3 ms·

Here is a point to remember: the less popular your website, the lower your CPM average will be. If you only attract 1,000 unique visitors - your CPM maybe well

by ankeshk 17y ago

Here is a point to remember: the less popular your website, the lower your CPM average will be. If you only attract 1,000 unique visitors - your CPM maybe well under $1. But if you cross 20,000 or 50,000 visitors - your CPM could go as high as $2 to $5. (I've seen websites earn $10 per CPM too - but that is very rare.) Most money in selling ads is made if you sell the ads privately. Without allowing Google or anyone else to take a big hefty cut. But you won't be able to sell out all your inventory on your own if you're not already popular. Anyhow - general rule of thumb: if a website can cross over the half a million visitors mark - he can make $5,000 from ads per month. (6 ads per page at $2 CPM on average.) So aim for 500,000 visitors per month.

jacquesm 17y ago
This completely contradicts my experience. (in total roughly 1M uniques / day on all the sites that I'm involved with). The larger the site the lower the CPM in my case, and that is significantly lower. Bulk traffic seems to get lower CPMs than niche sites, the smaller sites make as much as $5 and the larger ones are way down, some all the way down to $0.12. What sites do you see this opposite effect on ?
- ankeshk 17y ago
  I should stress that I'm talking about selling ads privately. $2 CPM per ad at 6 ad spots = $12 CPM for the website. You will very rarely earn $12 CPM from Google. FreelanceSwitch.com sells 125*125 ad spots at $900 (raised from $800 recently). And gets 500,000 page views. (Pretty close to $2 CPM). SearchEngineJournal.com sells ad spots for $1000. And gets 300,000 page views ($3.3 CPM). If you're selling ads privately - and show your analytics to your advertisers - they won't say that reduce my CPM rate as your traffic has increased. And if they do - you can just put up an ad-rotator so that their ads are only shown to as many people as they can afford. And if you show your analytics that has a trend of increasing traffic - you will start finding better quality of advertisers too - people who will not mind paying a higher CPM. So yes - as your traffic grows and you attract enough advertisers to sell all your ad inventory - you can increase your prices slowly and steadily. The trick is to reach a stage where you can sell all your ads privately. Its supply and demand after that. (Supply of ad spots remains the same. Demand keeps on growing as your website grows in popularity.)
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    Nice job on the layout on FreelanceSwitch.com very clean!
- astrec 17y ago
  Large sites with bulk qualified traffic e.g. auto or real estate classifieds can do 200m PIs a month and still make $5-$10 CPMs. To do so you'll either have to rep your own site or use a good agency, and be quite targeted e.g. Escalade ad for X5 search results.

by ankeshk 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

This completely contradicts my experience. (in total roughly 1M uniques / day on all the sites that I'm involved with). The larger the site the lower the CPM in my case, and that is significantly lower. Bulk traffic seems to get lower CPMs than niche sites, the smaller sites make as much as $5 and the larger ones are way down, some all the way down to $0.12. What sites do you see this opposite effect on ?

ankeshk 17y ago
I should stress that I'm talking about selling ads privately. $2 CPM per ad at 6 ad spots = $12 CPM for the website. You will very rarely earn $12 CPM from Google. FreelanceSwitch.com sells 125*125 ad spots at $900 (raised from $800 recently). And gets 500,000 page views. (Pretty close to $2 CPM). SearchEngineJournal.com sells ad spots for $1000. And gets 300,000 page views ($3.3 CPM). If you're selling ads privately - and show your analytics to your advertisers - they won't say that reduce my CPM rate as your traffic has increased. And if they do - you can just put up an ad-rotator so that their ads are only shown to as many people as they can afford. And if you show your analytics that has a trend of increasing traffic - you will start finding better quality of advertisers too - people who will not mind paying a higher CPM. So yes - as your traffic grows and you attract enough advertisers to sell all your ad inventory - you can increase your prices slowly and steadily. The trick is to reach a stage where you can sell all your ads privately. Its supply and demand after that. (Supply of ad spots remains the same. Demand keeps on growing as your website grows in popularity.)
- jacquesm 17y ago
  Nice job on the layout on FreelanceSwitch.com very clean!
astrec 17y ago
Large sites with bulk qualified traffic e.g. auto or real estate classifieds can do 200m PIs a month and still make $5-$10 CPMs. To do so you'll either have to rep your own site or use a good agency, and be quite targeted e.g. Escalade ad for X5 search results.