This is a first approach to the issue of Adsense Income estimation. Most webmasters create sites with the intent of earning money from ads, and usually their expectations are overrated.
We designed a calculator based in several factors known to influence AdSense revenue:
– extension of project (the more content, the more chance to earn from ads)
– language (English paying triple than Spanish, for instance)
– subject (cars earn more than bikes)
– Clic-thru rate (CTR). A measure of how attractive are ads for users. Hard to master, but critical for success. There is a whole discipline called “adsense optimization” that addresses Adsense revenue at the time of writing and designing websites.
– Ad density (there is an optimal ad density, and it is dangerous to drift away from it)
– SEO (the site needs to rank top in Google, otherwise it will not earn money)
– age of project (ranking improves with time, provided we do not do anything punishable)
We also included development costs, based on the amount of text. Of course we cannot compare a good writer with a software that generates text based in simple rules. But provided we pay a ghost writer 5 cents per word, no matter how good or bad, we can calculate the cost, and compare it with the previsible revenue.
Finally, we add the number of days necessary to recover the initial investment. We assume that hosting and web maintenance are very cheap, which is the case in most cases. Of course, it would be better to grow a site slowly and regularly, and keep a link-exchange campaign and fresh submissions to directories. However, we leave this out of the calculator for simplicity sake.
This is intended for domain owners who want to get some revenue from their speculative domain activity, and also increase the selling value of their virtual real estate.
The calculator provide results that match quite closely our current Adsense campaigns, although there is always room for improvement.
This calculator is open for discussion by Adsense gurus.