One of the reasons that I picked up the financial/economic news topic was that I did a study on adwords advertising. I bought a list of the top 50,000 paying k

One of the reasons that I picked up the financial/economic news topic was that I did a study on adwords advertising. I bought a list of the top 50,000 paying keywords on Google's Adsense program off of a shady looking site. I then wrote a script to scrape the number of hits on Google for every keyword on the list, and that gave me a ratio of high paying keywords to low hits on Google. The data off the list looked pretty accurate when I spot checked it with my adsense account. There was a huge cluster of keywords on that list that had to do with financial topics. Not only that, but financial services account for 20-25% of all online ad spend. That tells me that there are advertisers that are going to be interested in a niche readership that are interested in economics and financial news. So, my hypothesis is that ad rates for a niche site focused on financial and economic news will be able to use advertising as a revenue stream. To test that hypothesis, I put up some adsense ads two weeks ago, and I got $1 - $1.50 a click. I'm pretty happy with that.