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Web Advertising Revenues?
WoTG asks: "Every now and then I dream about starting a website and making it popular. Maybe for profit, maybe for fun. Web hosting costs are pretty easy to find and estimate. But I've always been stumped when it comes to guesstimating the revenue. How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue? What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments? How much more expensive are the larger ads (bigger than banners) worth? What websites are good for finding out more about this stuff?"
"For the sake of argument, let's say that it's a fairly targeted audience - maybe a forum for fans of a new TV series, or residents of a particular city. Let's also assume that it will have about a million hits a month. Lastly, let's assume we're only considering non-intrusive advertising, e.g. no pop-ups.
I've done little bit of research (but not much). Those spiffy google text ads are only available to sites with >20M hits a month. I've yet to stumble on good search terms on Google that will get me relevant results. Besides, more often than not, the insights from the Slashdot crowd are more useful than any other web 'resource'."
Funny you should ask this question as just today I got a love-not from my main avertising broker saying they wern't going to pay me as much anymore.
Anyway, I'm reminded of something someone else once told me on this front: "making money on a web site is easy; doing it without pissing off your users is hard.", and that's the truth.
Web advertising is harder then ever, at least from a publishers perspective; the breadth of sites and users that are around now make it hard to command any great sum from advertisers; Even popup ads, the little darlings of the IAB, seldom pay more than $2 per thousand.
To make a living like, say, Slashdot you either need to be lucky enough to sign on with a large advertising death floatilla (tribalfusion, 247realmedia, etc) or hire an avertising broker/PR agent to sell your site to advertisiers; These sign-up-on-a-web-page dealies sound good and by and large are goods but don't scale well when it comes to paying $1500 a month in expenses not including money for you to live on. They are good for making a little on the side, not for financing a lifestyle.
You asked "How much can a moderately popular site expect to earn from advertising revenue?". The answer as I've seen it is, unless you have a very, very, very tight demographic, the answer is not much. If your site is already running, monitor it's ranking on Alexa and see where you stand. Also, how do you define "moderately popular"? The answer varries widely depending on who you ask: A little while ago when I was lookign for advertisers, Advertising.com wouldn't even talk to me unless I had a 100,000 pageviews a day, and they consider that a "small site".
I guess what I'm trying to say is unless you have huge readership, you'll need some sort of specialized demographic (read: gimmick) to attract users and advertisers.
Also, remember that income is net: today being USA tax day and all you need to remember that you've gotta pay taxes on your monies, too, and that takes a big piece out.
If you're hell bent on doing this for a living you need to get lucky and cheat to win. Let's pick on Slashdot some more, shall we? Contrary to popular belief, it did not get popular based on those early Nude photos of Pater: it got popular largely based on riding the popularity wave of Linux and the Open Source zeitgeist. If you can find something similar, something that you can tune into, you'll stand a fighting chance.
Actually, I have no idea what I'm saying, I'm just rambling.
Hilary Rosen's speech was about her love of money and her desire to roll around naked in a pile of money.
... with a German geek-toys site à la thinkgeek. Since I hadn't the money to build up the logistic part around it, I tried it as a reseller. I found a good (German) affilate program (zanox), that lets me choose products out of the participant's catalogues and get a revenue of 5% of every sold item. Additionally, every participant delivers a couple of banners in every needed format.
I mix the affilate program with amazon stuff, using their reseller program and make the products the content of the site.
Using movabletype and keeping in mind some main ideas of google in mind (search terms in filename and in the header, etc.) I finaly made my site to appear on top in google using some interesting keywords (dialer blocker (a tool to stop troyan horses dialing expensive numbers), div x or mx 700).
Additionally, I show banner ads. I show both, valueclick banners from external sponsors and 'internal' ones (sending the users to products or shops of the affiliate program or even sending them to the bestsellers of my site).
The content based ads are making around 3/4 of the money, the rest is devided in 4/5 of the affiliate banners and 1/5 (only a couple of Euros per month) through valueclick.
All in all, I have around 1500 visitors per month generating around 140.000 hits. It pays the traffic, but not my work (I've to post at least one new product a day).
The most important thing is that I have two other software products (ImagePuzzler and ImageDupe) I can advertise for on my site. Since ImageDupe's website is an often linked site and ImageDupe links back to futuregeek.de I got a little 'google-bonus' from it.
All ads and clicks (even the valueclick's) are tracked using phpAdsNew and 99% of my visitors come from google, the rest is yahoo, lycos and a german meta search engine. Since I don't trust webalizer (especially the search engine identifier), I wrote my own script, that keeps an eye on the referers.
I have a small website (aspectscripting.com) that caters to users of Procomm Plus (terminal emulation software that I used to test and still use every day) and its ASPECT scripting language. I bought some ads through google.com, that combined with the regular Google cataloging of my site, seems to have done a good job of drawing users to my site (Google appears much higher as a referrer than other search engines).
.com site I used to create and manage my ads. The ads offered here are not the higher-traffic ad that you posted the google.ca link to. The ads I have through google.com appear on the right-hand side of the Google search window, clearly marked as a sponsored link. You only pay for an ad when someone clicks on it, of course. Google debits my credit card monthly for the ads I have active, and I'm able to monitor the status of the ads nearly real-time. Google requires that your clickthrough rate be no lower than .5%, but I have only had that problem with one ad that was getting massive search hits but little clicks.
https://adwords.google.ca/select/ is the Canadian version of the