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One of my new ventures is a site that will be Stack Overflow for predictions. Hopefully it will be a high traffic site with many inbound links and targeted keywords.

Assume all the risks bear out and there are many inbound links and a lot of traffic, and I use some reputable ad provider.

How much traffic would it take to generate $1000 per month in advertising revenue?

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I'd be curious in general for those sites that use ads as their main source of income to provide their rough numbers... e.g. we get XX,XXX uniques a day on average which for us equates to $Y,YYY in ad revenue per month. Of course the trick is each sites ads, ad partner, and visitor type will greatly alter the ad revenue. e.g. I would expect that a high tech blog would not get many users that would actually click on ads. :-( – scunliffe Jul 11 '12 at 12:35
It's actually not a tech blog, more predictions about future events, my initial push will be politics, consumer products and stocks/financial events. – Stronico Jul 11 '12 at 12:51
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Understood. I just think some "average" numbers on what sites make would be a good baseline to work with. I think many startups base their sole business model on high ad revenue without understanding how hard it is to achieve. Sites like Facebook make it look easy because they have all the demographic info they need to push ads that most cough basic users cough will click on, but most niche market sites have more tech savvy users (that don't click the ads) – scunliffe Jul 11 '12 at 13:36

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For a tech blog/website, then $1 CPM (that is, $1 for every thousand hits) is the kind of level I've personally seen, and I get the impression that's not atypical. So, for $1,000/month in revenue I would need 1,000,000 hits. But obviously if your market is such that people are willing to pay more for clicks then you'll get more, and if they're willing to pay less then you'll get less.

(Aside: it's worth noting that I get a better rate from advertisers I've made a direct relationship with than I do from Google AdWords, by a factor of 3 or 4.)

In your comment you say that your site's content is about is "politics, consumer products and stocks/financial events" -- this suggests to me that it's a broader market than a tech blog, which I suspect (but don't know) would mean that your CPM would be lower, so you'd need more than 1M hits to reach your target. In general, as I understand it, the more targeted you are, the higher the rates.

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Great answer! General estimate, and how the number is calculated along with mitigating factors. – Elie Jul 11 '12 at 14:26
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I previously had a real estate listings site and was generating around $1500 mth with about 3000 unique users per day. Content was essentially syndicated but as Google changed algorithm the traffic went through the floor.

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