How much traffic before you can really sell ad space?

At what point is a site taken seriously by advertisers?

[tomthumb2000]

If i want to sell ads to say, Pepsi, how much traffic would my site need?

I understand adsense serves most sites but I'm wondering if there's a barrier you can cross, x number of page views, when you can qualify for higher-paying brands to place ads on your site?

I can't imagine that a site that gets a million visits a month has no better solution than adsense... or am i wrong?

And are there agencies who do this or would I need to hire someone?

[aspdaddy]

I think it has more to do with visitor demographics and your contacts than volume of traffic - there is a site that makes £7Million a year from banners in the UK that has very low traffic, the owner just happens to be very good at selling ad space.

There is another site that offers free inormation to people in a certain job, I know the owner build the whole site only to sell banners to companies who offer insurance for that job. Again its very low traffic but sends a lot of traffic to the insurance company because of the demographic

[tomthumb2000]

Yeah, that makes sense, thanks for the examples.

Then of course there's the famous completely-free dating site that made a million with adsense in 6 months. If there was a better option i assume the guy would have used it.

Why don't we see more adverts for big companies like Pepsi on websites though? I assume most sites are just too small for it to be worth everyone's time responding to invoices etc