Trying to make that sort of money using something like an Adsense program is going to take a hell of a lot more pageviews over having a sales force capable of selling high-dollar ad packages.
That isn't to say that sites like PlentyofFish haven't been able to do it, but your CPM has to be fairly high if you're not getting billions of pageviews a month.
Sourceforge doesn't get nearly the level of traffic that Facebook does, but they brought in $5.4 million in media revenue from 36 million uniques in their first fiscal quarter of '09[1].
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Trying to make that sort of money using something like an Adsense program is going to take a hell of a lot more pageviews over having a sales force capable of selling high-dollar ad packages.
That isn't to say that sites like PlentyofFish haven't been able to do it, but your CPM has to be fairly high if you're not getting billions of pageviews a month.
Sourceforge doesn't get nearly the level of traffic that Facebook does, but they brought in $5.4 million in media revenue from 36 million uniques in their first fiscal quarter of '09[1].
1. http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=155376
Isn't a ton of Sourceforge's ad sales direct to Microsoft, for their classic "I lowered my TCO with Server .NET Live 200X Enterprise!" campaign?
Be careful not to confuse uniques with impressions.
Assuming 10 impressions per unique, that's still a very respectable CPM of $15.
That's the point, though, $15 CPM is enormous compared to the article's claim that the social network average is 40 cents.
I can confirm that claim.
This is over a sample of about 3 million uniques / month.