Price check for site earning $2.5k per month in ad revenue

[wutz]

I'm not planning on selling my site, but I saw this subforum and figured I would get a price check, just out of curiosity. And who knows maybe if it's high enough it might change my mind.

I started the site about 6 months ago. It's an entertainment site. Has earned a little over $10,000 from adsense over the last 4 months. Hosting costs are $400 per month, could be brought down to $300 easily. Site probably has room to get about twice as big before needing to upgrade the server. It's still growing and has huge room for growth in its niche. Currently ranked about 50,000 on alexa. Has maybe 20k unique visitors per day (250k per month). Approximately 1.5 million pageviews served per day. Content added largely by automated bots, the rest is uploaded by users. 15,000 registered users at this point.

It is, in my opinion, far and away the best site in its niche. I've never done any advertising for it at all, and I would imagine the popularity could be increased substantially with even minimal effort put into advertisement/SEO. I didn't create the site with profits in mind, so there are probably large untapped opportunities for monetization which I haven't considered. I basically just threw adsense up on it and that was that.

Don't really want to post the exact web address (though I can link you to it in a private message if you're interested), so I don't expect anybody to give me an exact price, I'm just looking for a general price range for what I could expect if I did sell the site.

[Spliff]

Established sites usually sell for 12-24 months of income depending on the quality and stability of the traffic, the niche, and the amount of work needed to keep the site up and running.

The entertainment niche is about average for quality of traffic, and if you need to write articles yourself to bring in traffic (I.e. Blog) then it's worth much less than say selling a high traffic forum that runs itself. If your traffic is organic, it's worth a hell of alot more than any site that relies on links from other sites etc.

If you want, PM me the URL an I'll have a look and let you know.

[nykn43866]

I'd also be interested in reviewing the site. Please go ahead and PM me the link and I'll look it over and give an estimate of what I would pay...

[patrickm]

i am also interested. please pm me and i will review the site.
thanks

[wutz]

PMed all of you

[ronrule]

I'm curious why your hosting costs are so high.

[stand856]

Pm me too, thanks.

"I'm curious why your hosting costs are so high."
I would guess due to high traffic?

[wutz]

yeah we served 45 million page views last month, that's a lot of traffic

[Mega B]

Can you PM me the url.Thanks

[ronrule]

Something isn't right with that figure, even on a terrible site you'll still get an average 1% ad click rate. That's 450,000 clicks... even if you were only making 5 cents a click, that's still $22,000 a month.

[wutz]

there's nothing wrong with the figure, and the site is fantastic. but the ctr is much lower than 1%. it isn't a site which is built to sell products. lots of different types of sites have ctrs lower than 1%. if you think you can get it up to 1% by choosing a better selection of ads then offer me some crazy amount of money and buy the site and get rich

what i'm really opposed to is your assertion that the ctr is proportional to the quality of the site. that's just bullshiz. some of the worst sites on the net probably have huge ctrs since they offer no content of their own and give the user nothing of value aside from the ability to leave and go to an advertiser's site.

[ronrule]

Even at 1/100th of 1% you should be making a lot more than you're saying with 45 million impressions. What's the CTR that shows up in your AdSense account, and what do THEY say the number of impressions are? I've always found the number of ads served to be a lot lower than my other stats, even when running IWEBTrack and Google Analytics simultaneously.

[wutz]

wtf are you questioning me on this, i know how much traffic my site gets.

adsense reports 122,017,271 ad impressions over the last 30 days.

78 million ad requests

62 million page views

CTR 0.02%


most of the money doesn't come from CPC ads anyways it comes from CPM ads

[ronrule]

How defensive you are is what makes it questionable, not the numbers. I'm just telling you as someone who's been doing this for 15 years that something is wrong if you're getting that much traffic and only making $2,500 a month on ads. My most popular site running AdSense gets about as much traffic in a month as you get in a day, and it's doing a lot more than $2,500 in clicks.

Maybe it's the ad placement. Send me your URL & I'll take a look. If you're really getting that much actual human traffic and its not bots, you're sitting on a gold mine.

[wutz]

it's odd that you view my responses as defensive when in reality i'm just confused by the fact that someone is saying that the true statistics can't be true, when they are. or that the site must be worse than "terrible", if they are. dunno how i'm supposed to respond to that aside from saying "wtf" and restating that they are in fact correct, and that the site is in fact of high quality.

i'll send you the url. i've also felt that i should be making more than $2,500 per month, but that's what i'm making no matter how i feel about it.

and yes it's all human traffic, but notice that i only get ~20k unique visitors per day (258,036 per month), it's not like each of the 45 million page views are coming from a unique visitor (which would obviously make it substantially more valuable)

tbh i'm not that interested in CPC ads. if i was making just 0.10 on CPM ads i would be in a better position. but i suspect there aren't enough CPM ads in adsense to fill the demand that i have for them, so they send me CPC ads which pay significantly less.