How Much Traffic Do You Need to Make A Living from Advertising on a Website?

8 replies
I understand most people on this forum have something to sell, but I was wondering if you made content your focus and had advertising as prime source of income, roughly what would be the traffic you'd need to make a say at least 25k from it?

Similar question if you have a forum, which as we see from Warrior forum can have perks to make that pay in addition to ads.
#advertising #living #make #traffic #website
  • Profile picture of the author mikemac1
    Totally depends upon your target market...for example, say you are targeting "celebrity gossip" then you would need millions of uniques a month; conversely say you are targeting "private jet owners" obviously that niche is much smaller but say you build a site that gets 10s of thousands of uniques and is steady and you become a authority site for the niche...well you could charge a good amount per month for sponsorships or on a CPM basis.
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  • Profile picture of the author kenny5
    I honestly think this takes much more work than creating something and selling it. Your site has to be extremely well known and people have to be begging you for advertising space for you to make that kind of money.

    An example of a site that has that kind of power is problogger.net. Keep in mind this is just my opinion and I have only dabbled in making a content site with advertising, so I am by no means an expert.
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  • Profile picture of the author joelraitt
    You don't need your own product to sell a product...it's just if your selling advertising...I think your missing some of the pie. Now if you have like millions and millions of uniques and can't manage it all yourself...then you can just sell the impressions...

    My opinion.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tymarkinc
    Originally Posted by BargainBookMole View Post

    I understand most people on this forum have something to sell, but I was wondering if you made content your focus and had advertising as prime source of income, roughly what would be the traffic you'd need to make a say at least 25k from it?

    Similar question if you have a forum, which as we see from Warrior forum can have perks to make that pay in addition to ads.
    I wouldn't limit myself to one source of income. Those websites that make the huge money off advertising typically get millions of visitors.

    However if you did focus on content, you would be starting off a lot better than most internet marketers that only think about the sale.


    Focus on the good content and solutions for your readers and make suggestions on solutions they can buy.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tyrus Antas
    Advertising is a crappy business model, even
    in high priced niches like finance.

    You can easily make multiples(30x) of what
    you'd made with advertising just by selling your
    own products and services.
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    • Profile picture of the author espresso
      have a look at buysellads.com it will give you an idea
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  • Profile picture of the author phpnetpro
    I've done a very wide variety of websites over the 15+ years I've been working online for a living. A content type of website like this is definitely one of the hardest to make and it will almost always take years to get a website like this to the point where you are making some really good money on it.

    Like others were saying, it will depend on the niche but you will likely end up needing many thousands of monthly unique visitors to make something decent.

    This isn't my website, but just to give you a comparison I will speak of a dog forum (dogforums dot com). This site offers monthly advertising rates (I'm publishing an ad there soon, so I happen to know of their stats and rates at the moment). I'm pretty sure they are the number one dog forum on the internet and they receive 1800 DAILY unique visitors. I can almost guarantee that this site doesn't make any more than 5-10k a month. So, if you are looking to hit 25k monthly, you will truly have your work cut out for you and there's a pretty good chance you wouldn't even be able to run a site like that by yourself.

    Personally, I used to make sites like this - in fact, that's all I made when I first started. Yes, I did have some success but it took me years to get there. I really don't want to get into specifics because I don't care to think about this often, but my first big success on the internet was a content site like this that went on to generate $15k monthly (this was about 10-13 years ago). Where is this site today? I don't even have the domain name registered for it now, LOL. Why? It was a site about something that was huge a decade ago and pretty much nobody cares about it today.

    The moral of the story is don't put all of your eggs in one basket and especially don't do so if you are counting on a site that could just be a passing craze. These days, I have a ton of different websites on a very wide variety of niches. 99% of my sites make less than $600/month, but when you have hundreds of them it adds up quickly. Most of these sites do not require a single bit of my attention, so I could literally throw away my computers and I would still get a very large check each month. On the other end of the spectrum, the site that I used to run required many hours of attention every single day or else I would have angry customers and readers.

    Over the years, I think the most important thing that I have learned to is work smarter and NOT harder. Sure, it has required a lot of work to get where I am, but I only continue to work hard because I'm still building more sites.
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  • Profile picture of the author Ron Douglas
    On one of my sites, I have an advertising agreement for $4 CPM and another one for $3.25 CPM. Those ads are both on the same pages, that means for one page view I'm getting $7.25 CPM or $7.25 for each 1,000 views.

    In order for me to make $25k a year, I need to get 287,356 views per month or like 9,579 per day. Those are not unique visits or clicks, just page views that generate ad impressions.

    I make a lot more than $25k a year from that one site.
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