ad-based economic model

[alibaba]

I am in the final stages of getting ready to launch an education content site.
The sites that I will be competing against receive, according to www.metricsmarket.com, between 244K and 13,33M "visitor sessions in the last 30 days". What is the range of advertising revenues these sites are probably making?
I have seen all kinds of figures from 0.10 to 1.00 USD per 1000 impressions.
Thanks to everyone for any input.

[MichaelBluejay]

Ad revenue is all over the map, it's really hard to generalize. Coming up with a range is better, but your range can still be really huge. This week in one fell swoop one of my sites is bringing in 7x as much ad revenue as it brought in the previous week, simply because I did a better job of marketing the space.

Let's say each visitor looks at two pages, and the site makes $1-$10 per 1000 pageviews. That's $2-$20 per 1000 visitors. So that's $488 to $4880/mo. for the site with 244k visitor sessions, and $26,660 to $266,600/mo. for the site with 13.33M visitors sessions.

I don't like to look at the cost "per impression", because that figure goes down the more ads you put on a page. If you have one ad on a page and you're getting $5 per 1000 impressions, that doesn't mean you can put two ads on the page and suddenly get $10 per 1000 pageviews. That is, twice as many ads on a page doesn't mean twice as many clicks onto those ads. There's a point of diminishing returns, and I bet you hit it pretty quick. I doubt a page with 50 ads gets more ad clicks than a page with 5 ads.

So I think it's better to look at the price you can get per pageview itself, and of course that depends on a gazillion factors.

The best thing to do is to just launch your site and see how much you can make from it. That's better than speculation any day. Good luck!

[alibaba]

Thanks MichaelBluejay! And best wishes for a happy and prosperous year!