Forum Moderators: skibum
It really depends on the niche of your site what kind of pageview volume you'll need to attract advertisers. To really get the most revenue from your site, you should consider a mix of options:
1) Affiliate programs generally pay on a CPA or cost per acqusition (sale) but can provide an effective CPM (cost per metric) higher than most advertisers are willing to pay for a traditional banner.
2) AdSense - a contextual advertising program by Google, if you get approved, the effective CPM is quite good (from reports here) and you don't need a large volume of traffic to get advertisers, because their technology will match Adwords advertisements to the content of your pages automatically.
Something to keep in mind:
Always work on building your traffic - generally speaking, you can never have *enough* good traffic and once you really get up there (say in the six figure uniques per month) the biggest headache you will have is maximizing the revenue per visitor, which may not always be a simple sale of a banner on a CPM model to interested parties (if there are any at that point).
