Ahh markus. I remember your thread. Made a few posts on there. I remember how many people couldn't believe ya and thought you were full of it. Seems not much has changed in that department.

So I do have to say cheers to you. I am so glad things are going well for you still after a couple years. You did good my man...real good.

Pass some of your luck to me...sure want to get the ol' 1/4 mil per year back myself. Shoulda been up to 2.5 mil by now. Oh well, win some loose some. Off to figure out how to make another penny somehow. Peace my man.

Hard to watch every word you say when you are with a reporter for 2 days straight.

Ahhh we forgive you Markus... I cannot imagine the quotes that would be printed of me if a reporter spent 2 days with me...

"Max is in the bathroom... again. When does he ever get any work done?"

Ha, nice timing. When I first found your site that day I said something like "nice site, maybe I'll try it out!" -- Flash forward to now: I just got back from a week long POF date. Thanks Markus, cheers to success!

Markus, you are true inspiration to us entrepreneurs out here who sometimes lose site of the brass ring.

hey markus007, thanks for stopping by again, i remember reading with wonder on your process of handling all the database calls per second, and how you pretty didn't know anything about databases before you started, but you learned and applied and streamlined the functions. it may be an hour a day work now, but then, im sure it was quite a bit more, kudo's to you..

oh, and nuevojefe, thanks for the link..nice to see everything wrapped up nice and pretty on a one man show..

markus007 Senior Member joined:May 24, 2003

I feel like thank you Brett for making this place a startup for so many people, including me, congrats Markus!
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[edited by: eelixduppy at 5:08 pm (utc) on Jan. 18, 2009]

The other extreme is people who take stuff at face value and than try and recreate it or try to understand every little detail and they constantly test everything in sight. These are the kind of people i've found running extremely successful businesses.

Funny you said that, as I was thinking about the reporter and wondering what he took away from the time spent with you other than a story.

Nice job. BTW, what kind of traffic spike did you realize after the Today Show?

Markus, WAY TO GO! It is great to read the success of someone who is so driven like yourself. It appears that you take the extra time to think things through, especially the way you state your two points. Some people do not and will not get it. I hope that I am able to pay $25 Million in taxes one day soon; some of will get this. Cheers and many more successes to you. If you are down in San Antonio, let me know. I will be happy to show you around.

Is the 8G RAM figure correct? I can't believe such a high volume microsoft database would process so much data per second with that amount of RAM.

I totally agree about optimising separately for read / write. This is the key to my sites speed (albeit it is a low traffic / high db use site).

Nearly all database functions are read only; data, temp files, and session data all run from a ramdrive; database is optimised to be as small as possible with the code performing translation of the data so that fields can be as small as possible.

Just remember that the less moving parts* the faster the site will be.

*Of course SSD is now less of a problem for hard disks speedwise.

[edited by: Frank_Rizzo at 9:45 am (utc) on Jan. 17, 2009]

Great success story and incredible to see how he can do it with just a few servers/minimal employees, however I see he has all his eggs in one basket, what if he wakes up one day and finds Google bans his Adsense account? goodbye to his $10m/year.

Maybe would be a good time to sell to match.com then :P

So Markus, tell us how it feels like being at the top? Do you feel the same as you did 6 years ago, or as if work never stops and you're even stressing more.

"As Frind gets up to leave, I ask him what he has planned for the rest of the day. "I don't know," he says. "Maybe I'll take a nap."

Don't know if this is just the writers at INC magazine spinning stories to get more magazine sales, but I can pretty guarantee that most rich folks never relax for too long, because sooner or later their competition catches up and before you know it your at the bottom.

Example is how Match.com has recently launched a free dating site that will compete with POF, you can never relax being at the top, from what I've seen.

Read the article as soon as INC. came in the mail. Congrats on your success, markus007!

Certainly an inspiration for us webmasters with a ton of domains and ideas, and so little time. Time to refocus!

Congrats again.

BTW, what kind of traffic spike did you realize after the Today Show?

My site was featured on the Today Show this last Spring. We saw a very small increase in traffic that day... extremely small. It did wonders for our brand as we got a lot more advertising inquiries, news write-ups, etc. But traffic-wise, most folks are not online when they watch that show... and hence you won't see a spike right away... But perhaps added visitors for weeks to come trickling in.

Nice to see a fellow WebmasterWorld member achieve so much. Congrats, Markus, and thanks for your willingness to help other members here over the years.

@max,
that is about what I would have expected.

SELECT By_Jafo FROM Page-> [webmasterworld.com...] Where Markus Says 'I make about $40/day off 1200 visitors. No idea if that is good or bad' and Page_Location = [webmasterworld.com...]

- Forgive me if I am skeptical and if my sql is bad :)

That is an old post. Five years is a very, very long time on the internet and a lot can happen.

I can verify from my own experience, testing AdWords site targeting on POF, that these days Markus's site truly does have a TON of traffic.

The current traffic claims are very credible to me because I have seen it with my own eyes from the advertiser's end of things.

wow! If that's true then that's truly awesome. Time to research and go figuring how he did it :D

Congrats markus007, very inspirational.

I have noticed many advertising links which you have blended in very well. I am sure you are getting very high CTR, cause as a webmaster myself, I have confused the text ads with content and accidentally clicked on one of your ads.

You owe me 2 cents! ;)

Many folk around here have made a lot of money from the information contained within these pages..

Congratulations Markus..

..and thank you, I found the love of my life on Plenty of Fish :)

@kirby, on your question:
"what kind of traffic spike did you realize after the Today Show?"

I knew my free site competitors where going to venture capitalists and asking for huge sums of money, and my competitors where claiming to be first movers etc. After posting that check their chances of raising money went to 0. The wall street journal called after reading that post. WSJ article came out, next day the Today Show Called. The next week my total US site traffic was up over 50% and kept on growing.
http:// plentyoffish. wordpress. com/

Hmmm, amazing...

what a rubbish site , i tried to logon and it wont let you register ..... keeps brining up problems

Hey Markus,

definitely an inspirational story. Nice to know there are some players up here in Canada making killer Adsense cash...do you think you could PM me your site URL? :)

Too bad I'm not a million dollar markus too. Still a thousand to two thousand dollar markis unfourtunately. hehe.

Markus007, were you interviewed on "The Hour" recently? The TV schedule said you were going to be a guest, so I watched the show, but instead it was some guy talking about fancy cars. What happened?

This is inspiring, to say the least. Congratulations!

do you think you could PM me your site URL? :)

I think it's well known around here that markus007 is the guy behind Plenty Of Fish.

Interesting - I couldn't sign up to be a member of Markus' site. It keeps saying that the username already exists no matter what name I pick. Maybe Markus has been busy implementing some artificial intelligence feature detecting people who want to spy on his business:)

"I don't listen to the users," he says. "The people who suggest things are the vocal minority who have stupid ideas that only apply to their little niches."

You listen to users more by watching the analytics than actually listening to what they say. Actions speak louder than words. He could sell that site for a fortune to numerous personals sites/companies. It may only make about 2% or less of what some of the big networks make (revenue) but with one person it is quite an accomplishment.

Great success story and incredible to see how he can do it with just a few servers/minimal employees, however I see he has all his eggs in one basket, what if he wakes up one day and finds Google bans his Adsense account? goodbye to his $10m/year.

After a few years @ 10M, it probably wouldn't matter. I'd bet even if AdSense is the biggest revenue generator, there are other sources in there that pay out more than a million a year.

however I see he has all his eggs in one basket, what if he wakes up one day and finds Google bans his Adsense account?

If you read the article he mentions that he's caching a check from an advertiser (directly) for $180k. So it seems his eggs are safely in various baskets ;)

Congratulations Markus,

have you gotten around to selling your own ad supply? Even if you do, do you still use Adsense or any of the ad suppliers out there?