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Ask HN: Ad supported website. What traffic is required to sustain it?

7 pointsrgovind8 comments

I have a few ideas for some content driven websites. Something like home ownership costs comparison, loan comparison, online courses for verilog/vhdl, etc. It will mostly probably be an ad-supported website. If I want to earn around $2-3k per month, what should be the traffic to the site? I understand that it is a difficult question, but I would appreciate some indicative numbers. If you are outside USA, please mention your country. Pointers to how I can do analysis like this are much appreciated.

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I actually wrote a piece on this in response to a brainstorm on business models: http://blog.chewxy.com/2013/03/06/startup-business-models-ad...

I work in advertising, and I think that is a pretty good guide.

Here are the numbers in case you can't be arsed to click on the link:

Assuming you managed to secure a $0.50 CPM deal. And you're running 1 Dyno and 1 Worker on Heroku. To break even you need about 70k ad imps (~ 25k page views) per month.

BUT the underlying assumption that you can get $0.50 is wrong. It's actually really less than that, don't be seduced by publisher networks that say they can give you more. Always look at the small prints.

Also bear in mind that a lot of publisher networks (that pay relatively well) do have a minimum imps per month requirement - most start about 500k. Adsense of course has no minimum

It's extremely dependent on the niche you're serving.

Something like a games website will, at best, get around $3 CPM (counting all ad blocks). By contrast, something about cancer or payday loans will probably get $20 CPM or more.

This is further complicated by how you're doing ads, but let's just assume that you're planning to go the Adsense/similar route. (If you were thinking to run your own ads and optimise them yourself, you can make significantly more than the CPMs above, but there's more work and specialised knowledge involved.)

It's perfectly possible to make a very nice income off 50k visits a month, but you have to be in a very competitive niche.

As a rough guideline (and, as you may have guessed, I have recent practical experience in this area), aim for 800,000 visitors a month in a low-CPM niche, or 100,000 a month in a high-CPM one.

http://cpmcalculator.com is neat little tool that I use.

back of napkin, $2 CPM, CPM = 1000 banner impressions. 3 Banners per page, mean $6 Page CPM. $3000 / $6 = 500, therefore you will need to generate 500,000 page impressions per month. 3 page impressions per visitor means ~166,666 visitors per month

Lots of assumptions made, but gives you somewhere to start.

Thanks very much. I understand its a rough method. I will try to refine it. Any sources that I can read from? There are many sources online, but they are not curated.

check out http://buysellads.com to see how different sites stack up against each other.

$2 CPM seems high these days, I'd assume $0.50 for a transactional website and $0.10 for a social one.

Even $0.50 is pretty high ask.

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