Alright, lets do the math. Everyone has an ecpm which tells you how much 1,000 visitors earns you. Usually it is somewhere in the range of 2-3$. So 1,000 visitors come to your site and you get 2$, sounds simple right? Until you start looking at the big picture. Lets look at some of the best sites out there and see how much they are making from advertising. First off, plentyoffish.com. This site makes 300k per month. We know this because the owner has shown us his 900k check from google! He gets 500,000,000 page views per month. So lets see, 500,000,000/1000 x 2 = 1,000,000 per month. However, he doesn't have an ecpm of 2$ he said it is under 1$ which explains why he only makes around 300k per month. According to Alexa.com this site has a traffic rank of 403 which to say the least, is a very popular site. Next up, digg.com. 250k per month from adsense and fedora media (another advertiser). This site pulls in 200,000,000 visits per month. Once again doing the math: 200,000,000 / 1000 x 2 = 400,000. So their ecpm is probably lower than 2$ as well. According to alexa.com digg's traffic rank is 243 and we all obviously know how popular digg.com is To say the least, if you plan on making any decent money from only advertising your luck is against you. For every 1,000,000 hits you get you will only make 2,000$ and that is on the high side if you ask me. All of the good paying niches are flooded out so it will not come easy. Also those niches get less traffic. Now that doesn't mean that adsense advertisers aren't spending the money. They are. It is just that I believe that google is getting most of the cash because they post the ads as well on their serp pages. I would think more people click those ads compared to site ads. A recent study suggested that google's "Im feeling lucky" feature costs google 110million per year as 1% of google searches use this feature. Now lets extrapolate that out - If 1% of google searches earn 110million then that must mean that the other 99% earns google about $11 billion more or less. That probably explains why google has revenues of 21 billion! We all know adsense is google's main money maker. If you learn anything from this post it will be this: Don't just focus on making money from advertising! You will be much better off building a solid site with some premium features. Of course, you have got to deliver the highest value to customers. I once subscribed to a private forum because they had all the best guides, programs and sites for this game I was playing. I paid 20$ for 1 year. I felt it was worth the money. The site listed that there was 35k premium members. When you do the math that comes out to: $700,000! So I am sure over a couple years this guy was a millionaire from creating a simple little site and getting 35,000 people to purchase the premium feature. If you get 1,000,000 visitors and only 1% of them buy your 10$ "premium" feature that is $100,000. 1,000,000 visits over one year is only 2.7k visits per day so I would say it is definitely a possibility.
40-60$ ecpm? I am not buying that for a second. Let me guess that ecpm is based on what? 30 hits and 10 clicks? Go to google, click since last payment and tell me what the ecpm is. For me it is 1.18 and that is out of 40k hits. Also do a search on DP for other people's ecpm's, you'll see it is in the range of 2-3$. Even if your ecpm is that high, chances are that you aren't getting much traffic. Honestly, how many people are searching for forex, mesothelioma, lawyers and so on? Not many and not to mention those keywords are flooded beyond oblivion. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=831257
Just my 2 cents: Seems all those big guys link plentyoffish and digg are not optimizing their google ads positionin. That's why they are getting so low.
killer2021, Thats some good thinking and excellent write up. Heuristic thinking that makes sense. Thanks.
It is really not that hard, I've created a number of content sites (13) and I'm making $2900 per month...my total page views on average is a little over 50,000 per month for all my sites. I would have to say, your stats are off, just a bit, to say the least!
I make about $20 off 1,000 visitors, so your math is wrong. Where you getting your traffic StumbleUpon ??
It's actually very well optimized, just visitors get ad blind there quickly. And digg is filled with adblock users
How could you make a staement like this? Sites such as those only have 1 advertisement block per page because they dont spam there users with ads.
That's seriously good writing... Though I do not agree completely on what you said.. I really think Adsense is a good way of earning money. Not millions but pretty decent money..
Hmmmm very good dude... Is there any other way so that I can make some more ?? I'm getting .40$ every day. That is less. Any ideas for me ???
I've never really earned much with adsense, I also dropped it from my main site but that's mainly because it didn't fit into my business plan, I have over 10 different affiliates on that site which pay me a lot more than adsense ever would. I have it on a few of my side projects but I don't earn much from them, nor do I expect to, since those sites were created solely to help people out.
i am agreed with the quality content, even i have a myspace comments site but my site has some new unique content thats why people visit my site much more then many hit sites. but seriously i didn't get any info or any ideas from DP yet.
I've earned many times more $ with affiliate marketing than adsense. However now w/the bad economy, many merchants are going bankrupt, cheating their affiliates, etc. Time to look at adsense again.