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Ask HN: Resources about building a business with Ads

4 points by virmundi 15y ago

A friend of mine and I are thinking about creating a new game community site. We have a specific market and want to have a free, ad supported version of the site. My partner is reluctant to proceed until he sees numbers around expected revenue from ads. We both realize these numbers are not necessarily accurate, but he wants a rough, even really rough estimate. Specifically the site is focused on the financial/stock space. I've looked around on Google, but can't find any real number. Can you help? Thanks, JPD

ig1 15y ago
As a general rule of thumb you can ballpark ad income at $0.50 - $1 CPM, in the financial space you can maybe get a bit higher than that maybe $2-3. This is based on using an automated system like Adsense, if you're going to have your own sales people selling ads you can get quite a bit higher (i.e in the $10-$80 range) but obviously costs are going to be quite a lot higher as well. A good approach is to see how much it costs to advertise on sites similar to yours and multiply that by around 0.6.
- virmundi 15y ago
  Thank you for the information.
- damoncali 15y ago
  This is good info, and matches my experience, for what that's worth.
staunch 15y ago
Affiliate revenue might be even more profitable than advertising on a financial/stock site. There are many financial services companies that pay $30-$60 commissions. That can add up really quickly. If you have a very successful site in that category you really don't have to worry about being able to monetize it. That will be the easy part.