Submitted by dave on Mon, 2010-03-15 09:40
One way to be an online seller is to sell content. You could have an internet site like this one, provide information and community, and then hope to monetize it thru affiliate marketing or by selling ads. Google Adsense being the advertising medium du jour of late.
I am very curious about how much traffic you have to obtain to make even a modest living exclusively with Google Adsense. Google has restrictions in their Adsense user agreement about sharing what you make, so such information is hard to find. However, one established site was featured by Google in a pro-adsense commercial blurb, and from it we can gleen some decent information for a case study.
That site is Dog Breed Info. The site is not particularly high design - kind of amateur 1999 style. I am not trying to dis the site or its design, I point that out only to say you do not need to have the fanciest most expensive design to build a high-traffic site. As of this writing, it has an Alexa rank of 6,724.
On that site, you can view monthly traffic stats up to May 2008. In that month, the site was getting about 15.8 million page views a month and 3.2 million visits per month. Dividing by 30, this yields approximately 527,000 page views a day, and 107,000 visits a day. Information on unique visits is not provided.
Then if we go to the google commercial blurb, we discover it is dated May 8, 2006 and states that the site boosted revenue to $650 a day by changing how they presented their adsense ads. Now I realize these are very rough numbers, but $650 a day times 30 days per month equals $19,500 per month, or $234,000 per year. Not bad!
Now the Google article is May 2006, so let's see if there are traffic statistics on DogBreedInfo.com for that time period. I see June 2006 as 21.7 million page views, and 2.3 million visits, per month.
So, other things being equal, that comes to about $0.90 per day per 1000 daily page views, or $8.47 per day per 1000 daily visitors. I realize other things are not equal. It depends on click-thru rates, keyword payouts, etc, etc.
But if you wanted to start building a pet community site, or something that might earn similarly in click-thru rate and keyword payout, then that is hopefully a decent estimate for what you are looking at.
Getting 1000 visitors a day is not easy, and pays for only a budget lunch. Getting 10K visits a day would be $84.70 a day = $30,915 a year.
So from this case study, it looks like you need about 20K visits a day to make a solid American-style living from Adsense, given the assumption your site behaved like DogBreedInfo.com. A pretty tall order - DogBreedInfo.com has been around a long time. But if you could plug away at it for several years with no income, you could probably pull it off.
However, that is assuming a site like DogBreedInfo.com - a pet site - where the links/keywords are very low paying, in the 10 cent to 20 cent range. What if you had a site like this one, which should attract higher paying keywords? If you could get say $1 clicks instead of 10 cent clicks, then you could make 10 times as much money on the same traffic. Then things are getting really interesting.
Know of any other sites with information we could use for further case studies? If so, please let me know in the comments...
Thanks for this article, very informative and inspirational. This is giving me a good idea as to how much work I still have with my own information site.
I guess its a systematic thing of persevering with continiously adding quality content as well as some good quality SEO. At the moment I also monetize with Adsense and am thinking of affiliate as well....I won't say how much I'm making with Adsense at the moment, but it's not a lot! We'll see in a year's time again.
Cheers
Alex-
P.S my site is http://www.natural-advice.com
Thanks for this article, I just stumbled accross it searching for Adsense case-studies as I've got an information site myself. This article help put things in perspective - cheers.