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Comment by AznHisoka | Hacker News Reader

I find the math behind any consumer apps that depend on online advertising very depressing...

Let's say you get a million visitors a month. With a CPM of $5 (very optimistic), and each visitor = 5 pageviews, that's just $25,000/month. Great if it's just a lifestyle business. Depressing if you're trying to build a company around it.

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Here is a study that shows that the median (not mean) value of internet sites (note that these are not applications, but blogs or forum sites!) is around $500, with a monthly revenue of $133. http://www.slideshare.net/Flippadotcom/how-do-websites-make-...

It's basically that most niche sites have a hard time scaling up to 100,000 users, let alone 1M.

Not sure how well those numbers scale to consumer applications however, but you can probably interpolate from those online advertising/affiliate marketing numbers.

The concept is to not get depressed about $25,000/month, but excited. If you are able to come up with a number of simple products that have a quick development and production time, then with five hits, you are at the $125,000/month. Look at the <insert name of the company that makes that ridiculously simple conversion program that posts here to Hacker News alot whose name currently escapes me>, they have three hits on their hands, and would assumedly be at $75,000/month.

It is easier said than done - you'll be lucky to develop 5 products that total $25,000/month. It takes a lot of manpower to make 1 hit, let alone 5.

I get a little over a million uniques a month (~4mil pageviews) and earn about $2500 / month from ads.

Think I'm missing an order of magnitude somewhere.

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