I read this story: 10,000 a day the other day and still haven’t stopped thinking about it. Here is a guy with a free dating site that is pulling in 10k in adsense revenue. The article is more about anti-marketing design, but I’m interested in what it takes to pull that kind of cash off a website.

I’ve reviewed the site and the adsense appears primarily as a leaderboard on the main pages. It is near where a person selects the type of person they are searching for, so that’s good placement as most clicks are going to be in that area to begin with. Outside of that, it appears it’s simply a numbers a game. Get tons of traffic with a free dating site and you’ll get a certain percentage of clicks regardless.

So the keys again are give people what they want (in this case opportunity to find love, sex, companionship) and a novel service idea (free dating service), some good SEO and you’ve got a winner.