Sippey (from Six Apart) was inspired by Kotke’s comments (links in post) regarding ad-supported vs. sponsor-supported services.
Sippey then makes a very lucid thought experiment that drives home the it ain’t easy to support a service with ad revenue alone. And, to make it even more interesting, the math is set up to calculate $40k or revenue, which is not really any revenue to speak of for any business.
Oh, and Sippey is talking about a PC browser-based world. Fuggedaboudit, if you are thinking of click-ad-supported mobile services.
Link: this is sippey.typepad.com: back of the envelope.
OK, here comes the hard part. Math! $40,000 at $1.75 per 1,000 page views means that you’ll have to do north of 22.8 million page views in the year, or 1.9 million monthly, or approximately 64,000 a day. Think you have it in you?
It doesn’t take a math genius (like me!) to know that this calculation is highly influenced by the eCPM you think you could earn; if you think I’m off, post your calculation in the comments.
