How many visitors per day does a site need to draw any significant ad revenue?

Check out How to estimate revenues/valuation of an advertising-supported internet website?

Here is my answer to that quesiton:

There are a whole lot of variables that go into estimating the revenue potential of a website, but there is one variable to rule them all. It's the audience.

Asking "if my site gets X pageviews, how much can I sell it for" is like asking "I have X pounds of metal, how much can I sell it for?" Since gold sells for $1000/ounce and iron goes for $200/ton, it's a pretty silly question. The same holds true for pageviews.

HR.com, a resource for HR professionals, charges upwards of $80/CPM. I've heard that MySpace and Facebook charge in the fractions of a penny per CPM. That's a pretty big spread of zeros, and your site will fall somewhere in the middle depending on the audience.

For your projection, I'd start with two "number of zeros" estimations and pick the midpoint. Guess these based on how close your audience aligns to the top end (say, Fortune 500 CEOs at... oh I don't know, $100.00/CPM) and bottom end (children in 3rd world countries... at $0.000001/CPM).

If you were to pick $0.10 and $1.00 (a range I'd say appropriate for young American professionals earning >$50K), you'd have $0.55. Then multiply it by the number of pageviews each month.

All of the other variables (such as numbe of ads per page, layout, etc) aren't really important now since those have a relatively small impact (relative to audience) and can be adjusted later.

So how to get to the $100 figure? Well, if your audience was the right fit for BuildMaster, and you delivered several dozen qualified visitors a week, then we'd buy out the space for a year.

Want to know a secret ??? You are pissing away your time if you are chasing CPM profits! These are great for sites like wowebook or other sites which nobody would really advertise on.

Here is how you make money as a publisher. 1. - sell your inventory for a fixed cost, BuySellAds.com is a good way to do this. 2. If you are smart, then you write the proper content that trigger PPC clicks. Thats where you can make decent money. 3. - You partner with businesses, and join affiliate programs. You sell leads, or make sure that when someone clicks your link you get paid big time.

I would look for affiliate programs with recurring commission structures. So you can continue to grow, rather than start fresh each month.

You can get pretty sneaky, and setup sites to promote products and make decent income from it. But if you are that smart, chances are you can find even better things to do.

Web CPM used to be one lucrative concept till 2 years back. I used to see returns of $3-3.5 CPM certain times. This means to make an income of $100 per week, you'll have to just get a traffic of 30000 page views for your site. This was with one popular CPC program which you might be able to guess.

Also, bringing in traffic used to be having "some content" and a lot of link building till that time. And a lot of traffic used to come from Google. But recently Google has changed its logic to show relevant results only of the content is good and I believe the power of links have gone down in terms of pulling lots of traffic (though it is still a base requirement).

Certain other programs like In text links also were making some more. But as with time, the returns dropped and the CPMs are currently $1-1.5. So, actually selling some products is actually a good idea and if you have good marketing sense, persistence and hardwork, you should be able to pull it off $1000 per week quite easily. But beware, it needs

• a lot of hardwork
• wisely picking the product which you love
• picking the product which has some demand in the market
• Right affiliate programs
• or you sell the product yourself (May be like a distributor or even a manufacturer)

The one problem I find with affiliate programs is that there are a number of options which market products which are non-essential. In my view this becomes too tough to pick and market also. I would actually prefer some product which is required/essential for a section of people and then start selling them (either as affiliate or as direct seller)

PS: By writing this, I am actually revising this note to myself as well. I would have to roll my sleeves and do something for myself :)

Jack Spirko (http://www.jackspirko.com/) says when you hit 20k-30k visitors per month, you should have no problem going out and getting 3 or 4 sponsors to pay you upwards of $250 a month for banners or other ads.

Here is one of the many shows (about 15 minutes long) where he talks about sponsorship -- Episode-53- How to get Sponsors for a Podcast, Blog or Website

One concern I have with only making $100 a week is that you might be monetizing too soon. Grow your audience to 20-30k before you try to make money. Otherwise your priorities are misplaced.