About a year ago I bought a Social Networking site. The site has been around for about 10 years. Before Myspace really took off the site was getting close to 40,000 unique visits per day and more than a million unique visitors per month. As Myspace and Facebook started to take off the previous owner was discouraged and stopped maintaining the site. The site now gets an average of 5,000 unique visits per day and about 140,000 uniques in a month. The site has about 80,000 members and I have their e-mail addresses in my database. I realize most of them are old, but I still think I could pull at least 1,000 members back to the site with an e-mail blast. I plan on giving the site a complete over haul so that it can keep up with more modern sites. In the mean time while I am coming up with the money to over haul the site I'd like to take advantage of the traffic and get some money coming in. I signed up for an affiliate program and when I run the reports my ads are getting over 70,000 impressions a day. Sales aren't really that strong though. With the numbers that I am currently getting can anyone tell me what I should be able to expect to bring in per month? I know there is no way to get an exact number, but I want to get some opinions so I have something to base the sites performance off of.
Depending what ads you're running and where they are placed would probably determine how much you can make of the site. Would you mind sharing your site's url?
If you asking for where can you improve, it will be better that you show us the URL. With Facebook and MySpace dominating the general market, you should turn your social networking site targeted for some users only, i.e. student, accountants, engineers, programmers, pet lovers (you the idea right?) This will also make monetization easier since the traffic is targeted.
The site is www.stlpunk.com. I am just a beginner when it comes to programming. I have managed to give the home page a facelift myself, but the profiles and several other parts of the site feel out of date to me and are over my head. I have recently bought another domain name and I plan to have the site rebuilt and open it up to the midwest rather than just St. Louis. Let me know what you think.
Have you considered setting up your own ad services and sell direct to local bands? Seems to be a goldmine for that areas underground music crowd.