Even if your site is only making $10 a month in Adsense....

Only if your time is worth nothing.

True! I actually signed up with a $1 / month hosting service not so long ago. They let you use up to 5 domains and 200 subdomains. Except they're a bit slow so I wouldn't recommend them :rolleyes:

Thanks Jay. Yes, every bit counts.

Yes, a good point. A site making that much should sell for at least 10x that amount.

So in other words your not good enough to make a respectable income from Adsense.

Instead of knockings things, why dont you try them with the intentions of giving it your best shot.

Why do so many people swear by Adsense or any other method for that matter - because it works if you know what you're doing.

Better to keep an open mind because you never know when you might need it.

Adsense does work just keep at it and follow the rules of the BIG G and you can make bank... speaking of bank I'm off to go deposit my adsense check for april that just came wooohoo.


Peace
Scott

Haha, I like the sound of that! I guess SEO is like that anyway. One big strategy game where the goal is to beat the competition, get to the top of Google and earn a few bonus points (Adsense) along the way.

Hi John, thanks for the reply. I enjoyed reading your daily blogger posting thread the other week and have started setting a few Blogger blogs myself. If I remember correctly you had the same idea there about about using those to pay for bills.

And yes, Flippa is definitely something worth looking into also. $300 doesn't sound too bad for a site earning $7 a month.

The time issue does work both ways, but it will still take a while to become profitable. I never said that it won't *ever* be profitable, just that it won't happen right away as the poster I responded to (not the OP, whose observation I actually agree with when put in perspective) claimed.

To push the point far further than I probably should here is an brief analysis.

Let's say that you value your time at $25/hr, which is far less than most people here probably *should* value their time at. And for the sake of example, let's say the site earns 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 dollars after the first through fifth months before settling in on a consistent $10 per month after that. We'll say that our hosting and domain cost us a total of $1 per month.

So, our first month's cash flow looks like this:

-$500 (20 hours * $25/hr) -$1 (hosting/domain) + $0 (no income first month) = -$501

The second month's cashflow is positive: $-1 (hosting/domain) $2 (adsense income kicking in here) = $1 cash inflow.

But because we covered our expenses and had an extra dollar of cashflow in month 2, is our enterprise profitable? An argument was made here that it is. I argue that we are still $500 in the hole.

In fact, if we take the net present value of the project after three years of earning $10 a month, using a discount rate of 5%, we're still at -$228.29. That means that after 3 years we're still over $200 in the hole!

Again, I'm not saying that this will *never* be profitable. If we can continue to get $10 a month we'll eventually get there. Assuming, of course, that you don't sink any more time into the project. And the underlying assumption is that we'll do better than $10 which will accelerate the payback period. I'm also not dissing Adsense, not even in the slightest.

What I'm challenging, and hoping to shed some light on, is the notion that if you exceed your hosting costs after the first month you are all of the sudden "profitable". That's just not the way it works. You could build 100 sites using the same parameters as above, and you won't be profitable for years.

And don't dismiss the notion that since you don't have a job, your time is not worth anything. There is an opportunity cost associated with this time, which could otherwise be spent with family, on the beach, or at the mountain. And spending 40 hours a week on sites with the economics that I've described above won't feed your family.

There was another thread here that discussed what the expression "treat it as a business" means. I think this is a prime example of where this expression adds perspective.