How many visitors per day does a site need to draw any significant ad revenue?

Lately, I've been considering different ideas for new sites, but the first and biggest question is how to make money with a site. When I can't think of an obvious way to make money with a site, I think ad-revenue. But what level of visitors makes a site viable through ad-revenue? How many visitors is it going to take to justify time and effort spent on the site?

Assuming I don't litter the entire page with ads, probably just one or two per page.

How many visitors a day would I need to make about $100 a week from ad revenue?

Want to know a secret ??? You are pissing away your time if you are chasing CPM profits! These are great for sites like wowebook or other sites which nobody would really advertise on.

Here is how you make money as a publisher.
1. - sell your inventory for a fixed cost, BuySellAds.com is a good way to do this.
2. If you are smart, then you write the proper content that trigger PPC clicks. Thats where you can make decent money.
3. - You partner with businesses, and join affiliate programs. You sell leads, or make sure that when someone clicks your link you get paid big time.

I would look for affiliate programs with recurring commission structures.
So you can continue to grow, rather than start fresh each month.

You can get pretty sneaky, and setup sites to promote products and make decent income from it. But if you are that smart, chances are you can find even better things to do.

I assume you're referring to US$, rather than any of the many other dollars that are used around the world.

You might be able to get as much as US$1 per thousand pages. Assuming the average visitor loads two pages (pretty typical), then you would need 50,000 visitors per week (just over 7,000 per day) to make US$100 per week.

Jack Spirko (http://www.jackspirko.com/ ) says when you hit 20k-30k visitors per month, you should have no problem going out and getting 3 or 4 sponsors to pay you upwards of $250 a month for banners or other ads.

Here is one of the many shows (about 15 minutes long) where he talks about sponsorship --
Episode-53- How to get Sponsors for a Podcast, Blog or Website One concern I have with only making $100 a week is that you might be monetizing too soon. Grow your audience to 20-30k before you try to make money. Otherwise your priorities are misplaced.

Check out How to estimate revenues/valuation of an advertising-supported internet website? Here is my answer to that quesiton:

There are a whole lot of variables
that go into estimating the revenue
potential of a website, but there is
one variable to rule them all. It's
the audience.

Asking "if my site gets X pageviews,
how much can I sell it for" is like
asking "I have X pounds of metal, how
much can I sell it for?" Since gold
sells for $1000/ounce and iron goes
for $200/ton, it's a pretty silly
question. The same holds true for
pageviews.

HR.com, a resource for HR
professionals, charges upwards of
$80/CPM. I've heard that MySpace and
Facebook charge in the fractions of
a penny per CPM. That's a pretty big
spread of zeros, and your site will
fall somewhere in the middle depending
on the audience.

For your projection, I'd start with
two "number of zeros" estimations and
pick the midpoint. Guess these based
on how close your audience aligns to
the top end (say, Fortune 500 CEOs
at... oh I don't know, $100.00/CPM)
and bottom end (children in 3rd world
countries... at $0.000001/CPM).

If you were to pick $0.10 and $1.00 (a
range I'd say appropriate for young
American professionals earning >$50K),
you'd have $0.55. Then multiply it by
the number of pageviews each month.

All of the other variables (such as
numbe of ads per page, layout, etc)
aren't really important now since
those have a relatively small impact
(relative to audience) and can be
adjusted later.

Web CPM used to be one lucrative concept till 2 years back. I used to see returns of $3-3.5 CPM certain times. This means to make an income of $100 per week, you'll have to just get a traffic of 30000 page views for your site. This was with one popular CPC program which you might be able to guess.

Also, bringing in traffic used to be having "some content" and a lot of link building till that time. And a lot of traffic used to come from Google. But recently Google has changed its logic to show relevant results only of the content is good and I believe the power of links have gone down in terms of pulling lots of traffic (though it is still a base requirement).

Certain other programs like In text links also were making some more. But as with time, the returns dropped and the CPMs are currently $1-1.5. So, actually selling some products is actually a good idea and if you have good marketing sense, persistence and hardwork, you should be able to pull it off $1000 per week quite easily. But beware, it needs

• a lot of hardwork
• wisely picking the product which you love
• picking the product which has some demand in the market
• Right affiliate programs
• or you sell the product yourself (May be like a distributor or even a manufacturer)

The one problem I find with affiliate programs is that there are a number of options which market products which are non-essential. In my view this becomes too tough to pick and market also. I would actually prefer some product which is required/essential for a section of people and then start selling them (either as affiliate or as direct seller)

PS: By writing this, I am actually revising this note to myself as well. I would have to roll my sleeves and do something for myself :)