There is another way to predict how much money you can make online especially if you are planning to make money by advertising - have a look at your competitors' website.
Open your favorite search engine and do a search for your competitors. For example, for this website I would do a search for ‘making money website’. Then click on the first search result.
If the website has advertisements you are in luck. Usually they will also have a dedicated webpage page for potential advertisers. Normally under one of the banners you will find a link called ‘Advertise Here’. Click that link.
This will take you to a gold mine of information. Here the webmaster reveals how much traffic they receive and how much they charge for banner space. All that you have to do is simple math to figure out how much money they make.
Using the data provided on the advertising page (visitors per day * cost of banner per 1000 visitors), figure out how much money the webmaster gets a day for each banner on the website. Finally count all the banners on the website.
Now you know how much money your competitor makes with their website. And now you know how much money you can make with your website.
To provide a specific example, here is the data from my competitor based on their ‘advertising here’ page:
- Daily Page Impressions: 25,000 Daily Visitors: 15,000 Cost per 1000 impressions (number of times viewed) of banner: $2.00 Number of Advertisements on Webpage: 5
It is important to mention that impressions are not the same as visitors. 1000 impressions does not mean 1000 visitors. Every time the banner is viewed it counts as an impression. So a single visitor can cause multiple impressions. For instance, if the banner is on two web pages, then the visitor creates an impression on the first page, then when they go to the other page this causes another impression. And if they go back to the first page then that causes another impression. Three impressions from one visitor.
For one page, and for one banner, my competition with 25,000 daily page impressions receives $50.00 a day. $50 for 15,000 visitors a day.
But the calculation accounts for only one banner on one page. Since there are more than one advertising sections on the webpage we need to add up all the advertising on the page. The competitor has 5 advertising sections on the page. So if we take $50 a day and multiply it by the number of advertising sections (5) we get a $250 a day.
With a little cross multiplication we can calculate that the competition makes $1.66 for every 100 visitors. This is very close to the known value ($1.70/100 visitors) of this website. So it is probably a very good estimation.
If you would like to make your own estimations of competitor’s (or your) website here is the complete formula:
Required Inputs:
DI - Daily Page Impressions
DV - Daily Visitors
CM - Cost per 1000 Impressions
NA - Number of Advertisements on Webpage
RDay = DI/DV*DV/1000*CM*NA
R100 = RDay*100/DV
