copy of an AdSense check, or bank statement? Or even a screen shot of AdSense with the private stats blocked out…
It is nice and warm up here 🙂 I have no intention of putting up adsense earnings. I’ve been one of the top people in PPC and affiliate marketing and now the top in adsense. I don’t really care if other people believe it or not. Just annoys me when some people start outright lieing.
Here are my stats for AFF its one of the affiliate links hanging around. I don’t cater to adult traffic so its basically just revenue from new users per day.
http://www.plentyoffish.com/aff.jpg
Thanks Markus. It’s nice to see you’re making a solid $30k+ per month by helping people hook up for casual sex…(yes I know it’s just a tiny link at the bottom but good grief). I understand your position on posting AdSense earnings though… I was gonna say, when you’re making millions you probably don’t lose much sleep over a few skeptics 😉
E
Hey Marcus. It’s nice to see people are making money with adsense. I’m just getting started with adsense could you give me some advice on how to make some extra money. Check out my website and please let me know what I can do to improve this site.
Adsense sucks 🙂 They blocked my account and won’t tell me why. I already have an idea of why but at least that little twit sitting in his cubical with no life could warn me so I could have corrected it.
Now the question is what are my alternatives?