Someone mentioned in another thread that no website survives on ad revenue alone, because it is very small
Is this true?
Is there some rule-of-thumb formula that translates unique page views per month to a rough dollar amount that can be made from serving ads on that website? (banner ads as well as Google AdSense)
Doesn’t Google itself survive mainly on advertising?
Yes, but does it survive on the advertising on google.com, or on the advertising on the myriad other websites that its ads appear in?
I think it’s certainly possible for a website to survive solely on advertising revenues, if its costs aren’t too high. One site that does so is the online dating site PlentyofFish.com. The New York Times ran an article about the website’s creator, describing how he netted $10 million a year on a ten-hour workweek (although the article is about 18 months old, so the situation may have changed).
And Craigslist is supported by job and apartment listings only.
There are absolutely websites that survive on nothing but advertising.
You do kind of have to define “survive” though. An acquaintance gets about $200/month from advertising on a web comic she puts out. This is not surviving in my book, and doesn’t quite equal minimum wage, but it does cover all the costs and the web site is still “alive.”
A webinar I attended last month had several CPAs (who should really know better) get excited by the prospect of making an extra $50-100 a month by integrating ads into their existing blogs or web sites.
But I think those examples show exactly why it’s mainly a truism that you can’t survive on advertising alone. Some people pull it off and make a real living, but the majority could find better uses of their time.
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Someone mentioned in another thread that no website survives on ad revenue alone, because it is very small
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Maybe I misunderstand the question, but isn’t this obviously false? If for example www.cnn.com were losing money, wouldn’t the parent company have pulled the plug by now? Isn’t advertising their sole source of revenue?
I think that it’s easier to make money if much of the website content is user-provided, as it is for a site like Epinions, Yelp or Wikipedia (although that’s non-commercial). You still need to develop the website itself, and pay hosting and bandwidth costs.
It’s possible but you’re lucky if you can get enough back to maintain the cost of just paying for your server costs and yearly domain registration.
Well, Drudgereport.com, for example makes an estimated $3,000 a day. It is all ad revenue. So it is certainly possible to make a boodle of money through ads alone if you find the right formula.
I used to make money from hosting free software I maintained. Lets see, I got maybe 10k unique visitors monthly or 100k visits total, and hosted google ads. I made maybe 30 to 40 dollars a month. I once did a lot better than that when google was offering 1 dollar for every copy of Firefox installed. That month I probably made 100 dollars.
Im thinking the places that make enough money to live on probably get a few hundred thousand or a few million unique visitors monthly and these people actually click on ads. Just showing an ad, generally, pays next to nothing. Its the click throughs that pay. Some places hosts ads like “punch the monkey” and other annoying flash ads that pay more. Others do transitional ads or video ads.
I was under the impression that many sites did. Coding Horror and Stack Overflow.for instance.
No, although as others have pointed out, the definition of “survive” is relative. I have a website that has generated enough ad revenue to cover expenses for 15 years. That’s mostly because the expenses are so low.
No, because web advertising generally is sold on a cost-per-click basis, not cost per impression.
going back a bit: slashdot.org, fark.com and digg.com all do much better than survive. They’ve made millions for their owners. They do offer preimum memberships in some cases, but the advertising revenues alone would be substantial.
Mind you trafficestimate.com claims 2.5 million unique visitors a month for slashdot.org and 16 million a month for digg.com
thats a lot of eyeballs and thats a lot of ad revenue.
I personally know of at least one site that makes over $100K a year from on-site advertising (but it’s much more elaborate stuff than just banner ads). They’re one of my employer’s clients, so I’m not sure if I can be more specific without violating the non-disclosure agreement in my contract.
I understand that Perez Hilton makes a couple (hundred thousand) dollars a month from ads on his blog