We have read a lot about the big individual adsense players like Shoemoney, the guys with myspace, PlentyoffFish, and so on, but how much do you think a site like About.com making off adsense. Remarkably, About.com is ranked 87th in Alexa. I would imagine a site like that pretty much gets most of its traffic from search engines. I find the site a bit off putting because of the mountains and mountains of ads and adlinks, banners, etc. I think NYT bought the site a few years back.
difficult to base an estimation on relevant data given the scarcity of data at hand... i have no idea
I always wondered the same thing, im sure they are making tons, but they probably need the majority of it to pay their writers and freelancers. I try and avoid them as much as possible though, too many ads and not the greatest info.
You can send an email to and ask him or her how much they make. That would be the quickest way to find out.
How much of their traffic is return traffic. I really don't like their structure. For many of their articles, they have like 2 paragraphs interspersed with ads and then the article continues on to a 2nd, 3rd, 4th page. It can be really annoying, I think their main motive is to earn as much as they can from the ads. By the way, their revenue in the year 2005 or 2006 (I can't remember which) was $57 million alltogether. How mcuh of that was from adsense?
Not surprised they out rank other sites. They have litlrally hundreds of thousands of backlinks, well aged domain, links from high established sites. The qualitty of their articles varies from some excellent to some that are average.
You are quite right. Very little, if any of that $57 million of their revenue in 2005 or 2006 was actually profit. They have very high maintenance costs.
hummm ... well here is my guess: 5'000'000 users/day 3 PV/user 15 M PViews CTR = 3% or 5% CPC = 0.03 or 0.05 3% 0,03 -> 13500$ / Day 3% 0,05 -> 22500$ / Day 5% 0,03 -> 22500$ / Day 5% 0,05 -> 37500$ / day They do well. But hey .. dont start insulting me please ... just what i guess...
Plus being a premium publisher I'm sure Google is looking after them in all aspects of the earnings and I would be shocked if their CPC was less than $0.1 per click. I know if I had a client earning a good $XX,XXX daily income of which I'd be earning a good chunk of I'd definitely be bending over backwards for them. When it comes to things like this it is really hard to guesstimate, but I'd say they are definitely earning $XX,XXX/day maybe even $XXX,XXX - but trying to make an estimate of their earnings after that would just be based purely on guesses.
It must be around low $xx,xxx/day at least with all the traffic it receive. Also Google is lot nicer and bend their rule little for them if necessary than for rest of the us. Who would kicked out a premium publisher like that just for little rule breaking.
However, I think you're estimating their CTR as rather high. In my opinion, most users of About.com are by now used to the ads, and I think their CTR should be no higher then 1 or 2 %.
But about.com would get tons of traffic from search engines as well - I know everytime I end up there it is via a search engine result.