You guys all know pay per click mogul Markus Frind? Well hes not necessarily the founder of ” Pay Per Click “, but he certainly is the master of monetizing his famous niche that he provided free for people to use in order to find their match. When he was working one day back in the early 2000’s his co-worker showed him all these dating website’s which were offering a service that you had to pay for. These dating services where priced out at different rates and struggled to maximize traffic gains because of the costly fees that were charging consumers to use its services. Lavalife now valued at over $1 Billion dollars according to sources spent money on TV marketing and major sponsored adverts that cost them more in expenditures than anything else did. We can consider this to be necessary costs that could of been avoided if they thought of a better way to save more and gain more at the same time. Markus frind said, ” I can beat them “. Microsoft provided a very cool programming language that could code many different actions, functions etc. The language was called ASP.Net which Markus started learning. after learning the language he starts to build his first website on his personal computer. In one week Plenty Of Fish was live and open to all users everywhere, and within the first month according to one of his blogs it shows his earnings of $7.60. That month possessed 493 page views with a 2.4 % click-through rate. In addition to the next months earnings his click-through rate decreased to 1.1 % but the number of clicks increased to over 2,000 clicks compared to its previous month with a grand total of 182,404 page views created by visitors. Month after month his online dating site took off and Plenty Of Fish became a success in the market. For so many reasons with very little overhead costs and 10 years later hiring its first programmer Markus proves that a one man company with determination is all you need to beat your competitor. A little bit of thinking and working smarter not harder was the key in all this. But to come out with one reason why plenty of was successful, it was “free”. That was the only outstanding change it made in that market to beat and succeed its competitors. Pretty innovative or just very lucky. It’s not like free was something that changed the way people used a product. It didn’t make the service different from anyone else, all it really did was bring on more people to cancel their paid services and jump onto a free service. It was more or less a business model advantage over its competitors that made the site successful for what it offered. Later on Plenty Of Fish got innovative and built different systems and algorithm’s into matching and test’s that would potentially match you up with the person you are compatible with. Copy caters came on that very same week to look at what the sites changes made and copied that same feature and pushed it onto their site to keep up with the competition. So it all came down to great SEO, content marketing, low expenditures, A good business model, and of course “Free”. Traffic was not even a subject at that point with all these great things added to the formula, page views were consistently aiming high, CPC’s were effective in the number of clicks that were delivered from its visitors and click-through rates were a blessing. A source just recently states that Plenty Of Fishes company was doing $30 Million a year in ads. If the number of traffic rises or Plenty Of Fish aims to find more ways to make money from its traffic they could certainly hit the billion dollar a year sales mark and that will place Markus Frind in the Billion Dollar Club.