How much can this site make in advertising money?

Question

I am close to buying a website. Here are the site's stats.
133,000 unique visitors per month
438,000 visits per month
2 million page views per month
28 million hits per month

I have space for a banner ad and several smaller ads.
How much can I make in advertising per month?
I know it's hard, but please guess.

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Advertising is all about CONTEXT and AUDIENCE. You have omitted that crucial information from your question.

The "best case" scenario would probably be about $20,000 per month ($10 eCPM) -- far fewer than 10% of advertising-supported web sites earn that much (measured by eCPM). Probably fewer than 1% of all advertising-supported web sites earn an average eCPM of $25 or more -- at $25 eCPM, such a site could earn $50,000 per month from 2 million pageviews.

But many sites with 2 million pageviews per month are struggling to earn even $200 per month ($0.10 eCPM).

I won't bother to identify an "average" because your site isn't average -- it is whatever it is.

The stats suggest that this may be a forum or discussion site; such sites usually fall at the low end of the spectrum for advertising income, because visitors come to the site for a specific purpose and their eyes focus on the messages, not on ads.

In addition, revenue is likely to be quite different depending on the pageview "distribution" at your site -- it's unlikely that you have 133,000 unique visitors each viewing 12 pages per month -- instead, you probably have far more than 100,000 visitors per month viewing only a few pageviews each, but several thousand visitors who each view 200 to 1,000 pageviews per month.

Added: If you're not familiar with advertising terminology, the term "CPM" refers to "cost per thousand" (M is the roman numeral for 1,000). While "M" usually refers to 1,000 pageviews, many advertisers won't pay for multiple pageviews by the same visitor. Most advertising is not actually sold based on "CPM" and therefore most publishers combine revenue from all advertising (CPM, pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, affiliate) and compute an "effective CPM" or eCPM for the site overall.

Source(s):

http://www.MarkWelch.com/

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

Thanks Mark. I appreciate your effort.

Answer 2

It's hard to provide an estimate on how much you can earn as you did not provide the website URL so we can see what is the topic as well as the target audience of the site

For example, if the audience your site gets are CEOs, venture capitalists and other high net worth individuals, you can pretty much charge anywhere from $20-$100 CPM. Compare that to a site that attracts hamster lovers -- where you may be able to charge at most $1 per CPM.

Big big difference

But assuming you can charge $2 CPM for your site and you have 2 million pageviews (ignore the hits - they're irrelevant)

[2,000,000 pageviews / 1,000 ] x $2 = $4,000 per month

Increase your traffic and your CPM rate, and your income increases

If you will run CPC ads such as Google Adsense it is very hard to give any estimate because there's too many unknowns -- what keywords will be shown in your site, what is the bidding rate for those keywords, how responsive are your traffic to the ads, how well you optimize the ads, how well you convert for the advertisers, etc.

Now if you will serve both CPM and CPC ads using various formats -- e.g. CPM rate for leaderboard and CPC for medium rectangle -- then you can increase your income potential.

Answer 3

What type of site is it? It all depeneds on the CTR of the site and what niche it is in