Ads and Affiliates Doctor Ebiz Q&A

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Ad Revenue for a Broadly Focused Website

"I am starting a lifestyle magazine online, and I'm wondering how much I should charge people for advertisement space on my site. What would help me determine my prices?" -- T.L. Delmore

It's important to project your site's future income before spending lots of energy building a website. To estimate revenue from Google AdSense ads, open an Google AdWords account and look up the current costs per click for the major keywords that your site will attract. We don't know the revenue split, but estimate 50%. For banner ad networks, project about $1 per thousand page views for ads sold on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis. Since "lifestyle" is a general (not niche) topic, banner ad revenue isn't likely to be high.

Of course, the great unknown factor is how much traffic you'll receive. The problem with an advertising revenue model for a website is that it is cost-prohibitive to generate traffic to your site through PPC (pay per click) ads. Likewise, renting e-mail lists is too expensive and spamming is now illegal in the US. That means that all the traffic to your site must be generated by search engines. Your task, then, is to work very hard to get near the top of the search engines for your keywords. If you can generate enough traffic, then you can have a chance at a money-earning business.

The problem I see is that a "lifestyle magazine" isn't a niche focus. Because of the intense competition, you're better off finding a narrow business target niche, than a broad, diffuse "lifestyle" focus. To learn how to locate a profitable niche, read my report Research Guide to Online Niche-Finding (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/niche-finding.htm)