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. FULL ARTICLE @ ADN

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. Check out this graph of traffic to the top 5 free dating services. 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.