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

good luck

[austad]

Most sites that support themselves solely off advertising are hurting bigtime right now. I used to work for a place where a large portion of their revenue was from ads, but now, even though they are doing more advertising, the income it generates is negligible.

Why not come up with something that people are willing to pay for? Something on the order of $1 a month per subscriber is much more than you will get from advertising. Plus, at $1 a month, it's not like it's going to break the bank for anyone. Of course, you would need to charge them once for like $12 for the whole year, otherwise your credit card fees would take most of your money.

Re:good luck

[Telastyn]

Most sites I've seen be successful [read: profitable] actually sell a product. Tshirts, books or some such that relate to their site. People will pay for things they want more than they don't want the hassle of paying for. People don't want to click on ads [almost universally], people do want cool things.

Next to nothing.

[Spudley]

If you're running it as a hobby, don't expect to earn anything serious. Trust me, I know. :-(

Sure, you can set up advertising, banners, pop-ups, merchandise, blah-di-blah-di-blah, but unless you're prepared to put in a lot of time, you simply won't get much out of it.

In order to make a significant amount from web advertising, you will need to keep a careful eye on which ads are earning and which aren't. You'll need to constantly add new ads, and purge the ones that aren't working. You'll need to keep in touch with the latest trends - what are people clicking on, and why, and change your adverts to follow the trends.

Put simply, if it's a hobby, you're not likely to have time to put in the effort required to make money from it.

Putting up a simple banner ad might get you a small amount of income - it depends on just how popular your site actually is ("moderately popular" is not a well defined amount), and also whether you're willing to sell your soul and advertise gambing sites and dodgy credit cards (these two categories will earn you about ten times anything else, but I still refuse to advertise them).

The other idea that might work for you (depending on what your site actually has on it) is merchandising. If your site is suitable for merchandising, may I humbly recommend you visit CafePress, and start selling mugs and t-shirts with your logo. I have actually managed to make a bit of money from this, where advertising failed dismally. (also not much, but again I'm not putting in any real time to actively market them)

Revenue from other places

[crazyj]

Don't just plan on web advertising revenue. Think of other creative ways to make some dough. We have been pretty successful with the Amazon Affiliate program. We even added some stuff to Slashcode that allows the authors to very easily link to Amazon products in the stories. Some of the readers don't like it, but you could denote those links with an icon or something. Most of our readers are tolerant and understand that we need to make some money. Most months our Amazon income beats or banner ad income.

Another thing that worked well for us was a biweekly or monthly book/product list that we worked into the left column of the site. Also, work directly with related companies to advertise their product for either a monthly fee or product donations.

All that said, unless you plan to be really big, don't plan on actually making any profit. At MacSlash we're happy that the site makes enough for us to go to a convention or two each year.