Assessing potential adsense revenue of content site

I have the chance to buy a website - will it make money?

[tomthumb2000]

I have the chance to buy a site that is a single keyword of a popular food item. It's at an .org address and is a large content site that ranks at 11 in google searches for that keyword.
How can i assess what kind of revenue (even a ballpark) of what the site might bring in?
I don't know how top list the number of backlinks as they seem to vary so much (google lists 81, yahoo 3500) but it has 100 files which are very long and well written.
It's an established, authority site on its area and has held that position in the serps for a long time. The owner will let me keep all the content and he is simply not comercially minded.
Should i go ahead?

[mm1220]

How many visitors does the site get every day? I think that's way more important than what position it's in in the SERPs. Work out a potential set of combinations of CTR and revenue per click. If you're confident that you could get 5% CTR and assuming that you'll get (worst case scenario) $0.03 a click, do the math and see if you could earn that bare minimum back in a time frame that you find reasonable.

[JohnKelly]

One way to look at it is that if you were starting from zero (the site exists as now with content, but not in search engines yet) would you still buy the site?

That way, any existing traffic will be icing on the cake.

[Sierra_Dad]

Does it already have Adsense on it?

Then you can get an idea of the number of impressions by looking at the site targetting in Adwords.

[tomthumb2000]

Right, traffic - around 1500-2000 visits a day from what i remember. There's no adsense there yet as the owner isn't comerically minded but does need some ready cash.
So at 5% x 0.03 cents that would be about $1000 a year. I can buy it for less than that. Is that the way i should think about it?
Thanks for the feedback

[mm1220]

A quick web search will turn up a few tools where you can enter a url and the tool will display what ads would be generated by whatever url you entered.

Assuming all the articles are food related I presume that they won't date? Try to get the owner on board to become an 'author' after you take over. You'll want new content all the time.

[YesMom]

So at 5% x 0.03 cents that would be about $1000 a year. I can buy it for less than that.

Oh, my goodness... do it! You won't be sorry. Once you've carefully optimized you will have your investment back in a short time... just a few months, most likely. Even if it slightly longer, once it has paid for itself you might be looking at years of potential income.

I've bought sites like this and it is so much fun! Much safer than the stock market. ;-)

Buy it and let us know what the first days' income after adding AdSense is.