

"Traffic is not enough to make any real money" - Fuca

I found this phrase while reading this thread:<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=461296<p>Do you think this is true? If so I am wasting my time.
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eli
If you have lots of highly qualified niche traffic -- the kinds of people that
advertisers actually want to reach -- along with a solid in-house ad sales
team, you can make quite a bit of money off even a moderate traffic site.

If you have tons of traffic, but you know nothing about the audience, you will
get very little money for your ads. Why do you think the washingtonpost.com
has to run ads for home refinancing and mesothelioma ambulance chasers?
Because there aren't many advertisers willing to pay a premium to target "any
schmuck reading the newspaper."

Advertisers aren't stupid. CPM rates have basically been comditized unless
there's something special about your site or your advertising model/targeting.

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timf
I don't think it's possible to make any universal statement about it. We could
make guesses at the ratio of how many people with this business model become
successful with it or not (this depends on your costs and profit objectives of
course). But it certainly _can_ be done.

The "profit objectives" part of that is pretty important. What do you consider
"real" money. On the low end, there are a lot of people making salary-level
income on content driven sites + adwords. Personally, I'd be pretty happy with
that as a start (freedom) and go from there.

~~~
Fuca
I agree, a salary-level would be nice. It is just that sometimes it seems not
a lot of people are making a living out of just ads.

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icey
I would rather have the traffic and not need it than need the traffic and not
have it.

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gojomo
The poster was talking about _his_ project's traffic, not traffic in general.

