Monetizing Traffic

[adamnichols45]

I have an idea for a new website. It is free to use and will include a forum.

But the forum is just a sideline and not the main part of the site.

The visitors all fit into the same niche but I have no idea on how much revenue could be generated from advertising for say 20,000 uniques aday!

The type of visitors that we want to attract will be coming to have alook at the first stage of buying so they are already thinking about spending money but accross a very broad niche!

The type of companys looking to advertise with us I imagine will be brands advertising on tv etc but Im unsure on advertising revenue anybody care to throw some numbers my way?

Thanks Guys

Adam

[httpwebwitch]

Let me get out my crystal ball.

hmm very interesting

looks like you're going to start with 0 visitors, and $0 per day revenue. Then it'll grow from there. Ah, now it's getting fuzzy... I see a tornado in your future and a house dropping into a garden full of small singing people.

Honestly Adam how is anyone supposed to answer a question like that?

[piatkow]

mmmm - I had better not buy those red shoes then!

The accepted wisdom about forums is that they monetise badly. For the main site there are too many variables. I have run two sites on the same topic in different geographic areas. One gets clicks on the ads and the other doesn't. I am not sure if the difference is in the demographic (rural and small town against big city) or if it is because the big city as a keyword attracts more off topic ads. Even with some experience behind you it is not always possible to extrapolate.

[maximillianos]

20k visitors per day = $125.45 revenue.

(bozoputer)

[tangor]

I like pie. Pie in the sky, however, is not that tasty.

[adamnichols45]

ok how is anybody supposed to answer!

well I was looking for real life examples! bob up the road has 30,000 uniques and is generating $500 a week would have been a good answer. If he had told me what sector he fitted into then even better!

[digitalv]

Three real examples of sites I run using AdSense:

Site 1 gets about 350,000 hits a month and makes about $800 in AdSense revenue. Site 2 gets about 1.2 Million hits a month and makes $900 in AdSense revenue. Site 3 only gets about 1,500 hits a month and makes $150. [edited this, these are not uniques just page views: the number of uniques is on average 1/3rd the number of hits]

The moral to the story: your revenue will vary more by how likely your visitors are to click ads than by the amount of traffic. In all cases, the click rate is about 1%-2%. So why do the numbers vary so widely? Because the payout rates vary.

If your website topic is something where advertisers are paying several dollars per click, you're going to make more money on that same 1-2% of visitors than on a site where the best-matched ads are only paying 25 cents a click.

If you want to estimate this better, think about what keywords are related to your site's topic, then see what people are paying per click for those words in AdWords. Based on my experience (with sites of varying topics and traffic levels), only 1 or 2 out of every hundred visitors are going to click an ad. So a site that gets 10,000 uniques a day is going to get an average of 150 clicks. So the question is your revshare cut based on average of $1.00 a click or an average of $0.10 a click?