The Biz of Coding

Web Traffic Required to Earn $ 50 Million Revenue

by Ujwal Tickoo on March 20th, 2007

NewYork Times (reg required) article "Popularity Might Not Be Enough" provides some numbers to understand just how much traffic does a website require to make $ 50 m annual from online advertising. The NYT article is based on some calculations done by Jeremy Liew of Light Speed Venture Partners in a blog post.

Jeremy's base estimate is 200 million Page Views (PVs) per month to make $50 million annual from online advertising. A site focused on a specific demographic would need 800 million PVs. And for a General Interest Site it would take 4 billion PVs a month to earn $50 million. Tim O'Reilly considers Jeremy's analysis "sobering" and talks more about The Economics of Online Advertising on his blog.

Jeremy's analysis easily explains the rationale behind Google's AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network. Both these products esentially match a website's content with related Ads and help even smaller websites make money without having to invest in relationships & infrastructure required to sell Advertising inventory and then serve Ads online.

POSTED IN: Google