I was inspired by a thread The Business of Software – Making a million bucks/year in revenue from a Hacker News submission to figure out just what it would take to make a million bucks a year from my free online dating site. The original thread lists out what revenue per hour or month you would need at what prices to make a million dollars a year. I’m not accounting for taxes or overhead here I am just interested in the gross income.

The numbers are not exact as nothing actually divides up nice and evenly into dollars and cents. To make a million dollars a year you need to make $2739.73 per day. I’m going to calculate out for AdSense revenue only here from my current numbers. No traffic details, CTR or CPC will be posted.

So from April 2010 lets say that my gross revenue per AdSense impression, this is per banner slot not per page view, was $0.0027457700650759. At this stage all those fractions of a cent mean a lot to me so bare with the over-sized number. This means that for my free advertising based site to make a million dollars in a year I would need to get no less than 997,801 AdSense impressions per day. Not to mention I would have to also miraculously keep my revenue per impression no less than $0.0027457700650759 for an entire year.

I happen to only have one banner per page, lets say I keep with that for this theoretical success year that means I’ll need 977,801 page views per day. So to make a million bucks a year from free:

• 40,742 ad impressions per hour
• 977,801 ad impressions per day
• 356,897,365 ad impressions per year

Wow, growth never scales like you want and the graphs never grow forever so it would actually take much more than that per year to make a million bucks.

Now I don’t get much organic traffic much (yet!) so to see those kinds of page views per day it would cost about $14,834.49 per day on AdWords to drive that traffic or around $5,414,590.51 per year. This does not take into account the vast increase of return users per day if I had $14k a day lying around to drop on ads. I’d have to spend a lot more time making ads if that were the case. So those numbers were just for fun I guess.

Anyway, when your product is free you have to get an enormous amount of traffic, more than I’ve seen yet but it’s only a matter of time and focus!