BUSINESS WIRE -- Jan 16 -- Userplane, a subsidiary of AOL, today announced that PlentyofFish, the world's top free dating site, has joined Userplane's new ad revenue-sharing program. Userplane now enables text-based ads within its private-label chat and IM tools. It then splits any resulting revenue with participating sites. PlentyofFish has more than 1 million daily visitors and is ranked by Hitwise as a top five dating service in the U.S. Since 2004, its members have used Userplane Webmessenger(TM) to initiate, on average, more than 100,000 IM sessions and exchange millions of text and audio/video messages per day. Userplane's ad network delivers more than 1 billion ads per month.
The full article was originally published at ADN, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I think Markus ruffled some feathers on the final panel when he said that he wasn't interested in making more money. There were more than a few gasps around the room. Quite a few of the people I talked to were interested in starting free dating services...but something doesn't quite compute. Markus is one guy. He's an efficiency engineer and prides himself on being able to run his site on less than ten servers. He makes a modest CPM on his advertising and gets massive amounts of traffic in comparison to other free dating sites. I say, power to Markus. Place an ad on his plain Jane site and let him upsell to your paid dating site. Or, if you want to convert your paid dating site to a free dating site, start by firing everyone and ripping out 90% of your servers and features.
Markus runs the mother of all affiliate sites for the dating industry.
Life is good.
Peace.
-S
Posted by: Saïd Amin | Jan 18, 2007 at 05:56 PM
The inertia of the natural growth curve of the online dating industry is taking shape and so people are looking for innovative ways to increase profit. Such as niche marking, and even free dating with a skeleton crew replacing the niceties of internet dating.
Personally if I were going to look for a mate online, I would prefer to pay, as mate selection is more important than money.
However, an alternative is to cut cost through outsourcing back office functions so you can maintain or increase the quality of service and run operations with the costs of a free dating service.
This way everyone wins, the clients get quality service and gets to keep the niceties making dating more convenient and personal, and the online dating industry firms can achieve profit growth through increased margins.
Posted by: Mark | Jan 19, 2007 at 08:20 AM
Good to see that even free dating websites can make big bucks with advertising.
Posted by: Free dating site | Mar 24, 2007 at 03:53 AM