How many page views does a website need to produce a month before it can get advertisers?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22787

by dottertrotter • 19 years ago

14 19 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Last month when my startup signed up our first groups we did about 25,000 page views, and this month we're on track to do about 50,000. My current average pages viewed per visitor ranges between 20 and 30, but what I don't know is how many page views does a website need to produce a month before it can get advertisers?

wschroter• 19 years ago

My short-handed response would be that you need about 200,000 or more uniques per month before it becomes meaningful to advertisers. There are sites with less traffic that get targeted ads, but if you're talking about doing something other than AdSense, you really need to be at 200k+ to get meaningful traction in my opinion. Meaingful in my mind is getting more than $5,000 p/month in revenue, btw.

immad• 19 years ago

what is your startup?

willg• 19 years ago

50k pageviews a month will not draw too much attention unless you are in a specific niche and someone notices you.

You can always throw up some google ads in the meantime. If you have good cpm/ctr numbers from google it will help.

eli• 19 years ago

depends on how you're selling the ads, who you're selling them to, and (especially) visitor demographics.

dallasrpi2• 19 years ago

I know some are based off unique visitors such as tribal fusion (min 2k visitors)

dallasrpi2• 19 years ago

thats per day

sabat2• 19 years ago

I'd go with AdSense to start -- and/or maybe some others.

Does anyone know if Google cares if you run other networks' ads on the same page as AdSense ads? I think I've seen people do this.

yubrew2• 19 years ago

try out adsense or yahoo publishing network. G cares if you mix adsense with other contextual text advertising. banners, text link ads, display ads are all fair game.

8en• 19 years ago

You are actually welcome to use other contextual advertising networks as long as you clearly distinguish Google Ads from Other Networks Ads. This is easier than it sounds, as the standard AdSense unit has an "ads by google" image

sabat2• 19 years ago

G cares if you mix adsense with other contextual text advertising. banners, text link ads, display ads are all fair game.

Did you mean "does not care"? Being "all fair game" implies that you mean that Google does not care.

lupin_sansei• 19 years ago

For the record my use of a leading search engine's advertising programme leads to about 1c per page view for me.

webwright• 19 years ago

The larger questions are:

1) How targeted is my audience? 2) How well can I describe my audience? 3) How many ads do I need to sell to justify the costs associated with selling ads (ad server, cost/time of setting up the ad server, salesperson, etc)?

"Getting" advertisers is an active process (i.e. sales) for most publications (online and offline).

run4yourlives• 19 years ago

Shouldn't you ask your advertisers that question? Sorry, not meaning to be snarky, but you do see where I'm getting at here right?

wehriam• 19 years ago

Depends on how lucrative your users are to advertisers.

If your newsletter was read by 100 CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, I doubt you would have a hard time finding advertisers.

Social network "junk traffic" is not particularly valuable. You would need millions of page views just to get in the door of major media buyers.

Adsense is a different story - you don't need page views to get started.

lurker• 19 years ago

So you've got 2500 unique visitors this month doing 50k page views. general, social network traffic might generate $1-2 cpm so that's $100/month in revenue.

if you have a high value niche with targeted, quantifiable traffic you can get that maybe as high as $50/cpm on a well marketed site (read: you have ad sales people or you're cramming the site with ad channels.)

This guy http://www.johnchow.com/make-money-on-the-internet-april-2007/ has grown his blog to 250,000 page views, crammed it with every kind of contextual ad you can think of, is a compelling writer with great content. He's at $50/cpm. Of that, 40% comes from a pay-per-post ReviewMe ad thing, so his ads are generating about $30cpm.

So you can put adsense on the page, but you won't make any money. and you're a ways off from doing banner ads.

sbraford• 19 years ago

Great point. I wrote up a whole post about this "John Chow CPM anomaly" over at: http://onwebapps.com/how-to-profit-from-alexa-arbitrage/

Basic summary: if you can start a blog/site geared towards users who probably have the Alexa toolbar / Firefox SearchStatus Plugin installed, you can reap much higher CPMs.

How many page views does a website need to produce a month before it can get advertisers?

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