Who runs a small/medium website supported by ads?

It may be viable to run a small/medium website on ad revenue, because a small/medium website doesn't cost much at all.

Hacker News is famously run on 2 boxes. And that is without Cloudflare + CDNs to cache static requests: static websites are practically free. Domains are cheap as well, even a .com domain costs $20/yr and domains like .xyz cost <$5/yr. The cheapest linode cloud server costs $5/month. Idk how much ad revenue pays out but I imagine it can recover those costs.

However, you probably won't profit from ad revenue, and it definitely won't sustain a full income.

I run a small-to-medium (based on your definition) website that is entirely ad-supported. It occasionally peaks into the large territory.

It's not really "viable". This may be because of the industry it's in, which doesn't really purchase online advertising, and therefore cuts into the overall earnings potential.

I run it for fun and for certain incidental benefits, not for the $$$

Whether it's viable or not depends on how much money you want/need to make. Ad networks typically pay out $5 or more per thousand views (many people reporting RPMs in the $30s and above in some niches / geos), so if you want to net USD$10k/month and your costs (content creation, hosting etc) are $2k/month, you'd need between 400k monthly pageviews (at $30RPM) and 2.4M monthly pageviews (at $5RPM).

The viability of this business model has been somewhat dented recently by multiple Google algo updates. Many operators were buying expired domains, scraping People Also Ask questions in bulk from SERPs, and using GPT-3 to create prettily-worded but factually-questionable answers, on a massive scale. The algo changes aimed at these sites (and other types of SEO spam), which in some cases would have been generating six figures monthly, also seem to have taken out many legitimate sites.

I've known someone who did this, they created a website (niche industry, offering docs, and tools), took years for it to gain anything meaningful in terms of ad revenue then one day out of the blue Google just killed their ad account and kept the money still in it. All they got was a "You violated the terms of service" without specifying how, what part, or giving the opportunity to appeal it. It was a boring website, in a boring field, and nobody took an interest until the revenue was even a little high (I believe it was the low 1,000s when it was killed).

Luckily the revenue wasn't enough for them to quit their job and do it full time, but it was still a financial blow.

I guess my point is: Ad supported is a nice idea, but it makes you very vulnerable to the big ad network(s). Even if you do everything right, if some automated system decides you did something wrong, click, you're gone. I've read stories about competitors hiring click-bots to click on ads until you get banned, and while I don't think that is what happened in the above case, it is another thing to be paranoid about.

Me partly, shepherd.com, working to lower the number now as just added them in August and figuring them out.

Shepherd is a book discovery platform, still in baby stages and adding genres this winter!

I want to drop display ads eventually and replace it with in house book ads… but that is a big project, hopefully 2024.

I think Unsplash was kind of like this until they were bought by Getty Images. Really loved they're way of presenting ads.

On a personal note, I tried getting into ads for one of my personal projects (a map of recycling points for my hometown), but Google declined my application because it doesn't have much content on it — though it's kind of absurd because people use my web app, to find locations on the map, not read content. I ended up not doing ads for now, and keep receiving "buy me a coffee" donations.

That depends on various factors, such as how many users one can attract with their small/medium websites, what kind of content is provided by your website, and so on. If for example the content on your website is compatible with an ad-network such as Google Adsense or Amazon Partnernet and you have like 500 users a day, you may earn enough money to pay the server/domain cost of a simple project.

At around 3-5k users a day things start to get interesting.

Also, to chime in with another site I run -> https://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Ads pay for everything there even though something like 55% of people use an ad blocker. My partner has been really improving it and adding user reported issues and slowly going to get more data into the pages.

My website https://officesnapshots.com

We sell and host our own advertising which are static images. No ad network for the last 7-8 years.

The goal is to match the ads to the content and have the content be curated so that only people who care about the content would be interested in the ads.

There are a massive amount of people doing this with their ads or affiliate programs - I suggest looking at affiliate lab or authority hacker which are paid courses but have a lot of examples and interviews of founders who operate in this space. Also Empire Flippers does write a lot about these businesses.

The internet says one can make $5-20 / 1000 views from adsense.

I'd like to hear specific cases if anyone wants to share

I’d really like to know how much money can be realistically made. I have a niche price comparison website getting around 300k page views monthly. Would it make sense to bother with Adsense at this point since other attempts at revenue have not worked out.

Do you consider a news website with 150k impressions a month small or medium?

Go on Quiet Light and you will see lots of small ad supported businesses. Some are very shaky but some have been pumping out cash for years and years!

I run AdSense on a site that gets 300-500k page views p/m. Takes about £60-80 in ad revenue, but I only place one ad per page.

Why have ads at all on a small website? Running one costs very little.