

Ask HN: Estimating Ad Revenue - mikecuesta

Hey guys, I'm currently in the process of doing some revenue estimates and I was wondering if there are an good resources I could leverage?<p>Thanks!
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sachin
Here are some things to think about...

Are you planning on direct sales or remnant advertising? Early on you'll
likely be only leveraging remnant advertising since direct sales requires a
large sales team or sales rep firms.

The next question is how much of your traffic is expected to be US vs
international. US traffic still has some value, versus most international
countries (outside of a few top markets like UK, Canada, etc) have very little
online ad spend. Take a look at the following data of internet ad spend per
capita in top countries to help scale revenue projections depending on
expected country traffic:

[http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pGQagieY9vfGVnTGpCmbg...](http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pGQagieY9vfGVnTGpCmbgJw)

You'll next want to calculate number of impressions you expect on a daily or
monthly basis. Just take expected growth rates for unique visitors and come up
with some realistic estimates of page views per visit and number of ads per
page.

Then take a look at this recent PubMatic report to get some estimates on
average remnant advertising CPMs for multiple verticals:

<http://www.pubmatic.com/adpriceindex/>

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mikecuesta
Thank you very much, this is all I was looking for. Much appreciated!

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ALee
Depends on what you use. Google is actually good if you're just getting
started and you want to learn about CPC and the eCPM of ads.

Just learn these key phrases (CPM, CPC, eCPM) and then, do google searches
from there. You would want to do a bottoms up analysis (for every one active
user, I get 12 pageviews, each 1K pageviews serves 50 cents). Then you just
graph it out.

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mikeyur
There's no good way to estimate it, I'd just go for google ads to start and
see what you're getting and graph that out as ALee said.

Your best bet would be to find out how much traffic you're getting each month
and attempt to privately sell ads. You can get much higher CPM if you sell
private ads versus going through Google.

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sdragon
#1: Google Adwords -see things from the other side of the equalation.

So, basically you go, sign up (best spent 15 bucks, ever), start a new
compaign, and type in a web site with similar content to the one you're about
to build; select all collected keywords, which are related to your venture,
and behold the traffic estimator. Two points of data are of interest for you
here: estimated avg CPC, and estimated clicks/ day; the first one will tell
you how much you would earn _relatively_ to other keywords (remember, G takes
a cut); the other will tell you how much of a niche you are.

#2: fail fast: you actually go out, and build a stub of your grand vision,
stick up the ad network of your choice (it's always best to shop around), and
measure it. You'll get much better data, than any other method -both from ad
networks, and as market research (whether people would actually use your
stuff) Good luck.

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quellhorst
I have had eCPM from $0 to $200+. Its impossible to estimate based on what you
have provided.

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rms
I have one site that is doing $70 eCPM with adsense. You can use that number
for your estimate, if you want. It's like 1996 all over again!

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rrhyne
I have no idea whether my system will prove to be accurate, but it's a start:

Number of users * avg page views a day = total page views/1000 = inventory.
Then do a % of your inventory of sold as CPM * a CPM rate. Next do a % of your
inventory sold as CPC * a CPM rate. Then can ad affiliate marketing % and so
on.

Build all that as a spreadsheet and you can play with all the numbers with all
the numbers as you do research in your space as mentioned on previous
comments.

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wallflower
Arn from MacRumors said it best. Traffic to your site gives you power which
brings along advertising revenue.

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dshah
As noted elsewhere, your revenue from advertising can vary considerably based
on several factors including:

1\. The market you're in 2\. The profile of your visitors 3\. The degree to
which you're engaging them 4\. The kinds of products/services being advertised

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mattmaroon
Just go ahead and guess $0 cpm. You won't be far off.

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axod
Why is this being upmodded? I guess it's funny if you don't have a clue how to
make money with advertising...

CPM rates vary massively with sector. Try it out and see what sort of rates
you get, I don't think you can estimate these sorts of things well.

I run a 'free stuff and competition' website, and that typically gets
$5-$10cpm. For a finance or gambling site, probably multiply that by 10. For a
social network site probably divide by 10-20.

Also remember adsense is only one form of advertising, which works well on
some sites, not so well on others. You can often get better payouts going for
per lead or per sale affiliate programs.

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mattmaroon
How good of an answer can you give to someone who asks for a revenue estimate
for advertising without telling you anything else at all? He either doesn't
understand any of the relevant factors, in which case it's laughable, or he's
for some reason not sharing them, which is begging for nonsense in reply.
Given that he's trying to do "revenue estimates" in this manner, I'd guess the
former.

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sounddust
He wasn't asking us to tell him how much he would make in advertising on his
site. He was asking us for resources online that he could
read/research/utilize so that he could make the estimate himself.

~~~
mattmaroon
justfuckingoogleit.com

