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I have a reasonably successful open-source project ( www.mediabrowser.tv ). The website is seeing over 50K unique visitors a month.

I would like to monetize some of this traffic by offering a "sponsors" section on the site and perhaps some sponsor logos in the footer.

What kind of a monthly fee can I realistically charge for this given I am getting 50k unique visitors a month? Naturally sponsors will be in the same "space" so by having a spot on our site they will be able to reach a fair amount of new business.

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Why don't you start with something like Google AdSense and measure the results?

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If a site the scale of Stack Overflow could not manage to make any bucks out of ad sense I doubt my site will – Sam Saffron Feb 17 '10 at 12:46
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The audience of Stack Overflow is software developers, and I can tell you it is tough to make money on selling developer tools. A generic B2C product should be more successful, not to mention that it appeals to a broader audience. In any case, I was suggesting you to use AdSense not to make money, but to measure the "monetizeability" of your Web site. – Dmitry Leskov Feb 18 '10 at 6:00
Dmitry is right. Notice that Stack Exchange platform is targeting specific market niches (big business / big wealthy companies since they charge a lot of money for this platform). A free solution with thousand of visitors instead can be profitable while using Adsense. – Junior Mayhé Jan 10 at 10:27
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Why don't you put a placeholder that says "Sponsor us" and let potential companies make an offer.

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You have a good number of uniques - what about returning visitors?

I think in this case, you have a product that end users want to download and can use without the need of returning to the site. This makes it difficult to do any sort of banner ad campaigns via a network.

If a significant number of your traffic is found within the forum, I would consider getting a phpbb mod to support ads and put some house ads in there.

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since I disabled my auto update piece, a while back I seem to be get a fair number of return visitors, but I also have the chance to advertise on my tracker which is mostly return visitors. – Sam Saffron Feb 18 '10 at 0:55

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