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Thread: Free dating site makes $300k a month from Adsense

  1. #16
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    Interview is complete: http://www.webpublishingblog.com/exclusive..

    A few interesting points he made:

    -he banned Alexa and websearch toolbar or comscore from using his site in the beginning so that the site would stay below the radar

    -he quit his job when the site was making 4k a month

    -he says always test new designs (one of my rules)

    -he thinks that paid dating site membership will shrink to 5-20% of the dating market
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  2. #17
    Registered Jon's Avatar
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    The dating industry is tough to get into.. regardless of whether it's free or not.. I think a lot of people look at him and think "oh my god, I'm going to do that now!", but overlook that Markus has been doing this since 2001, which was a good time to get into it. Anytime you're going to release a free version of something that most people in the industry pay for, you had better be ready to invest a lot more capital into it than you think. I do agree with him that for "free" services badly designed sites do better, but that's not true in most things. For mortgage for instance, when you are trying to get people to fill out forms where they have to give out a lot of personal and otherwise confidential financial information, they are going to choose a site they feel safe on, not a site that loads quickly and has some crappy images. They want to signup with a site that represents "trust and security".. So it's different for every industry.

  3. #18
    Senior Member chromate's Avatar
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    Wow, I honestly had no idea how big plentoffish was!

    I've had a front page link exchange with Markus's site for ages now. Guess I should feel quite honoured to be on his front page

  4. #19
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    Thats really cool, that link would probably be worth a lot of $ if it was

    Jon, I agree with you about design, its all about knowing your audience. Getting people to visit advertisers vs getting them to pull out the credit card are two very different things. I suspecet 90% of designers have no idea what conversion even means, and thats where the danger is. When I was in college my design class teacher said most websites were boring and they needed things like crazy cursers (that made up my mind about an art degree pretty fast.)
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  5. #20
    Senior Member chromate's Avatar
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    Thanks to Jaffro for pointing out my link on the front of plentoffish is a "nofollow" link.

    That's the problem with the online dating industry, everyone is so underhand. You think you've got a good link exchange going only to find a week later it's been removed or made "nofollow" without any notice. Takes way too much work managing it all to get anywhere.

  6. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by Cutter
    -he says always test new designs (one of my rules)
    Test in what way?

  7. #22
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    Change layout, colors, read up on split testing as done in direct marketing. This is what I do with Adsense to increase clickthrough rates.
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  8. #23
    Working. Masetek's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by chromate
    Thanks to Jaffro for pointing out my link on the front of plentoffish is a "nofollow" link.
    Cant be happy with that. Thats happened a few times to me. Most of the time they just remove it after a few weeks. Very annoying

  9. #24
    Not that blue at all Blue Cat Buxton's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Masetek
    Cant be happy with that. Thats happened a few times to me. Most of the time they just remove it after a few weeks. Very annoying

    But do you get any real traffic, Chromate, from the link.

  10. #25
    Senior Member chromate's Avatar
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    Not really, no. About 20 uniques a day, recently. (used to be a lot less) Surprising considering he gets 14million page views or whatever it is. But I guess most people spend their time on the sub pages, where I don't have a link.

    It's not really the fact that it's "nofollow" that annoys me. If he had told me that he was going to do it, I wouldn't have really minded so much, because it's nice to be linked to from a high profile site and it does send some traffic. What's annoying is that he didn't tell me. So in effect he was getting a one way link from the front page of my site which flits in and out of page 1 on google for "dating services", so in local rank terms, he's getting a reasonable deal considering his primary keyword is "free dating services".

    I've returned the favour anyway (not that he'll care) lol

  11. #26
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    I don't think the engines even pay attention to nofollow.
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  12. #27
    Senior Member chromate's Avatar
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    I think Google do don't they? I must admit I don't pay much attention to the specifics of SEO these days - I just follow common sense basic stuff for long term objectives.

  13. #28
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    Quote Originally Posted by michael_gersitz
    Dating sites proboally have ads that pay $1 per click. That is 1,000 clicks per day.
    10,000

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