Ask YC: How much do you make on advertising on your site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: How much do you make on advertising on your site?

25 pointsmixmax25 comments

A lot of startups are depending on advertising on their site, but it is often hard to find numbers on what kind of income you can expect from this.

The numbers, of course, vary depending on your niche and your audience, the type of advertising you use, and how aggressively you place your ads.

Still I think it would be interesting to see some numbers and/or ranges. Anyone willing to share, or point to some good resources on this?

View on HN

RefreshThing.com : 58,434,725 impressions, 19,730 clicks, $3,083.27 rev, Nov 06-Present. Dropped AdSense from most of the content last May to simplify the design. This is AdSense only, not affiliate (CPA) revenue.

nice little app...

Your numbers might be skewed towards the low end due to your business model. I presume that a refresh is an impression here.

But thanks a lot for sharing. :-)

Yes - and prior to May there was an AdSense 728x90 in the top frame (fun with auto-refreshing CPM rev =) ).

Noticed you use affiliates (amazon etc). How much do you make from those? Are they worth having?

Significantly more. I've had ~630k absolute uniques since launch, currently ~2k uniques/day waiting for the Wii to be in stock. There are conversion rate considerations, click through rate considerations, etc. When it's in stock on Amazon (when the light goes green) at the retail price (non bundled, non scalped), it makes at least $10.00 per Wii sold. Best case is a bundle ($750 retail, 5%, ~$35), worst case is Sears which only pays 1%.

Is there any reason to not still have the Google banner at the top of your site? Do you do this as a benefit to your visitors, or would Adsense cannibalize your affiliate income?

I work for a site that gets about 350,000 unique visitors a month and 22,000 visits a day. So far this month, we have 2,403,259 page impressions and 23,232 clicks, totalling about $5,200.

Could we be doing better with affiliate advertizing?

What's your niche? The answer is often yes, if you can find the affiliate program that is perfect for your audience.

We're a site geared towards people looking to travel overseas. I'm not sure how much airlines and so one would be willing to spend on advertising with us, but this thread is inspiring anyway :)

Well, from a Google for "travel affiliate" I found that priceline will give you $7 for a regular price ticket or 3% for a name your own price ticket and there is an international bargain airfare booker that will give you $20 per flight booked through them. So there are definitely some affiliate programs for booking airline tickets.

For a moment I was confused about what this was about, because a slight misspelling takes you to an illegitimate site RefreshThings.com that I went to first by accident.

Nice app.

Well, my blog earned $2.16 in Amazon affiliate commissions this month! That was on something like 10K views. Time to go swimming in my bathtub full of cash!

I have one gaming site with forums that makes 400,000 impressions a month. It makes probably $140 in Adsense in a good month, plus about $170 in targetted banner ads from sponsors who approached me directly.

As such, it's enough to cover the servers of that hobby and pay a little towards my other dedicated servers.

By no means is it bringing in enough money for any business. That would require better conversion/click rates or a lot more impressions than I get.

I could probably get the banner advertisers to pay up to 50% more by bargaining harder (since there are a number of small business suitors), but I like them to get solid return on those advertisements.

We started running one site with Google Adsense. It didn't generate much money, but showed us what kind of keywords DID generate clicks. We used this knowledge to start selling banner adverts and that has brought in a lot more. We're not talking fortunes - it brings in around $4000/month, but that passive income helps

I read somewhere TechCrunch generates $214,000 per month from advertising.

I highly doubt that number. 214K a year, maybe, just maybe. I'd be surprised if facebook even brought in that much per month.

TC has paid sponsorship slots that cost $10k/mo and there's 10 of them now.

http://www.techcrunch.com/advertise/

He also has quite a few other ads running as well. He's making an incredible amount of money and has been for years now. Selling your own ad space is by far the most profitable way to make ad money.

Facebook is making bringing in alot more then 214K a month via their self service social ads alone. I've spent a few thousand there over the past couple weeks, and I know alot of other people who have. Profit? of course not, but revenue definitely.

umm here is the reference:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/21/...

facebook brings in 4-5 mil a month according to wikipedia

Sure it does.

You haven't tried affiliate marketing much have you.

One of my sites has around 1,000 visitors a day, generates $5k-$10k revenue a month.

Wishing axod would elaborate . . .

he wont cause its B.S

Reply on news.ycombinator.com