He knocked over one bowling pin to start: he conquered the Canadian dating market, started locally and moved across the border.
That can't be replicated again in the dating market, it's hyper saturated now, but that concept holds true for most any market and for most any product or service: you have to conquer that first market.
Keep in mind that's just the ad views, not the analytics for the entire site. If he began testing AdSense briefly in June, it wouldn't show the traffic the site had in May.
His site from archive.org reveals some interesting things:
At the top of the page are links to promotional systems. I'm guessing he basically used link exchanges, similar to how imgur used a traffic exchange (mgid.com) to dramatically bolster its early start.
