Growing pains

I've been watching the feed of Plentyoffish.com founder Markus Frind for a while now, because he has been the poster child for AdSense-driven Web sites. Frind is the famous US$10,000/day AdSense millionaire who runs the business as a sole proprietor.

Or at least, that's what he has been doing. Now, he has announced that he is going to ditch AdSense and hire his own sales force with a salary budget of US$300,000/month and also hire a bunch of software developers experienced in Microsoft technologies. I guess there is a ceiling of how big a one person show can get, and Markus just hit it.

At a much smaller scale, I'm having some of the same thoughts myself about our FanFooty business. AdSense can be very frustrating, as I have found during August especially. There is a point beyond which a site's traffic gets so high that the revenue difference between AdSense and an alternative sales structure will be so great as to outweigh the extra overhead of time and effort that non-AdSense solutions imply. FanFooty has pretty much hit that point already, with an inventory of three million page impressions per month to play with. The 2008 Aussie rules football season is going to be bigger and better for FanFooty for a number of different reasons, and the AdSense part of the business may have to be sacrificed as part of that transition.

EDIT: but now Markus is saying he's not going to hire for a while! Make your mind up, mate!