Vancouver Success Stories

Markus Frind

2008-03-11T15:58:00.000-07:00

Marcus Frind works two hours a day and makes as much as $10 million a year. He is the sole owner of plentyoffish.com, one of the most popular online dating sites in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. He runs his business from his apartment. Frind is a one-man show in a business many thought was impossible to do solo. Plentyoffish.com is taking on heavyweights such as lavalife.com, which employs no less than five VP's and a string of chief officers. This site is different than any other site, its free. His costs are practically zero as he has no programmers or marketers. Plenty of Fish was launched in 2003 as a pet project. Traffic grew fast, mostly through word of mouth. He decided to sign up with Google AdSense, which supplies web publishes with advertising to see how far he could take Plenty of Fish. The first cheque was $1,100 in July 2003. He is projected to make over $10 million this year alone just from ad revenues. To date there are about 660,000 active users mostly because its a free site. It ranks in the top 3 busiest dating sites in Canada and ranks number 1 in US and the UK on time spent on the site. The future of Plenty of Fish is to expand into the Chinese and European markets.

John Chow

2008-03-11T15:30:00.000-07:00

Many of you know him as "the blogger." This Vancouverite is B.C.'s six figure blogger. He blogs three times a day, talking about how to make money on the internet and he makes money while doing it. He writes for about 2 hours a day and earns an estimated $300,000 annually in ad revenue alone. www.johnchow.com is the go to site for learning how to make money off the internet.
Today, some 26,000 people read John's daily blogs which earn him about $30,000 a month. Last month, Chow's blogging income was $29,643 with the bulk of that being private ad sales. The rest of his ad revenue comes from affiliate marketing links, advertising supplied by an ad network and paid reviews in which he's paid to blog about a specific topic. John Chow also owns techzone.com, a tech site launched in 1999. This year he estimates his income will be $1 million.

Kevin Ham

2008-03-11T15:11:00.000-07:00

Kevin Ham is known as the man who owns the internet. People don't really know him because he is shy and doesn't want to be in the spotlight. His claim to fame is he owns over 300,000 domain names which are estimated at a whopping $300 million US. His domain names consist mostly of addresses that end in .cm instead of the usual .com. If someone types www.google.cm for example the page is redirected to Ham's agoga.com which hosts a wide array of ads. For each click, Ham gets paid.
Because .cm is owned by the West African nation of Cameroon, in 2006 he agreed to split the profits with them. Ham also owns sites that are spelt correctly including satan.com and god.com.

It goes to show that owning domain names by exploiting people's typing errors can make you a wealth of money.