Another One Person MicroISV

Following up on my One Person MicroISV post of last week:

Coding Horror in How to Get Rich Programming profiles Paul Preese, author of Desktop Tower Defense, an online game.  Apparently this game is making $8000 per month in Google AdSense revenue.

Once again, this shows that if you can create something that can get a lot of people to a web site, you can make good money with AdSense.  You don't even have to get huge amounts of traffic or expend much effort to get a smaller, decent amount of money from it.  My online games site doesn't get huge amounts of traffic and didn't require a huge amount of effort to create, and yet it too brings in a four figure monthly income, mostly from AdSense. 

As Iggy points out in a recent post, the big problem with a business that depends on Google AdSense is that this source of income could dry up at any time.  While Iggy makes some good points about Google, I think the real risk with these businesses is advertising in general, not Google.  Google is not going to go out of business.  But Google's AdSense revenue is highly dependent on the advertising market in general, and that can and will go through severe slumps.  We saw it after the dot com bust in 2001.  The bottom can fall out of the advertising market and the sites that get all of their money from advertising would be in trouble.

Multiple sources of income is always the key.  If my AdSense revenue were to disappear, that would be too bad but wouldn't affect much since I have other sources of income.  The businesses that make all their revenue from advertising, especially only from AdSense, may find that it goes away as quickly as it came.

But as long as you recognize that risk, it is clear that a lot of money can be made off AdSense.

Comments

[Michael McCulloch]

What kind of eCPM do your free pages receive? I've experimented with AdSense and see about $7 eCPM. Given that figure, you'd need about 150,000 impressions a month to make four figures from AdSense.

While that is not a huge amount of traffic, it is doubtful just any web page could generate that many views. Your free pages are leveraging the overall popularity of your site.

You guys that get good web traffic take it for granted. ;-)

[Thomas Warfield]

My eCPM is much lower than that. A $7 eCPM would be pretty sweet. Obviously, that means my page views are much higher.

Actually, the overwhelming majority of the traffic to the online site comes from search engines or a few external links. It gets very little traffic from the rest of site since the links to it on the main site are obscure.