Is your site making you any money?

Something that's been missing here I think is the question of are you using Dolphin as a profit-generating mechanism or are you just playing around with it for your own amusement?  My feeling is that most people attempting to use Dolphin are trying to generate some income from it.  If that is the case, is it successful for you in doing this?  Obviously, there are a lot of people here and elsewhere that are creating some income for themselves SUPPORTING Dolphin, selling mods, and from other revenue streams (I'm one of them myself) but what's happening with actual user sites these days?

I can only tell you about my experiences thus far, and it's been a rollercoaster ride for me over the past 3 years or so.  I created a site a little outside of the dating site concept, as mine is more of a video-chat/social community site with the emphasis on the chat.  Initially, it took some time to begin generating any revenue, but once it did, it took off for me.  Then along came the "Great Recession" and income started falling off pretty dramatically as it has just about everywhere online.  I tried all sorts of promotions, give-aways and anything else I could think of to keep things going, but even with those, we saw a continued drop in income.  This is not to say we were not getting more and more members, our signups increased pretty dramatically, especially with the demise of a few of our competitors.  We just saw fewer and fewer actually paying for the premium memberships.

All of this recently changed when we decided it was time to try something a bit more drastic.  No more free memberships.  We removed our "free trial period", changed all but two small teaser blocks to "members Only" so that the main site page just displays those and the "Join" & "Members" links.  The two blocks basically state that this is a Members Only chat site, and you can try out Trial Memberships starting at $1.99 and up for 7 days.  I completely re-tooled the signup process with an agreement page showing the necessary steps to follow, a minimalistic join page with just the very basic info needed to create an account, and the Paypal payment page to complete the process.

I was initially concerned that my new member signups would fall off a cliff, but that has turned out to be completely false.  We ARE getting fewer registrations, but the ones we are now getting are paying memberships and the quality of signups has obviously increased.

While I'm not getting rich by any stretch of the imagination, I'm beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel.  We've been plowing all of our income back into the site for the past 3 years, but at this point, we've got a good, stable, well-running site that our members are pretty enthusiastic about and support.

What's been YOUR experience?