Hey everybody,

My team is developing a user-generated-content platform, which also has a social component. It will be free to use and all revenue comes from advertising. We will be using different forms of advertising (CPM, CPA, affiliate product links), all of these make sense for our platform.

I'm trying to get an estimate as to how much revenue is generated by one user? (factoring in powerusers and passive users, taking the whole revenue and dividing it by the amount of users to get the mean) Is there any kind of rough estimate or rule-of-thumb that says something like "one user generates about 50 cents ad-revenue per month"?

Second: I'm curious about common user-growth statistics of these kind of sites (think yelp, oink, quora, instagram,...). I know that this differs VASTLY from company to company, as some take off like a rocket and get to a million users in a month, while others just never seem to get off the ground. So in your opinion, what would be a realistic user-growth-rate(interval)? Our site is not niche, it's something almost everybody is interested in, so there is no real 'cap' on the userbase. Example stats from other startups are much appreciated!

Marketing wise, we are almost guaranteed a good launch and lots of initial media coverage (maybe between 10k and 100k signups in the first month), but what comes after that is unknown, as we don't have a big marketing budget to 'force' new signups by investing heavily in google AdWords and doing expensive campaigns, etc.

Thanks for any help you can give me!