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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

The real answer is, of course, that it totally depends. Here's some reasonable generic ranges though:

   SCENARIO     CPM AVG     ADS/PAGE     PAGE VIEWS
   --------     -------     ---------    ----------
   Best         $1.00       2            2.5 million
   Okay         $0.25       2            10 million
   Bad          $0.15       2            16 million

You can almost always show more than one ad per page. But, don't over do it.

The primary way to generate significant ad revenue with low page views is to have highly targeted content and sell ads directly for $4+ CPM. It's better to think of this kind of advertising as sponsorship, and charge appropriately (preferably thousands over month+ commitments).

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I have a niche high market value site, generating a CPM of about $26, with a very healthy CTR. It's only a little side project and doesn't receive that much traffic, so it's certainly not my main business. But just goes to show, you don't necessarily need millions of page views, or indeed hundreds of thousands if you select your market wisely.

If it's getting $26 ecpms, why aren't you buying assloads of adsense traffic for it? If you have good retention, surely you can buy customers for less than you make off of them. If each customer averages only $100 pageviews that's still $2.60 a pop.

It's a project from a few years back that failed to live up to my misguided immediate expectations. So it was put on the back burner and now and again I look back and its been making steady progress. I'll get back to it soon and see if I can crank it up a few gears. The investment in time has been done, and it has a foothold, so now it should just be a case of expanding on what's there.

I'm not sure if what you have described would work for my particular site, I think id need an actual product rather than just articles and content, otherwise it's a bit of a gray area?

It is not a gray area at all if the keywords you are bidding for are relevant to your site.

Google will HEAVILY penalize you if they think you are doing "arbitrage" (paying for ads to get visitors who you hope will click on ads) because they think this makes for a sucky user experience. It is fairly easy for them to figure out who is doing this, considering they own the best CPC program in the world to get traffic (AdWords) and also own the best CPC program in the word to sell your traffic (AdSense). That gives them plenty of data to be a law unto themselves, but they have other sources if you decide to be tricky and try something like Yahoo CPC -> you -> AdSense.

Source ? AFAIK, google will penalize you only if the target site is filled with ads. If the target page has useful relevant content then google doesn't care. This is an accepted practice and high profile people have indulged in it (shoemoney for example) without getting penalized.

As far as I know there's no reason not to buy traffic to a content destination. It's not commonly done, but then it's not common to get $26 ecpms.

On a site with a desirable niche audience, you can hit $4 CPMs averaged across 6 ads, so you'd only need ~200k page views to make 5K.

Eek. I get an average eCPM of $0.06.

Those figures sound about right, with the caveat that CPMs can vary wildly over time even with the same audience and website. There is a market out there and what holds today will most likely not hold tomorrow.

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