Cant make money on sites with decent traffic.

[Codelizard]

Ok so, I have a handful of websites on varying topics. I'm currently generating about 3.6 mil pageviews a month. But, with that, I'm lucky if I make $50 a month.

I've been through a bunch of advertisers who all promise to give good pay-outs, but then dont give me any impressions. The only place that guarantees me impressions is CPM Star, and I'm getting like 3 cent CPMS from them. I even have a flash games site that shows a video preroll before every game, and the company serving the prerolls only pays like $20 a month (for a site with over 400k pageviews a month).

Can anyone give me a hint of what I am doing wrong? If I were making a little more money, I could afford to bring on some help to make my sites better and gain more traffic. But shouldnt I be making something decent on 3.6 mil pageviews?

Any help/ideas would be appreciated.

[Tastous]

Well it depends what kind of site your are running and the quality of your traffic mate. Music, movies, ebooks .... What kind of sites do you have bud?

[piatkow]

I even have a flash games site that shows a video preroll before every game

1. Start game
2. make coffee
3. sit down at game with coffee just as video finishes.
You only make money from ads or affiliates if customers come to your site with their credit cards already out.

[Juniya]

Have you tried selling your own ads? It's ultimately the best way to go, if that somehow fails, do Affiliate Marketing instead.

Leave the CPC ads especially a lone. Your target should be CPM since your users probably won't tend to click on anything, rather, they won't convert to sales so you should be able to make more money with CPM.

But yeah, try selling your own ads, advertise your site on forums like these ones where other companies/webmasters are looking to buy traffic, digital point had an entire forum section dedicated to these(I think they still do)?

Let me know if this helps and keep up the good work, 3.6mil page views is no joke!

[tangor]

I know a few site operators that would kill for your current metrics (cash wise).

Just about everything is divided by 1000, and to that mix there might be another 25% from adblockers/script killers to the deficit.

You will do better if you serve "ads" direct, but that is a bit more work on your end to find clients, etc. Not a guarantee, but usually 10x or "way" better than whatever you are doing now in passive mode.

[kopparberg]

That is bad, on one of my sites I get 70,000 page views and it makes close to $2000 a month. What sort of traffic is this? A lot more information needed to come to any sort of conclusion as to what is going on.