

Ask HN: Does Web Traffic Always Equal Income? - DanielBMarkham

This is a follow-up to a post I did a few months ago. I didn't listen to you guys then so I thought I'd ask the question again and hopefully get a better answer :)<p>I have a technology management blog. Post stuff about agile, programming, management, and other stuff I like to write about. As part of that, I do articles on all sorts of crazy stuff. Whatever I find interesting.<p>A while back I posted about a female pole-vaulter, whose name will go unmentioned, because she was becoming an internet sensation. Just a cute girl who somehow became popular because of the vagaries of the net. I thought it was an interesting story about how the internet changes the nature of celebrity.<p>Over the months, however, Google has started ranking my post higher and higher in search results. A while back I asked you guys what to do about it. The best answer I got was to use robots.txt to tell Google to ignore it. I was tempted to do that but didn't. Laziness I suppose. But I also didn't like the idea of censoring myself. As much as I dislike the idea of posting cute-girl-pics-for-traffic, I dislike the idea of being forced to pull stuff from my blog even more.<p>Now I'm reaching the critical mass point. I received an email from my ISP saying that my traffic is going to go past my limit this month, and it's mostly all this one article. WebAnlyzer shows 89,000 hits on this article up until yesterday. That probably translates into 20,000+ or so visitors. And the number keeps increasing.<p>So I'm spending the afternoon researching what other sites with this person on them are running as ads, hoping to find something that will "pay the rent" as it were, to keep this article up.<p>Here's the question: is there any hope here? Does high traffic automatically mean income? Or put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that much every time?
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vaksel
traffic does matter, the more traffic you get the more options you have.

5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks.

1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising,
without getting hung up on.

5m uniques a month? Congrats you can get into premium Google adsense, where
they custom build your adsense units that will look like they belong on your
site(meaning users will be hitting those links by mistake).

10m uniques a month? Congrats, you can probably raise some funding to pay
yourself a fat salary while you hemorrhage money.

40m uniques a month? Congrats you are twitter, and you'll get a CNN article
when you decide to change your homepage font from 11 to 12 pt.

200m uniques a month? Congrats you are Facebook, you can raise a ton of money
at 1 billion plus valuation.

Basically there is nothing wrong with having excess traffic, you can always
figure out a way to monetize it. i.e. how college humor started threadless
tees to sell tshirts.

But traffic isn't everything, you can have a finance blog with 3,000 visitors
a month, and be making 6 figures, just because the niche ads for your site are
$20 cpc clicks, and $100 credit card offers.

~~~
qeorge
Generally I agree, except for a couple points:

 _5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks._

Not all traffic is created equal, so just hitting those numbers won't get you
a decent ad deal.

 _1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising,
without getting hung up on._

Again, depends on the site. 1MM/month is not the big deal it used to be. 1MM
to a tech blog would be a big deal, 1MM to a meme photo site is not.

 _i.e. how college humor started threadless tees to sell tshirts._

BustedTees, not Threadless, but your point remains. (BTW, I think you meant
e.g. instead of i.e., and you should always follow either with a comma)

~~~
vaksel
Actually 5K is the official requirement for Tribal Fusion:
<http://www.tribalfusion.com/publishers/siterequirements>

But yeah if you are in a very saturated niche or mediocre(lolcats) niche, you
might need much higher numbers to get in.

And yeah quality always counts, but 1 million uniques should be a good enough
point to start selling ad space. You may not get the top of the line
advertisers, but you should be able to get some.

Yeah you right, I meant to say Busted tees that's it, got them mixed up.

~~~
qeorge
Thanks for the link to the TF specs. They specify 5k/day, which is more than
it used to be (150k/month as opposed to the 70k/month as I'd remembered it).

My math was wrong anyway so I edited that out, but you were definitely
correct. My apologies.

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zaidf
Quality of traffic matters a lot. iJigg gets over a million uniques a month.
But most of it is from Thailand and thus, we barely breakeven. I know sites
getting a fraction of our traffic and making few times our revenue.

So yes, traffic means income. But that is super oversimplification. User
intent behind your traffic matters a lot.

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qeorge
_Put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic
and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that
much every time?_

Bandwidth is really cheap, so even the worst monetization can cover a
$10/month shared hosting account. But that still doesn't mean its worth your
time.

For example, I used to own FakePosters.com (not affiliated with the current
owners). It started as an SEO experiment, but the traffic grew to several
million uniques a month with very little work on my end (StumbleUpon can push
_way_ more traffic than most people realize).

Sounds great, but unfortunately these type of visitors just don't click on
ads. The site easily covered its $10/month shared hosting bill, and made about
$150/month at its peak, but 1500 bucks a year is hardly worth the time it took
to run, not to mention the dubious legality of posting photos you don't own a
clear copyright on. So I closed the site after 1 year and sold the domain off
for $1k. I'm happy with the way it worked out, but I don't plan on a repeat
performance.

So if I were you, I'd move to cheap shared hosting and move on. 100k hits is
nothing your ISP should be complaining about.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I'm paying $30 a month for 50GB. If I understand you, it sounds like I should
be shopping around for better hosting.

~~~
weaksauce
Just a cheap $20 linode account will give you 200GB. you can offload the
pictures to a slice or amazon S3 and you should be better off than the $30/mo.
It is a bit apples to oranges because I don't know what the specs are on your
current hosting.(like how many domains they give you, the speed of the actual
data center connections to the outside world, redundancy, etc....)

The slice way is probably not for everyone because you will need to setup and
manage the server but for the easy route you can offload the large images to
S3 and that should be fairly cheap for that.

~~~
qeorge
That would work, but I'd probably go even cheaper and get a basic HostGator
account or something similar (~$10/month). Really depends on what your needs
are (you won't get SSH with shared hosting, but you'll have all the bandwidth
/ disk space you need).

But 100k pageviews a month is nothing, and no host should be giving you a hard
time about that. If you're hogging the CPU, that would be a more reasonable
complaint.

In general, its always a good idea to reevaluate your hosting. Chances are
there's a better deal going, much like cable or phone service, and its a good
fire drill to change hosts now and then.

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breck
Yes, but the level of income varies dramatically.

I've worked on sites that generate on average from $0.001 per visitor ($1 RPM)
all the way up to sites with less volume but generate much higher revenue per
visitor ($1.25).

My guess is the type of traffic you are talking about here is the former
unfortunately. In other words, you may have been able to monetize those 20k
visitors at $.01 per visitor (or maybe a total of $200). If you are getting
over 2,000 visits per day, you can throw AdSense on the page and see how much
you make.

What types of sites make lots of $$ per visit?

Generally product related sites, coupon sites, sites that sell something, etc.

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jasonlbaptiste
Quality of your audience is key. You can always grow the subscriber base
later, but you can't increase the quality too easily or at all. Look to serve
a valuable demographic or niche sector. Someone here said banking. Women is
another. Techno geeks like ourselves are another. Sports fans are another. The
really high end and rich are another. Urban is another. General spray and pray
traffic is just complete shit on a cpm basis. You need a lot of volume.

I would say that Email Newsletters are the most valuable. Thrillist gets $270
cpm for a dedicated video email. Their normal ads in the emails are somewhere
around $30-$60, so lets say $45 average. If you have 10,000 monthly
subscribers, you could do the following. Numbers used are for a smaller
newsletter who can't command a CPM like thrillist:

One weekly "dedicated" email (4 per month) at $100 cpm- 4x100x10 $4000 Ads
half filled at $30 CPM, 20 emails a month, so 10 opportunities due to half
filled- 30x10x10- $3000

That's 7,000 per month off of 10,000 subscribers. 10,000 subscribers isn't
terribly difficult to achieve. You can live pretty comfortably off of that.

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dwight721
If the traffic has a direct relationship to something you are selling; then
yes. Only you would know this. Conversely, there so many traffic generating
sites that send visitors to your site in hope of gaining reciprocal viewing
from other users that it's impossible to tell the "real" reason someone visits
a particular site. Traffic means nothing unless it is controlled traffic that
you generate for a particular reason; whether it be to read an article or to
sell a product

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alain94040
The obvious answer: try a few different options and report back here on how it
went. Put ads on that one page. See what happens.

Then try an affiliate link for related books or stuff from Amazon. See if it
works better.

Don't do anything that you'd feel bad about. I'm guessing that your goal
wasn't to profit from such traffic. That's why I'm saying to just put ads on
that one page, not your entire blog.

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kilobugs
I think hight traffic means income certainly, if you have good blogs you can
generate income through Affiliate marketing, advertising, and adsense as well,
but you just require to familiarize yourself with those areas and you will
make good income out of it, even be able to quit your job in the couple of
months.

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antidaily
Ah yes, Allison Stokke. Not only is she cute, she's actually very good at pole
vaulting.

