How much income is needed to become premium member?

Trying to get a sense of what numbers are significant for Google

[Clark]

How "big" do you have to be to be worthy of a premium partnership with Google? Just trying to get a ballpark figure? $10k per month? $20k per month? $100k?

I signed up soon after they opened up premium partnership and did not get accepted, but I'm wondering if a proven consistent income might sway google's mind. But I have no idea how much is considered worthy to talk to for Google?

[Shak]

a "few" million "quality" pageviews (I think)

Shak

[Clark]

If it's a few million pageviews per month then I got some more work to do :)

Do you think they care more about pageviews than income? I would tend to think a million pageviews with average 50 cent per click and 3% clickthrough would be worth more than 5 million pageviews at 0.01% clickthrough with 10 cents per click?

[Shak]

as an ADVERTISER, I care about quality of traffic :)

Shak

[justageek]

Shak is absolutely correct. Quality (a.k.a. buyers) is key to any campaign other than branding.

[Clark]

Well naturally. But if you are willing to pay $1.00 per lead because you are selling boats and you get a quality lead from a boat site where 1 out of a hundred visitors buys a $15,000 boat for which you pocket several thou, then a site with 1 million pageviews is worth more to you than a news site which shows 5 million pageviews about news topics that don't convert as well and isn't consistent traffic on your topic?

[Shak]

What you are aiming at is EXACTLY what happened with the BANNER advertising model, where millions of pageviews was what drove the market and then BANG...

Quality is the way forward.

give me the 4 page targeted website with 100 pageviews a day, over 6 million page views but no targetting leading to users clicking for the sake of it.

re-reading your message, I can see we that we agree on something, and disagree on something else.

Shak

[justageek]

I see what your saying. Yes it would be good for the advertiser and the content site as far as quality of traffic goes but the example you use goes back to what other folks such as DoubleClick do which is not contextual advertising but rather category targeting. Since Google is new to the advertising world and this is their only method of delivering ads outside of the their adwords then Shak's second post probably holds true.

[Clark]

Shak,

I'm more asking questions then making statements. So I'm not sure what we disagree about?

Jag,

Yes good point about categories. Tried with doubleclick a long time ago but they wanted millions of pageviews...and a HUGE cut...

[justageek]

They do don't they ;-) The price some of those folks out there charge is really amazing.

[Yidaki]

>give me the 4 page targeted website with 100 pageviews a day,
>over 6 million page views but no targetting leading to users clicking
>for the sake of it.

Neither the 4 page niche website with 100 views a day nore the 6 mio page views general site are making a good income automatically. Some niche sites (that sell products / run affiliate ads for cheaper products) need both: a targeted audience AND a lot of impressions if they want to live from the adds/sales income. To get a lot of page views you'll need a lot of content (in fact more than 4 targeted pages). The more content you add the more page views you'll get. The more targeted your topic is, the harder it is to get a lot of visitors. The higher the price of the advertised/sold products is the less page views you need to make some bucks. It's just that easy. ;)

BUT Google makes and pays the same money per click not matter if a add has been viewed 1.000.000 times or ten times. So they focus on partnering with sites that have *more* impressions to make the highest income. If the impressions are targeted, that's even better - but they don't care much about the potential of medium traffic niche sites.

... which is a fault, imho.

Maybe Google one day starts reselling affiliate commissions.
Then they'll recall us niche sites. >:)

[ogletree]

never mind

[europeforvisitors]

Well, they say 20 million page views a month. As for how much money that translates into, that obviously depends on a lot of things, including your audience and your topic. (The WASHINGTON POST may have a lot of page views, but I doubt if many of its news pages are generating significant AdWords/AdSense clickthroughs or income. On the flip side, a 20,000,000-pageview site devoted to cruising, hotel reviews, or digital-camera reviews might earn huge revenues from AdWords/AdSense.)

So why does Google use "20 million page views" as a threshold for Premium Membership? I'd guess there are three reasons:

1) It's easy.

2) Scaleability isn't a problem.

3) The most important reason: Google has to compete with Overture, Sprinks, etc. when pitching the big general news and entertainment sites, and those sites are likely to demand customization (including removal of the "Ads by Google" link). If Google wants their business, it needs to accommodate their demands.

For what it's worth, I don't care one fig about customization or a "Premium Membership" label. I'm happy to use a standard, off-the-shelf AdSense skyscraper; I haven't even bothered to play with the default color scheme (which has the advantage of being straightforward and, with its standard blue links, easy for users to understand). The only things I care about are effective CPM and total revenues--both of which have been pretty good so far, even if they aren't yet on a par with my affiliate revenues.