It may be viable to run a small/medium website on ad revenue, because a small/medium website doesn't cost much at all.

Hacker News is famously run on 2 boxes. And that is without Cloudflare + CDNs to cache static requests: static websites are practically free. Domains are cheap as well, even a .com domain costs $20/yr and domains like .xyz cost <$5/yr. The cheapest linode cloud server costs $5/month. Idk how much ad revenue pays out but I imagine it can recover those costs.

However, you probably won't profit from ad revenue, and it definitely won't sustain a full income.

I run a small-to-medium (based on your definition) website that is entirely ad-supported. It occasionally peaks into the large territory.

It's not really "viable". This may be because of the industry it's in, which doesn't really purchase online advertising, and therefore cuts into the overall earnings potential.

I run it for fun and for certain incidental benefits, not for the $$$

Whether it's viable or not depends on how much money you want/need to make. Ad networks typically pay out $5 or more per thousand views (many people reporting RPMs in the $30s and above in some niches / geos), so if you want to net USD$10k/month and your costs (content creation, hosting etc) are $2k/month, you'd need between 400k monthly pageviews (at $30RPM) and 2.4M monthly pageviews (at $5RPM).

The viability of this business model has been somewhat dented recently by multiple Google algo updates. Many operators were buying expired domains, scraping People Also Ask questions in bulk from SERPs, and using GPT-3 to create prettily-worded but factually-questionable answers, on a massive scale. The algo changes aimed at these sites (and other types of SEO spam), which in some cases would have been generating six figures monthly, also seem to have taken out many legitimate sites.

I've known someone who did this, they created a website (niche industry, offering docs, and tools), took years for it to gain anything meaningful in terms of ad revenue then one day out of the blue Google just killed their ad account and kept the money still in it. All they got was a "You violated the terms of service" without specifying how, what part, or giving the opportunity to appeal it. It was a boring website, in a boring field, and nobody took an interest until the revenue was even a little high (I believe it was the low 1,000s when it was killed).

Luckily the revenue wasn't enough for them to quit their job and do it full time, but it was still a financial blow.

I guess my point is: Ad supported is a nice idea, but it makes you very vulnerable to the big ad network(s). Even if you do everything right, if some automated system decides you did something wrong, click, you're gone. I've read stories about competitors hiring click-bots to click on ads until you get banned, and while I don't think that is what happened in the above case, it is another thing to be paranoid about.

Same happened to me. I ran Adsense and one day received an email from Google saying I was permanently suspended.

I knew I’d done nothing wrong, but there was nothing I could do to prove it to Google. Nor did they provide any useful info on what I’d done wrong.

This was the first experience I had of the perils of Big Tech monopolies holding the keys to entire sectors. Once they shut you out it’s game over.

Since then I’ve not found another decent ad provider. There are loads of awful ones that hit your users with deceptive and obtrusive ads. I just want banner ads, like Adsense served.

Any suggestions appreciated.

Buysellads is great, knoen the owner since the start and we use them for downforeveryoneorjustme.com

I just found this on their site: https://www.buysellads.com/ad-block-revenue-calculator

This is the type of thing I was interested in learning about. So if I have 50,000 monthly visits with people using around 25 pages per visit, and I show 1 ad per page.. it would generate $945.00 per annum. Ouch!

That seems quite low, compare with AdSense,

https://www.google.com/adsense/start/#calculator

I wouldn't trust calculators, I'd compare on reddit just start or just test them.

Me partly, shepherd.com, working to lower the number now as just added them in August and figuring them out.

Shepherd is a book discovery platform, still in baby stages and adding genres this winter!

I want to drop display ads eventually and replace it with in house book ads… but that is a big project, hopefully 2024.

Wow, that's a really cool site. I browsed around and didn't see any ads.

Side note: I had to laugh when it recommended "The Little Engine That Could" because I looked up "The Hobbit"

Thanks! :), I am betting you might have an ad blocker?

Very cool, where did it recommend The Little Engine That Could via the Hobbit? Very curious :)

Congratulations Ben, what a great website!

thanks :), it has been a joy to build and work on. We are getting close to more base features in place and then I can start on the more unique approaches. I should have genres and age groups added this winter, then book series data, and slowly working toward a personalized book recommendation newsletter based on what books and authors you love.

Did you happen to know Cowbird(.com), by chance? (I tried to open it now but it seems down)

It was a website from Jonathan Harris w/ stories from people all over the world.

The way you link books together reminded a lot of that (places, topics, etc...).

I do not, so all fiction? That sounds awesome!

Thanks! Ya I am basically trying to gather a lot of 5 book groupings around mood, theme, and topic (and eventually others). And, use that to help people bump into books better, and find them based on human groupings...

It was all user submitted stories, and the way they were intertwined together was truly exceptional.

You can still kind of see something at the archive -> https://web.archive.org/web/20190511074620/http://cowbird.co...

>based on human groupings

Yes, that exactly.

I hope you can get some inspiration out of it :)

very cool, thanks for sharing :)

I think Unsplash was kind of like this until they were bought by Getty Images. Really loved they're way of presenting ads.

On a personal note, I tried getting into ads for one of my personal projects (a map of recycling points for my hometown), but Google declined my application because it doesn't have much content on it — though it's kind of absurd because people use my web app, to find locations on the map, not read content. I ended up not doing ads for now, and keep receiving "buy me a coffee" donations.

> and keep receiving "buy me a coffee" donations

Is that enough to support the site? How does that work with tax? Are those people considered paying users or is it like tips. Do you pay tax on tips?

In a way it is, but I haven't done anything in the past few months, so it kinda faded. Made $250 from "buy me a coffee" this year, and yeah, I paid taxes on them.

I basically send an invoice for each tip I receive. Talked a lot to my accountant about this, and she said that if I don't invoice the people sending me these tips, I'm doing fraud, and can pay huge fines once I get caught. I think only as an NGO you're allowed to receive tips w/o paying taxes on the amount. I have an LLC, so I have to invoice every income.

It sounds like you're in Europe? They require invoices for everything there.

If you're in the U.S. though...you need to find a new accountant. You don't need to invoice every transaction. It certainly is advisable, for accounting/auditing purposes (much easier to track and verify income), but it's not mandated.

Interesting - thanks!

That depends on various factors, such as how many users one can attract with their small/medium websites, what kind of content is provided by your website, and so on. If for example the content on your website is compatible with an ad-network such as Google Adsense or Amazon Partnernet and you have like 500 users a day, you may earn enough money to pay the server/domain cost of a simple project.

At around 3-5k users a day things start to get interesting.

What happens at 3-5k users?

At what point is it worth creating a self-serve platform for advertisers? Or is that not useful at all?

Depending on your content you gain enough traction to expect a steady income with your website (50k-100k yearly or more). That can be enough to focus full-time on the project if you have enough ideas and potential to grow the project, and enjoy working on it.

When you can't manually handle the updates.

Put a link to advertise here and manually manage it until you have too many ads to manage yourself.

Also, to chime in with another site I run -> https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Ads pay for everything there even though something like 55% of people use an ad blocker. My partner has been really improving it and adding user reported issues and slowly going to get more data into the pages.

My website https://officesnapshots.com

We sell and host our own advertising which are static images. No ad network for the last 7-8 years.

The goal is to match the ads to the content and have the content be curated so that only people who care about the content would be interested in the ads.

There are a massive amount of people doing this with their ads or affiliate programs - I suggest looking at affiliate lab or authority hacker which are paid courses but have a lot of examples and interviews of founders who operate in this space. Also Empire Flippers does write a lot about these businesses.

The internet says one can make $5-20 / 1000 views from adsense.

I'd like to hear specific cases if anyone wants to share

This sounds about right. What I remember reading is that people pay Google Ads to serve their ads to people for around $10 CPM (cost per mille), so that is $10 per 1000 impressions.

And if Google Adsense pays you 50%, you end up with $5 RPM (revenue per mille) for your website.

I think this is similar for Youtube, except those are video ads, I remember seeing "this is how much I made from Youtube" and those were roughly $5-ish RPM and much higher for niche channels like finance etc.

It's also geo and category specific.

I’d really like to know how much money can be realistically made. I have a niche price comparison website getting around 300k page views monthly. Would it make sense to bother with Adsense at this point since other attempts at revenue have not worked out.

Yes, I’ve seen $2-$20 CPM depending on the niche. I once ran a site for furniture manufacturer part specifications and we were getting $50 CPM. Lasted about a year, was over a decade ago.

It’s relatively easy to setup and monetizes much better than a lot of things.

Thank you, I appreciate your reply. I didn’t expect it to be this much either. Even at the lower end of that range, that’s like USD 500 which goes a long way and will definitely help.

Yeah, there's a reason why AdSense dominates. If you are focused on optimizing your revenue, pretty sure Google dominates.

One other hack - AdSense may limit the number of ads per page, but you can also add in niche networks to increase your ads / page. This was 10 years ago, but I found the best option to be 2x AdSense per page, + 1 niche network. The niche network gave about 25% as much revenue as the 2 AdSense units combined - lower return but was still free money.

Thank you for your suggestions. I will definitely give this a try. Any recommendations for niche network. I keep getting mails from linkbux folks but I have no idea if they are legit or not.

(Unhelpful advice alert) depends on your niche. I ran a site related to manufacturing, and used an ad vendor in that space.

Do you consider a news website with 150k impressions a month small or medium?

I hadn't thought of scale really.

I guess something like this:

Personal - tens of views a month

Micro - hundreds of views a month

Small - thousands of views a month

Medium - hundreds of thousands of views a month

Large - millions of views a month

X-Large - 10s of millions of views a month

XX-large - .. you get the idea

Huge - Twitter, Facebook, etc

I had no idea if my website was small or pico. Thanks! I qualify as 'small' in this list and I'm proud of that (10k viewers / mo).

My website is aimed at older children (education), it's no-code Bubble.io and I use google adsense to drive revenue. It _just about_ balances as cost neutral to operate. I do not update any content any more often than once every 3-5 years.

I'm curious about exact numbers, if you don't mind sharing!

Just because the cost neutral could mean a few dollars (static) to a few hundreds.

Go on Quiet Light and you will see lots of small ad supported businesses. Some are very shaky but some have been pumping out cash for years and years!

I run AdSense on a site that gets 300-500k page views p/m. Takes about £60-80 in ad revenue, but I only place one ad per page.

Why have ads at all on a small website? Running one costs very little.

It depends on the website and what you are trying to achieve :)

I run https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ with a friend; it takes a lot of her time to code it, and make sure it is working efficiently, and can scale during big outages on the net. Plus, expand it to offer more data on where outages are happening and what they are. She is a senior dev ops so it needs to be worth her time. I spend my time building out new sites to check, adding FAQ items, and generally all odds and ends to keep it going. My time isn't cheap either.

I run https://shepherd.com/ which is a new site trying to help readers explore and discover books while helping authors connect with new readers. It is not cheap to build, the backend is Django/Python and custom, so I have an amazing part-time freelance developer I work with, a fantastic designer I work with part-time, a part-time editor to do editing with authors on each submission, a full-time person to help me with emails and keep on track of things, and several people helping with data on the books.

Does that help illustrate?