Ask HN: How much ad revenue you make from your side project?

[samblr]

Have a side project which is an analytics web application based on 100k+ records. I was initially thinking to get a small payment from each user. But it appears to me that - information provided can be easily scrapped from site (if someone really wants) and it won't make sense.

So I am thinking of revenue model based on ads. At its 'full' potential web application can draw a million visits per month (in 2-3 years may be).

Adrevenue calculators show adrevenue of $2000 dollars for a million visits[0] with 2 pages/visit and $1 RPM.

How realistic are these adrevenue calculators ?

Can anybody share their experience with real numbers and insights.

https://www.omnicalculator.com/business/website-ad-revenue\

edit: reformed sentence

[phoboslab]

I make about $600/mo pretty consistently with a typing game (http://zty.pe) - about 200k visits/mo.

I once managed another project that had about 14m visits/mo and made a meager $3000. Bad target demographic.

[20years]

It varies greatly based on type of content. The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site. We had Netflix and Hulu advertising on in through Adsense for awhile and their ads were specific to the individual TV shows we were writing about. The RPM's were amazing.

I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo with about 130k unique visitor per month.

More tech content sites or other more general sites I have ran haven't gotten anywhere close to those #'s.

Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well.

Ad placement also makes a difference. 1 well placed in-content ad can make you a lot more than 3 ads. That one well placed in-content ad can generate a higher CTR and CPC vs. if you place 3 ads. When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC. I have tested this extensively.

[notadoc]

> The most I have made was $20k per month on a TV show review site.

> I also ran a Minecraft mods site for awhile with my son and at its top it made $9k/mo

Congratulations. That is pretty impressive, and you repeated he success twice. Do you still run those? Is that your full time job?

> When you place multiple ads, the CTR on all of them even the well placed in-content ad is much lower as well the the CPC.

Wouldn't you still come out ahead because with more ads you get more impressions? Isn't that how it works and why you see sites with 1000000 ads?

[amelius]

> Games and entertainment content geared towards youth do well.

Which is, I guess, because the youth is more susceptible to ads.

:(

[Cherian]

I can speak for the food blogging industry. This is my wife’s blog[1]

A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4[2]. Where it gets interesting are the RPM numbers. If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks and become a preferred partner, you can rake up to $12-15in RPM [3]. Here’s more of multiple revenue sources for a successful blog [4]

Caveat: Things take off once you cross around 700—800K US traffic. Until then it can be frustrating.

[1]: https://alittlebitofspice.com/

[2]: http://d.pr/i/bIBobD

[3]: http://d.pr/i/Qvk1M

[4]: http://d.pr/i/dEqpvA

[robtaylor]

Your top right logo is 2.3meg https://www.alittlebitofspice.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03...

It can be much smaller and still get the 'retina' effect, saving load time and bandwidth.

[joshvm]

Very refreshing to see a food blog that's recipe oriented. I'll be trying some of those! When I see a picture of mouth watering food, I want the recipe, not paragraphs of fluff about what the author did that week.

[notadoc]

Wow I had no idea food blogging was a profitable thing. Congrats to your wife.

> If you can manage multiple ad networks, execute 100% fill rates, bid between networks

Isn't that impossible to get 100% filled? I recall reading a while back that getting even 40% was challenging which is why the ad quality online has gone down and they're more intrusive?

Lots of interesting stuff on this thread, thanks for sharing.

[mysterypie]

> A good food blogger focusing on the US/High GDP audience can get CPMs from $1-4

You're taking a risk here.

By mentioning this, a good fraction of the 300K Hacker News daily uniques will visit your site as I did, and some may be gourmands. Excellent uncluttered presentation and mouth-watering photography by the way.

On the other hand, you tipped off the largest gathering of highly motivated, entrepreneurial web developers to a business idea that no one expected to be so profitable.

[tomerbd]

i don't get it how do all you guys get so much traffic you talk about 100k's and millions of people visiting your web sites how do you make that happen?!?

[iiiears]

If i want to make a dish that needs exotic ingredients why cant i find a link to say.. Amazon or somewhere else?

[giarc]

There are no ads on her site though....

[throw2bit]

Are you the owner of Cucumbertown ?

[dejv]

I have couple of small side projects that which are monetised through ads. Portfolio of those web apps are 7 years old and traffic is growing linearly. The problem is revenue, which is basically cutting in half every 12 - 18 months: both CTR and revenue is going down.

There are a lot of people with adblock these days, but also mobile traffic is not that profitable and people learned to ignore the ads as a noise. I am also using just one small rectangle per page and not going for more aggressive tactics.

During those 7 years I am down from "these apps are paying my rent" to "I can have a one meal in a nice restaurant each month".

The point is: it is getting much harder to make money by having ads in your app. Also make sure that all the information are recent and comes from your market sector as is changing real quick.

[notadoc]

> There are a lot of people with adblock these days

And it is soon to be built into web browsers, you have to wonder the impact that will have.

[nitramm]

Do you think that it's more related to adblock usage or rather people ignoring ads completely?

[chirau]

I don't know if YouTube counts here.

On the weekends I upload videos for artists from my home country. I have one channel that is fairly popular. The artists themselves are not big enough to attract many people to their own channels so the use mine. We split the ad revenue. I pay them locally. My take home after deductions is anywhere from 5k to 8k per quarter.

EDIT: added payout period. I give payouts per quarter because as i said, they are not big artists, so it would be tedious sending small amounts to tons of people each month.

[quadrangle]

I have some YouTube videos that total half a million views, which is not much, but enough that I could be monetizing. I don't turn on monetizing because I don't feel okay pushing more ads on people. So my total is zero.

I would like to make a living producing positive value to the world. I don't want the additional job of promoting advertisements that I would not necessarily endorse just because my work is popular enough that advertisers will pay to take some of the attention I've gotten. Ads are inherently manipulative, and I'd rather encourage everyone to use an adblocker rather than have a conflict-of-interest with what's actually good for my audience.

[FlyingAvatar]

I got YouTube Red for the purpose of contributing to content providers without watching ads. I would just use an ad blocker otherwise.

Unless your content is for kids, where they probably don't have the choice to watch them or not, why not monetize?

If it's your viewer's choice whether they see ads or not, and if the money might help you provide more or better content, it could be a win-win.

[quadrangle]

extra note: I have a relatively low (for U.S., not just among Hacker News crowd) income otherwise, so my refusal to monetize with ads isn't even tied to otherwise having a high income. I just don't want to play this game that I can't agree with morally.

[t0mislav]

I'm small fish here, but since question was asked I will share. https://random.country/ brings me around 40$ passive income monthly. Around 5K visitors monthly. Probably it could bring me more money with one more ad.

[mysterypie]

I like the quiz, but I wish it told me the correct answer when I guess wrongly. You could give the correct answer either immediately or at the end of the quiz; either way would be fine.

[jerrre]

Hey, a small tip: I got the same country twice in one quiz, which is less fun

[iDemonix]

Do you do any work to bring traffic in or just rely on SERPS?

[titusblair]

Nice idea :)

[natvod]

@csallen could probably jump in with some interesting insights. His site Indie Hackers was generating $5K a month from ad rev before it was acquired by Stripe (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14090063).

He actively reached out to relevant companies to ask them to place ads on his website.

If you brokered these type of ad partnerships, you could easily make a few thousand with your audience.

Ad types include: send a targeted email promo to users based on their analytics data, ads on the pages, etc.

[joshvm]

I mentioned this in another post, but I believe this is how most seriously profitable bloggers make their money. They don't go for Google ads, they go for affiliate deals and sponsorship.

It's a smarter way to do it because the adverts are usually far far more relevant to the audience. Nothing annoys me more than generic clickbait advertising ("Release your equity!", "What did these 10 people do to get rich?", etc) which I'm never going to click on. On the other hand if I see a food blog sponsored by e.g. KitchenAid, I might have another look at their mixers.

If you have the readership and a trusting community (or reputation), it's a no brainer. This is how Daring Fireball does it too.

Affiliate links are another good way of subtly making cash - look at people like Ken Rockwell, who was once the de facto "Nikon Guy". His site was (is?) the go to place for Nikon camera/lens reviews. There are no ads on his site, but every damn link is affiliated (and why not?). This is also a very sneaky way for airline reward bloggers to make tons of points: they find the deals, everyone goes through the affiliate links and earns their meager 100 avios, while the blogger makes a tidy referral profit. The guy who runs Head for Points [1] made thousands when the Curve Card was released.

[1] http://www.headforpoints.com/2017/01/12/curve-rewards-launch...

[dgacmu]

$100/month for the Pi Searcher + the Splat Calculator. More on Pi day. $1-2 RPM. 100k page views per month. One built in 1996, the other in maybe 99. http://www.angio.net/pi and http://www.angio.net/personal/climb/speed

Neither is designed with monetization in mind. I just threw some ads on them to cover the hosting costs (the pi Searcher needs a few gigs of RAM) -- but it turned out that learning about the ad ecosystem was pretty interesting.

[galfarragem]

2 niche blogs: archimodels.info / archidrawings.info

Adsense revenue accounted to half of my monthly revenue ($100) 4 years ago. Nowadays, thanks to adblockers, it's only 10% of it and my monthly revenue is down to $50. Most of my revenue comes from a direct ad that adblockers can't detect.

Adsense is dead to small publishers.

[Envec83]

I run a couple of ad-based websites. The largest one being https://www.dailywritingtips.com

The key aspect to estimate how much you can earn is the page RPM you can get.

The average I have seen across my sits is around $2. Some niches have lower RPMs (e.g., programming, in my case at least). Some niches have much higher. I had a site about investing in gold that had $12 page RPM on average, if I remember well.

In your case, I believe the number would be higher than $2000 per month if you reach 1 million visitors. I am guessing twice as much at least.

[jaden]

One of my sites (https://riddlesbrainteasers.com) has been a wild ride, reaching a peak of $18k/month and down to an average of around $500/month now. Monthly traffic is generally around 300k unique visitors.

Another site (http://coincollector.org) was making $300/month as long as I kept posting but after several years I grew tired and now it earns next to nothing.

[latenightcoding]

How did you go from $18k/month to $500 month? ad blockers?

[archildress]

I hate to hijack, but I'm facing the exact same issue you are. The rates that I've heard quoted for AdSense just aren't happening for me. My rates are very similar to yours, samblr.

I think that part of my problem (and it could be yours) is that I don't have a ton of written content around my free giveaways, which is the core of my site. Basically: plenty of cake, very little frosting.

Can anyone offer advice for increasing AdSense revenue for a site without much written content?

I run a site called Preset Love (http://presetlove.com) which gives away free Lightroom presets (Lightroom is an image editor for Adobe). My ad rates are abysmal and I've thought of walking away as a result.

I welcome feedback.

[anonaffiliate]

I have an adwords site that sends affiliate traffic to a few merchants.

I currently pull in about $300k/year in revenue and $80-$100k/year in profit.

I use a number of credits cards for the ads to get points, so I consider it a source of revenue and vacations.

It's not easy to make a site like this and it as been a long road, but a worthwhile one.

(Posting anon as I prefer not to disclose revenues publicly)

[anonaffiliate]

Elaborating on the other questions:

There is no good revenge calculator to use as a baseline because it makes a broad assumption about demand for your audience.

if you care only about ad revenue, look for subjects that have high cpcs in Adsense. Those are a good place to start as the potential profit is more easily modelable. However, you also at wind up with subjects that are very esoteric or otherwise boring to you.

The other options is something you like as a subject to build content or a community around. You may have lower revenue but a much more fulfilling project.

My one major piece of advice is to look at how you creat unique value overall. If your site is easily replaced then the valeu is low and your staying power in the face of competition is very low.

If your site is something that users can't live without, then you are far better off.

[hn_username]

Wow, that's impressive - thanks for sharing. One question though, what do you mean by Adwords site?

[samblr]

At what point you approached an affiliate and what analytics you use to bill an affiliate ? in short how is deal made and managed.

[samblr]

..$300k/year is really a good amount! And what are your expenses - $200k is high - you pay someone to manage site ?

[blaze33]

-11$ this month for my blog. One article hit HN front page 2 weeks ago and I'm left with a small AWS bill, I had no ads :)

Since then, I tried to activate ads via disqus comments but their revenue program seems like you have to be selected first in order to earn money. What would you recommend to monetize a tech blog ? (at least to cover the hosting fees)

[merkaloid]

if your blog is static data on S3, you can put cloudflare in front of it with the free plan and pay next to nothing due to the caching which they dont charge for

[stevebmark]

Somewhere between -$30,000 and -$60,000 I think. Even though they weren't successful (two) projects, it's always disappointing to see how few people are willing to spend their own money on something.

[jackgolding]

their own money on a similar project or your customers?

[shazow]

Once upon a time, https://tweepsect.com/ would get upwards of 650,000 visits/mo so I slapped some Fusion Ads (now Carbon Ads) on it and it brought in about $200-300/mo.

It has slowly declined down to tens of thousands of visits per month, which comes out to around $15-30/mo.

I really didn't want to try and monetize it for too long and ultimately regretted not slapping a simple clean ad on it earlier. Could have made more with more non-exclusive ads but it was about right for the amount of effort it took (very little). Not bad for a completely unattended service with zero overhead.

[xtrimsky1234]

Android video game: https://traveler208.com/ Not making much, spend more in ads trying to make it works (300$) then what it brought me (about 100$).

Other old android apps are still bringing me 8$/month such as: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pervychine...

[Mz]

For some years, I got a check from AdSense about once a year or so. Then with the adblocker wars, I didn't see a check for about two years. Their payment threshold is $100, so I was making something like $100 or so a year-ish. With getting more traffic, my numbers in recent months are looking more promising than that, but it is still looking like "not enough to be obligated to report it on my taxes." (In the US, that means under $600 annually, which I am not on track to be anywhere near. But I might get a second check before the year is up?)

I have always done better with getting cash from my audience than with ads. I used to have donate buttons on my sites, but at some point I switched to a tip jar and my take improved. Instructions how to make a pay pal tip jar can be found here (on my website):

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/11/how-to-make-...