How much money can I expect to earn from ads on my website?

January 18, 2006 4:21 PM

Would adding advertisements to my site generate enough earnings to even bother in the first place?

The site generates about 80,000 unique visitors annually. Sure, that isn't much to write home about, but the hits alone are enough to get me thinking about adding some unobtrusive (yes, I know) ads to it (e.g. text ads). I've never done anything like this before on any of my websites though, so what can I expect in relation to earnings? Also, which are some good companies to go with? Yes, I know of Google, but who else is good? Lastly, would any of this be worth it? Again, I'm thinking in dollars and cents here. Oh and the website in question is not the blog linked in my profile. Just want to be clear on that.

posted by sjvilla79 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

It is impossible to tell. You just don't know what the click-through rates will be. Some sites attract people who click, some just don't. And, more importantly, you don't know the per-click payment rates for the type of ads they give you. Google ads can swing from $0.03 to $3.00, per-click. So your revenue is the product of two unknowns.

The easiest way to figure it out is to put up ads for a month and see how much you make. (Of course, once you do that, it will almost certainly be worth the marginal additional effort needed to leave it up.)
posted by smackfu at 4:35 PM on January 18, 2006

I have no idea how much you could potentially make, but I hear adbrite's real nice.

End users can buy ads space on your site from a link under the ads. Obviously, you could set this up yourself with programming know-how, but adbrite makes it all easy and slick.
posted by Famous at 5:42 PM on January 18, 2006

The trouble of adding text ads is virtually non-existent -- a few snippets of code, inserted just once, seems to be all that you need to do. Any earnings from the links is, literally, pure gravy. Likely not enough to make a dent in your mortgage, but probably enough (after a few months?) to at least cover your monthly hosting charges, or buy a few cups of coffee.
posted by davidmsc at 5:49 PM on January 18, 2006

Yeah agree with the above. I have a site that has far less unique visits, but I'm making enough off Google Adsense to at least cover the costs of the hosting, plus a little more.

The best thing about these ads, is that you only have to work ONCE at it, and can then just leave it there to make money for you.

As in many other cases, it takes a fair amount of testing to really see how you can optimize your earnings, and how much you can really make.
posted by arrowhead at 6:17 PM on January 18, 2006

The best thing about these ads, is that you only have to work ONCE at it, and can then just leave it there to make money for you.

How's that? You don't have to work to maintain the site so that people continue to go to it?
posted by bingo at 11:41 PM on January 18, 2006

Yes you do, but that's the content part of the website that you already have to work on, with or without ads. Adding the ads itself is a 1-time job, which was what I was referring to :-)
posted by arrowhead at 4:07 AM on January 19, 2006

If your audience is a core group of repeating viewers, probably not. I'd go the route of amazon associate links, and out and out pleas for them to click your link when they're making an amazon purchase.

If your site is mostly viewed by one-hitters -- people who look at your site once or twice but aren't likely to return, then textads might be the way to go.

The online community site I run is more the former, and I'd guess I get a couple hundred dollars in Amazon referrer fees a year. I also created a viral infotainment page a couple years ago that still generates a couple hundred to a couple thousand hits a day, and I've earned several hundred dollars by showing textads on that page.
posted by crunchland at 7:15 AM on January 19, 2006

...in any event, don't quit your day job. You'll never get rich by doing either of those revenue streams, but maybe enough to cover your hosting fees.
posted by crunchland at 7:26 AM on January 19, 2006

It took me about an hour to add google ads to my site, and that was a bunch of fiddling I didn't need to do. I put off doing it for a while because it didn't seem worth the time. I wish I'd done it much earlier. Really, given the one-time setup, no-maintenance thing google ads have going on, even if you make $10/mo, your hour will pay for itself in a couple months.
posted by fidelity at 8:22 AM on January 19, 2006