Via Digg: How Many Visitors Does Your Site Need to Make You A Web 2.0 Millionaire?

Well... depends, my startup is around position 20 in this listing about unique visitors / month but still I'm not rich ;) It is probably related to the nature of the deal we did and the fact our user base is in Italy, but what I mean is that if you don't get acquired and your business model is advertising 1,5 million unique visitors per month in a reddit-alike site will not make you rich most of the times.

For example assuming 5$ every 1000 impression, with an average of 3 impressions for unique user with 1 million of unique visitors a month you get from adsense 15k$. If there are two founders and bandwidth to pay this means you are making just about to survive.

In this web 2.0 bubble we are living this days I see very few news/technological sites where the business model is advertising and they are really profitable, or I'm missing something? Advertising tends to work only in services where your user base is the average john smith with IE6 clicking everywhere there is a banner. With smart users it gets very hard.

I'm not as experienced as many founders following news.yc but I suggest that if you plan to start a startup you should try hard to get an idea where there is a different business model than advertising, like PRO accounts or things like where there is a straight line binding user satisfaction with your earnings. In our new service we are trying this new model, even if this is also very hard indeed being the world full of free-everything-web-services :)