Ask HN: how many page views i need to earn $5000 per month from ads?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=712653

by maxwin • 17 years ago

61 30 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hi, Everyone, if i have a web app, i would like to know how many page views or unique visitors i need to have in order to make about $5000 dollars a month from Ads? Any (educated) estimation or guess? It will be great to hear from your own experience. Thanks.

FiReaNG3L• 17 years ago

It could be from 500 to 500 millions, really. Depends on so many factors; what ads, how many, CPM or CPC? Clickthrought rate? How high is your CPM? Are you selling stuff too?

redorb• 17 years ago

my site would need 1.25mm page loads or 125k uniques per a month Im currently at 7% of that or (9k unq's). (assumes my cpm scales) .. my site is weather related.

I would assume a web app would get more pageloads but have a much lower CPM.

drp2• 17 years ago

In my experience, CPM from AdSense does not scale by itself. When you're only serving up a few thousand impressions per day, all it takes are a few good advertisers on your keywords for you to get a pretty nice daily payoff, but as soon as you burn through the high CPM ads from AdSense, you get down to their low CPM remnant inventory.

For example, at 30k impressions per day, you might make $75 from AdSense at a $2.50 CPM. If you keep relying on AdSense as your traffic numbers go up to 500k impressions per day, you'll still get the $75, but most of the traffic above that level comes in at a low CPM, say $0.20, and you end up with $169 for that day rather than $1300.

The takeaway is that you can't rely on AdSense to scale, and selling your own ads makes sense at a certain traffic level.

boundlessdreamz5• 17 years ago

Those figures are way too low. See

https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/AsktheBuilder.ht...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07...

At 30K uniques per day you become a google premium adsense partner and google will allow you to customize the adsense code etc.

staunch• 17 years ago

The real answer is, of course, that it totally depends. Here's some reasonable generic ranges though:

   SCENARIO     CPM AVG     ADS/PAGE     PAGE VIEWS
   --------     -------     ---------    ----------
   Best         $1.00       2            2.5 million
   Okay         $0.25       2            10 million
   Bad          $0.15       2            16 million

You can almost always show more than one ad per page. But, don't over do it.

The primary way to generate significant ad revenue with low page views is to have highly targeted content and sell ads directly for $4+ CPM. It's better to think of this kind of advertising as sponsorship, and charge appropriately (preferably thousands over month+ commitments).

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

Those figures sound about right, with the caveat that CPMs can vary wildly over time even with the same audience and website. There is a market out there and what holds today will most likely not hold tomorrow.

kalvin• 17 years ago

On a site with a desirable niche audience, you can hit $4 CPMs averaged across 6 ads, so you'd only need ~200k page views to make 5K.

matthewking2• 17 years ago

I have a niche high market value site, generating a CPM of about $26, with a very healthy CTR. It's only a little side project and doesn't receive that much traffic, so it's certainly not my main business. But just goes to show, you don't necessarily need millions of page views, or indeed hundreds of thousands if you select your market wisely.

mattmaroon2• 17 years ago

If it's getting $26 ecpms, why aren't you buying assloads of adsense traffic for it? If you have good retention, surely you can buy customers for less than you make off of them. If each customer averages only $100 pageviews that's still $2.60 a pop.

wlievens• 17 years ago

Eek. I get an average eCPM of $0.06.

ankeshk2• 17 years ago

Here is a point to remember: the less popular your website, the lower your CPM average will be.

If you only attract 1,000 unique visitors - your CPM maybe well under $1. But if you cross 20,000 or 50,000 visitors - your CPM could go as high as $2 to $5. (I've seen websites earn $10 per CPM too - but that is very rare.)

Most money in selling ads is made if you sell the ads privately. Without allowing Google or anyone else to take a big hefty cut.

But you won't be able to sell out all your inventory on your own if you're not already popular.

Anyhow - general rule of thumb: if a website can cross over the half a million visitors mark - he can make $5,000 from ads per month. (6 ads per page at $2 CPM on average.)

So aim for 500,000 visitors per month.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

This completely contradicts my experience. (in total roughly 1M uniques / day on all the sites that I'm involved with).

The larger the site the lower the CPM in my case, and that is significantly lower. Bulk traffic seems to get lower CPMs than niche sites, the smaller sites make as much as $5 and the larger ones are way down, some all the way down to $0.12.

What sites do you see this opposite effect on ?

ankeshk2• 17 years ago

I should stress that I'm talking about selling ads privately.

$2 CPM per ad at 6 ad spots = $12 CPM for the website. You will very rarely earn $12 CPM from Google.

FreelanceSwitch.com sells 125*125 ad spots at $900 (raised from $800 recently). And gets 500,000 page views. (Pretty close to $2 CPM).

SearchEngineJournal.com sells ad spots for $1000. And gets 300,000 page views ($3.3 CPM).

If you're selling ads privately - and show your analytics to your advertisers - they won't say that reduce my CPM rate as your traffic has increased. And if they do - you can just put up an ad-rotator so that their ads are only shown to as many people as they can afford.

And if you show your analytics that has a trend of increasing traffic - you will start finding better quality of advertisers too - people who will not mind paying a higher CPM.

So yes - as your traffic grows and you attract enough advertisers to sell all your ad inventory - you can increase your prices slowly and steadily. The trick is to reach a stage where you can sell all your ads privately.

Its supply and demand after that. (Supply of ad spots remains the same. Demand keeps on growing as your website grows in popularity.)

astrec• 17 years ago

Large sites with bulk qualified traffic e.g. auto or real estate classifieds can do 200m PIs a month and still make $5-$10 CPMs. To do so you'll either have to rep your own site or use a good agency, and be quite targeted e.g. Escalade ad for X5 search results.

idlewords• 17 years ago

My adsense stats last month: 200K page views, $1300, CPM of around $6 for a very narrowly targeted website. As other posters have said, it's highly domain specific.

adinobro• 17 years ago

As others have said it depends on what your site is about. If your site already exists there isn't much you can do but if you are planning to create a site then you can find out what the CPM average is by using Google Adword tools to find out how much people are paying for the key words. That will give you a fairly good idea of what you can charge. As others have already said you will make more money if you sell adds yourself but I would only budget two or three times the price not ten or one hundred times markup.<br><br> Also a pure add model isn't generally the best idea. If you link to a realted product you can often get comissions that are much higher than the CPM average that you will get for adds. Without context you can only assume that you will get $0.15 CPM. Social networking sites are probably slightly less.

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

There are sites that estimate ad revenue: http://www.webtrafficagents.com/WebSitevalue/WebSiteWorth.as...

Then, you can use Quantcast or Alexa to determine page views: http://quantcast.com http://alexa.com

petercooper• 17 years ago

From my own experience? I no longer get anywhere near this but last year I made between 4-9k per month on only a few thousand pageviews a day to my personal blog - I was getting > $10 CPM from Adsense no trouble. No scams, etc.

Sadly my blog went down the rankings a bit and with the general advertising slump, even several hundred dollars is good for 2009 :-(

rrhyne• 17 years ago

I just requested a media kit from a blog that covers data centers: 45$ CPM.

CPMs at big internet marketing sites are worth much more than that.

Ask HN: how many page views i need to earn $5000 per month from ads?

Related Stories