how many of you can really earn "salary" from adsense?

[zozzen]

I've made a simple tool on my website. In recent months, I placed adsense on it again in a non-disturbing way.

The earning is really minimal:
CTR : 0.3 - 0.5%
eCPM: US$0.3-0.5
Ads shows: 60,000-100,000 times.

The income can cover the hosting cost without problems because I only use a very basic plan with only 100MB storage. It can buy me one or two cups of starbucks, but when I think of, as per users' request, to spend more time on enhancing the functions on my website, I really feel hesitated.

Even if I spent tremendous effort in boosting up the traffic by 10 times, the money would still be too minimal compared to the efforts.

Do you think I make a mistake in doing an adsense compaign?
I'm really curious how you guys can earn big money from adsense. It looks mission impossible to me now.

[graeme_p]

Yeah I'm stuck in this sell decision. My sites provide a growing income with very little maintenance and almost no overhead.

Same as my established site, although I am putting work into it again to (hopefully!) boost growth.

I do not see a good case for selling these. What are you going to do with the money that will replace the income? To put it another way, how much would you have to sell it for in order to be able to reinvest the money in a way that will provide the same income?

I'm looking at a 5x annual earning evaluation

Have you been offered that? Every discussion I have seen about valuation suggests about 1x annual revenues, and for a low maintenance Adsense site earnings/profits will be almost equal to revenues.

[graeme_p]

Yeah I'm stuck in this sell decision. My sites provide a growing income with very little maintenance and almost no overhead.

Same as my established site, although I am putting work into it again to (hopefully!) boost growth.

I do not see a good case for selling these. What are you going to do with the money that will replace the income? To put it another way, how much would you have to sell it for in order to be able to reinvest the money in a way that will provide the same income?

I'm looking at a 5x annual earning evaluation

Have you been offered that? Every discussion I have seen about valuation suggests about 1x annual revenues, and for a low maintenance Adsense site earnings/profits will be almost equal to revenues.

[Jane_Doe]

I'm looking at a 5x annual earning evaluation

One consideration in selling a site for a lump sum is 401k contributions. If you take advantage of the annual limits for 401K plans, then depending on your web income you could contribute up to a maximum of 49K per year, or up to 245k over 5 years. But if you sell a site in one year for 5 years income, would you lose out on some of the 4 years tax deferral limits you could have utilized had you just kept the site and received the annual income?

[maximillianos]

Good points. To answer graeme_p... Yes I have 2 offers on the table in the 4-5x annual range.

Compare it to Internet Brands recent sale. They own about a hundred community sites. They sold for 32x their annual profit.

Replacing the income is the biggest sticking point. There just isn't too many good investment options these day. One firm is offering me a job to run the site after the acquisition. That seems like a decent option. But long term I don't want to work for someone else.

Maybe I should just hold on to my site. You get very tempted by these lump sums being offered. :-)

[Swanny007]

One firm is offering me a job to run the site after the acquisition

Trust me, you don't want to do that. I could send you many links to former forum owners who are powerless and can't do anything about the complaints after the takeover. The takeover, by the way, usually upsets the long time members (increased ads, new look etc.) so keep that in mind if you're going to "sell out". Eventually the site founder winds up leaving their own site out of frustration...

If I sold one of my sites, I'd take the money and walk away. Maybe check back in a few times a year out of curiosity. Wait, I did that... but it was on a small site of mine ;-)

[shallow]

In hind sight, I would not have come out ahead had I ever taken any of the 1 - 2 years earnings type offers that were made in the past for my sites.

I've contemplated this many times but I've been advised, rightly or wrongly, that if you neglect a site (ie. stop writing articles), it will quickly die and income will drop.

Is this true?

[dataguy]

The thing is, when I was new to building sites and selling them, the first few major offers I received I turned down because I figured that if they were worth that much to someone else, they were likely worth more to me. The first two sites, specifically, I was offered a chunk of change for them, and I refused. Within a year of each offer I ended up selling the sites for less than 20% of the original offers. Ouch.

Something else that has formed my opinions on selling websites is that every site that I've ever sold with only one exception, the new owner ran the site into the ground within a year. Most of them aren't even in operation any longer. I'm sure glad I got the money up front for them instead of opting for a share of future profits.

I think the operation of buying and selling has matured and it's different than it was in the early days. I know I've matured.

Actually, I think I was the first person to sell a website on ebay. That was in 1997.

[Swanny007]

...but I've been advised, rightly or wrongly, that if you neglect a site (ie. stop writing articles), it will quickly die and income will drop...

In my experience that is not true. I have some sites that continue to do well even though they're on "auto-pilot".

However that could be true on blog type websites, as readers expect new content. I don't really do blogs.

[Pepito]

"...but I've been advised, rightly or wrongly, that if you neglect a site (ie. stop writing articles), it will quickly die and income will drop... "

Not at all w.r.t. my old "ugly html" site, not longer being updated for more than two years, and in some channels even much more. For the past last months my revenues are growing up, since the lowest months of 2008.

[ember]

I'm with Pepito. I have a 10 year old content site that has not been updated in four years and it still ranks well and earns decent money. Completely passive income.