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I know that this question depends on what kind of business one is in.

But if you where to get a healthy business out of a website based on advertising how many monthly users would you need to have, on average.

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3 Answers

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Consider:

  • Use $1 CPM as a benchmark for a banner ad rate on your site. (Obviously lots of variables, industry you're in, whether you do Google AdSense or display banner ads, etc.) So for an ad you display, every 1,000 times that ad is displayed on a page, you get $1.

  • So to make $1,000, you need to have 1,000,000 ad views.

  • Let's say each page has two ads. So every page displayed equals 2 ad impressions. So you need 500,000 page views to equal the 1,000,000 ad views.

  • Now let's say you have a fantastically immersive site where the average interested visitor visits 10 different pages on the site. That means they generate 20 ad impressions.

  • So that means 50,000 interested visitors to generate the page views / ad impressions to generate the $1,000.

  • Now you also have to back up to how many visitors you need to your site to generate the 50,000 interested ones who actually use your site. Figuring a likely bounce rate and others who view a couple pages before deciding it's not for them, you'll likely need 2x to 3x that 50,000 number.

  • If the page views / ad impressions will come primarily from "customers" - then you figure the conversion rate. That could be a big range but likely less than 10% meaning you'll need 10x the 50,000 visitors.

  • The big variable is the CPM. Obviously however that may increase you can reduce the traffic required.

It's a tough, tough go.

Best of luck,

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up vote 2 down vote

I think it's better to warn you: it's really hard to make any money with advertising online. Most likely, your earnings will be precisely $0.00 for a long time.

Thousands of page views for a generic site will translate into about $0.50 of income. Really. And to get those 1000 page views will take work.

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up vote 1 down vote

It also depends on the revenue per customer, how good your conversion rates are (i.e. do 1% of your visitors become customers, 10%, 75%), and how much money you want to make.

If a single sale gets you $50 in profit, then at 1% conversion rate you would need approximately 10,000 visitors to earn $5,000 per month.

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