What could YOU do with 11,000 unique impressions/month?

[pdxi]

Okay folks...

It looks like I'm in charge of a network of sites which, combined, average 11,000+ unique impressions per month.

If you could get this number of visitors, tell me what you'd do, and what kind of revenue you think you might be able to pull in.

And, if I'm foolish to ask this question, please tell me. The last thing I want to do is be rude by asking a dumb question

[fryman]

That's only about 360 uniques per day.

Unless you have a very targeted audience you will only make a few bucks.

[Snecx]

If that amount is for a week then Adsense might bring you some dollars. I get about 1-2k uniques per day on my personal site and it brings me only about 1-3 dollars per day.

[pdxi]

That's only about 360 uniques per day.

Unless you have a very targeted audience you will only make a few bucks.

Nice avatar, by the way

I find it hard to believe that 11,000+ unique hits per month would generate very little revenue, but I've never tried affiliate programs before.

My goal is to build up these sites with content. There are 640 sites in this network, and I think that there is enormous potential to be explored. Currently, all of these sites point to the same page; hopefully, the number of page views will increase once content has been added to each site.

[pdxi]

I have to add that I made a mistake in the reporting script that I wrote. The network is averaging 600 hits per day, with zero content.

[fryman]

Forget about hits, to be able to calculate any potential earing you need to focus on how many uniques you get per day, how many pageviews, and from what country do your visitors come from.

[Jing]

The network of 640 sites with 11,000k uniques a month, average about 0.6 visitor a site a day? That's very little. I don't think you could make much money out of it actually. Even if 11,000k uniques are on one site, it's still not a lot, but I think you would at least be able to squeeze out better dollars.

[ethanp]

If it was one website you'd have more potential, but 640 is a little over the top. Each site is barely getting viewed, let along read. You can probably only squeeze out a few bucks if you're lucky.

[aspen]

11k uniques from 640 sites?

I doubt you'll make up your domain name fees.

Lets look at it this way, one of my sites gets in one day what you get in one year. My earnings, daily, are around $500. So you could expect to earn around $500 a year with that traffic I think.

However, you might find it even more difficult, since no single site is likely to have enough traffic for ad network acceptance.

Now, assuming you're using a domain for each site, you're looking at $5000 a year in domain costs.

[moncur]

I agree, 11,000 uniques per month just isn't that much. On my sites at that traffic level, I don't bother running ads yet because it isn't worth the trouble.

Best case scenario, if your site was on a really high-paying topic and you ran AdSense, you might make $30-40 a month. But it's certainly not worth paying for 640 domain names...

[mwack]

640 sites and 11,000 unique hits.. yeah... not that great. Now, if one site were getting 11,000 uniques a month, you could do something. One of my sites is currently getting about 200 uniques a month (sandboxed), but I'm making $100-$200 from it. But 640 sites? I wish you all the luck in the world.

[angryads]

If only have traffic with poor quality, no advertisers will be interesting.

[Snecx]

Sheesh, that's for 600+ sites? Ignore about my previous post.

[GeorgeB.]

"....640 in this network"

You MUST be talking about some type of free hosting site. Forums, general free hosting, etc.

If so just keep building your network. As stated here you'll only be making a few dollars per day but if your network grows you'll ge there. I live on both sides of the line. I have a small group of massive sites I never mention here on SitePoint and a large network of small sites (2K uniques and below) that I do advertise here. I treat both networks like a seperate business and "graduate" sites to the big league network as it happens. So I said that to say that I see the difference between high trafic and low traffic sites every single day. So I speak from experience when I tell you that every bit of advice given in this thread so far is dead on.

[OnlineGuide]

Yes, it takes time to grow. 11k a month is nothing. On some of my sites, I do that in a few hours. The info you are getting from SitePoint members doesn't get much better. One of the unique things about SitePoint is that chances are everyone from every leve (small site, medium site, large site) is here.

[smartboyinuk]

What is the TOPIC of your site ?

This is very important. If your sites are business or finance related, then you can squeeze something out of it, but if its entertainment related, with 90% traffic outside USA, I would say that you may not qualify for Adsense's monthly cheque.

[pdxi]

"....640 in this network"

You MUST be talking about some type of free hosting site. Forums, general free hosting, etc.

If so just keep building your network. As stated here you'll only be making a few dollars per day but if your network grows you'll ge there. I live on both sides of the line. I have a small group of massive sites I never mention here on SitePoint and a large network of small sites (2K uniques and below) that I do advertise here. I treat both networks like a seperate business and "graduate" sites to the big league network as it happens. So I said that to say that I see the difference between high trafic and low traffic sites every single day. So I speak from experience when I tell you that every bit of advice given in this thread so far is dead on.

Oh, no - this is basically just a bunch of parked domains. No content. Nothing. Basically, what we're trying to do is build a network of sites on domains that are already attracting attention.

We own some of these domains outright, and some of them are being "loaned" to us. My goal is to find useful applications for the domains that we own, so that they will generate more traffic toward the other domains which are being "loaned".

I'm sure this sounds wicked strange, but I'm trying to not give away too many specifics. Basically, what I'm trying to say is "By some anomaly, I've got 11,000+ hits/month to point at something. What do I do?"

[KLB]

One very important factor about the 11,000 uniques, is how much of this traffic is from real humans and how much is from automated processes (e.g. search engine bots, pre-caching programs, etc.). On some of my sites, non-human traffic can account for a very large percentage of the total traffic.

If there is no effort made to seperate out actual page views/impressions by real humans and those generated by automated processes, those 11,000 unique impressions could have little to no value.

[krohnathlonman]

My site has had 18k visitors in a single HOUR on quite a few ocasions. daily average is above 100k uniques/day......

pretty much all you can do is sell traffic like some of the traffic sales people do but you're not pulling anywhere near enough traffic to do that with.....

My opinion is you don't even have a chance to make enough to pay domain fees no matter what you do..... If its supposed to be a business, bail out and quit spending money on it.

Also BTW google/yahoo always generate above 100k impressions/mnth for me since I have an insane amount of pages...... You'll want to run filters to see how much of that traffic you mentioned is spiders.

[Cutter]

Parked domains? So the traffic is basically type-in? I'm guessing you are parking it with PPC pages?

Are you holding them for resale, or do you want to develop them? The subject of names are very important too -- some topics can barely make $1 per thousand uniques, some can make hundreds (like free games vs home refinancing.) Since you don't want to reveal details, then you will have to do all the research on your own. Use overture and wordtracker plus any data you have.

For you, it may be worth more just to sell the domains.

[pdxi]

Parked domains? So the traffic is basically type-in? I'm guessing you are parking it with PPC pages?

I wrote a script to record where the visitors are coming from, which documents are referring them, etc. We're getting a few hits from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I can assume that the rest is type-in.

Are you holding them for resale, or do you want to develop them? The subject of names are very important too -- some topics can barely make $1 per thousand uniques, some can make hundreds (like free games vs home refinancing.)

At the moment, we're not planning on reselling the names. We're trying to use the traffic from these domains to promote our primary business. Yes, the primary business has something to do with domain names. Some of these domain names may be built up with content, but we're still not entirely sure at this moment. I think we'll try to figure out how to maximize our "pull" and/or revenue while spending the least amount of time on managing content. But that's everyone's dilemma, right?

Since you don't want to reveal details, then you will have to do all the research on your own. Use overture and wordtracker plus any data you have.

Yeah, I realize this now. I've always known that not all traffic is "good traffic": it doesn't make any sense to hawk mortgages to someone who won't or can't buy a home, for example. This is only a first stage in exploring what we can do with our assets... we're examining this option along with a few others.

For you, it may be worth more just to sell the domains.

Possibly. At that point, though, we have to wonder about what will bring us more revenue, and at what cost: Selling the domain names at an increased price, or developing these "properties" for a small dividend, spread over a few years' time.

So, yeah. We're not really sure what we're going to do at this point, but thanks to everyone for offering great information!

[KLB]

I wrote a script to record where the visitors are coming from, which documents are referring them, etc. We're getting a few hits from Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I can assume that the rest is type-in.

Incorrect. The vast majority of hits without referer information is not created by type-ins, rather by users who have their browsers set to block the passing of referer information or by automated processes that spider your site while spoofing the useragent string of standard web browsers.

[pdxi]

Incorrect. The vast majority of hits without referer information is not created by type-ins, rather by users who have their browsers set to block the passing of referer information or by automated processes that spider your site while spoofing the useragent string of standard web browsers.

Sure, but any guess as to how these people/robots are getting to these sites is purely speculative. A smart thing to do might be to do reverse lookups on all of the visitors' IP addresses (which I am logging) to see which visitors are within MSN's/Google's/Yahoo's IP blocks.

[KLB]

My point was that people aren't typing in directly to your site, rather they are coming in via search engines, etc. They are just not telling you their referrer information. Of these unreferred hits, the vast majority come from automated processes simply spidering sites for all kinds of reasons. These processes include malicious purposes such as worms like Nimdy, email harvesting bots used by spammers, etc. It also includes innocent processes like various bots that simply spider sites to see what kind of response times servers have and what software the server is using for statistical purposes.

On my site, via an extensive analysis of my logs, I have been able to determine that about 1/5 of all traffic to my site is the result of automated process likes bots. Small or low traffic sites may see a higher percentage of their traffic resulting from automated processes simply because of how many such processes are active on the Internet.