Advertising Revenue?

[wooflepoof]

Basically I'd like to know how much one could make in Advert revenue for a site that had around 20-50k member who visit regularly to semi-regularly and if itspossible to run a site like completely off of advertising, if not i'll have to incorporate a more extensive e-commerce section of the site but that means i gotta work that much harder on my business plan.

[SirSmash]

You could run a site off just advertising but it really depends on what the website is about. I've found out that advertisers don't pay much for things like anime websites, but things like social networking where the content changes often gets a higher CPM.

20-50k visiting should work, Without seeing the site I think contextual ads would be best for you as the ads would match the content increasing the likely hood of getting clicks. If your site is mainly images, then contextual doesn't seem to work very well.

And of course ad companies pay different and some won't advertise on sites with certain content. If your running say a bittorrent or adult site you'll have a harder time finding a company. I've tried Google, Adengage, adbrite, etology, exoclick and clicksor. For me etology has paid the best overall on static pages and Google worked best on pages that suddenly had a traffic spike (such as a new addition) but I've heard that for some people other companies were better. So you should probably try some different companies first, as you might be turned off when (say like me) I started using adbrite and got a whopping 2 cents in a day.

So you pretty much have to get people to click the ads; you can make more with pop up/unders and commercial breaks. Commercial breaks you could set to something like once per 24 hour period; that doesn't seem to tick them off much. Some companies count a commercial break (just loading it) as a click.

IMHO I'd do e-commerce. But that's if I wanted to live off the money; just to get some extra spending cash then I'd just put some ads on the site. Say you get 35k visitors a month and I dunno, 5 out of 100 visits gets a click (random number, as it varies widely) You'd end up with 7,000 clicks a month. If your getting say 4 cents a click you'd have $280 per month. Commercial breaks would increase this, but it irritates some users. I've found that some people never end up clicking "skip this ad" and thus never come back to your site.

[Viper007Bond]

Just toss some Adsense on the site and see how it does.