rianjs.net

I've been doing some back-of-the-envelope math lately, based on estimations after my recent slashdotting, calculating, on average, how much a page impression is worth based on Google AdSense from a relatively tech-savvy demographic. I've told some of my close friends my plans for world dominationbuilding a media empire (something I'll eventually expound upon here), and I've calculated that with minor AdSense optimization and a decent amount of tech-savvy readers (that tend to not click ads), a page impression is worth $0.0033495.

Based on my calculations (number of posts + infrastructure costs + authors + misc.) I need $66,240 to operate for 12 months, assuming I didn't make a single cent in advertising revenue, and figure an extra $3,000 for expenses I didn't think of.

Assuming a page is worth that fraction of a cent, I'd need 1.6 million page views to break even, assuming Google AdSense was my only source of revenue. (Which it wouldn't be, but I'm figuring worst-case scenario.)

Oddly enough, technology infrastructure at this point is but a drop in the bucket compared to what paying good writers would cost, so it would make no sense to skimp on the backend. Serving pages on a robust platform costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent in an all-in-one package that most dedicated server packages offer. (The machine is yours to serve as many pages as your bandwidth will allow.) Colocation, on the other hand, tends to charge more in terms of bandwidth. In other words, 1GB of colo bandwidth tends to cost more than 1GB of dedicated server bandwidth thanks to overselling. Colo customers tend to have a better handle on how much bandwidth they'll use in a given month — in theory, anyway.

Fun, fun.

Money, entrepreneurship, writing, start-ups, business, media, Internet, AdSense

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed