Lee Gomes writes today about plenty of fish, a web site he calls the most profitable site per capita on the web. It's a dating site, run by a single person in Vancouver, Canada. Gomes properly calls out the trend that makes this possible:
PlentyOfFish is the success that it is because of several converging Web trends. Servers and server software have become simple and reliable enough that they can run on their own, without a lot of babysitting. What's more, a remarkably sophisticated economic infrastructure now exists that allows busy Web sites to make lots of money, certainly enough for one person to live very well.
This is exactly the same trend that is fueling the disruption in the news media, and is fomenting the kind of speedy evolution we're seeing in the way people communicate. Rich Karlgaard at Forbes calls it the "cheap revolution," and we are just now seeing the long term impact.