Roughly how many users minimum does a website/blog need to have to make a decent income off of advertising (google adsense and other ads)?

It all depends on your audience and what kind of ads you serve. Your content will also come into play with how many page-views you get.

For example, the Apple crowd are less likely to click on ads versus regular Windows users. (unless they’ve got Adblock or something, then forget it)

If you want to make money don’t appeal to a geek audience ;)

Oh fun, a math problem.

Let’s say you’re making $1 CPM which is reasonable if you’re focused on having users that come back regularly but maybe low if you’re looking to trick people into visiting (at which point the ads become a convenient exit).

$1 CPM means that for every 1000 page views you make $1.

I think most sites average 5 or so page views per visitor per month. That seems low because it’s coming from Google analytics, which doesn’t differentiate between random visitors and visitors who have accounts. So let’s say it’s 50/50.

You want to make $4k/month because you could live off that (although most people who are capable of making a site that makes that much money are also capable of getting real salaries so maybe the number should be $10k).

Working backwards, $4k would require 4,000,000 page views per month ($4000 x $1CPM).

At 5/views/visitor/month you’d need 800,000 visitors.

Guessing that half of those have accounts, you’d need 400,000 users. Now that I’ve gotten this far, I think those have to be active users. Probably framing this in terms of users is just too hard to answer.

I did work for a site that had 200k users and tried adsense and these numbers were in the ball park.

Some people do much better and my take away is that you can’t just create any site and expect to get make money.

“I did work for a site that had 200k users and tried adsense and these numbers were in the ball park”

what do you mean? roughly how much was the site pulling in each month with 200k users?

I think $3k but the site got a lot of traffic from people who didn’t have accounts (and not that many people with accounts were active).

To create something widely popular it would have to have an appeal to a lot of people and regularly updated content .

I make $800/month from a niche site that does 1.5M pageviews from around 150k unique visitors. The category is a ‘cheap’ one so the ads don’t pay much… but hopefully these figures show you what can happen on the low end.