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'."

Comments

Abandon hope all ye who enter in.

[Xunker]

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.