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Content Cost vs. Ad Revenue Equation?

by raindog308
2 replies
Maybe this is a dumb or newbie question but...

How do you evaluate the cost of acquiring content vs. the potential revenue? I'm specifically think of Adsense revenue but I suppose there are other choices.

For example, I own a domain about a particular technical topic. I'd like to put some content up on it. To have good content will cost at least a penny a word, and likely several times that.

Let's say I wanted to put up a blog and post 400-500-word articles on it. Each will cost $5-10. It's easy to spend $100 on content.

How do you estimate the possible payback on that? I'm not thinking of an autoblogging scraper (where the "cost of content" is zero) but rather having some good, original content created. I can find the cost of the content...but the potential revenue?

BTW, yes, I could create some content myself, but again I'd need to know the per-hour payback. If it takes me an hour to generate 500 words of solid content, then I only make $10 in revenue, it's not a good use of my time because I could work at Wal-mart for that
#content #cost #equation #revenue
  • Profile picture of the author Web Content By Jim
    Based on my experience, there is no standard answer to this. You can't say that "500 words of content will earn me $30" and justify your decisions based on that.

    Also, there are a lot more things that go into how much ad revenue your site will make than just the content. You can have two sites with the exact same content and the exact same visitors (hypothetical, of course) and get two totally different monthly profit figures.
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  • Profile picture of the author bethparker
    There is no such equation, at least not one that works. My best-performing article to date was one that had a keyword with less than 20 visitors per month. It was one of the first keywords I ever targeted. If I had had a formula, or even more knowledge, I never would have gone after that keyword. But I'm glad I did. Other keywords I have targeted looked good but got hardly any traffic even when they got to #1 in Google. You just never know.

    The best way to find out which keywords will be most profitable is to look in Analytics and see which ones are bringing in traffic and ad clicks already even though you haven't specifically targeted them, and then have a post written to target that keyword. Of course, in order to do that, you have to have some traffic coming in to begin with.
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