For a huge number of businesses out there, websites are at the forefront of cash flow. There’s a huge variety of ways sites can make money, and understanding how much they make might well be one of the most important pieces of research you can do. So if you’re wondering how to find out how much a website makes, read on. Whether you’re looking as a part of your own business decision, as a stakeholder of someone else’s, or even just of interest, there are a few different things to remember.
The main way websites make money is through general business profit. For sites that are selling products and services, that means how much profit they make as well as their revenue. It may not be as clear cut if the business in question also takes sales offline, but generally speaking online sales are their own area.
Although it’s not easy to figure out businesses’ sales figures, checking out their business online can almost always lead to their tax or accounting records, whether that’s on their site, in a press release, an investment portfolio, or even in stakeholder resources. It might not be the easiest of tasks, but usually there’s a lot more information available than it might seem.
For many businesses both big and small, money and value come in another way entirely. Instead of having products or services they are selling to consumers, they instead sell ad space. This is how content platforms like Huffpost and Facebook make their money, for example. There is nothing being sold other than ad space, giving businesses a chance to pay to reach you while you engage in the content you love.
To determine how much a website makes from ad revenue, things are slightly less clear. For example, it depends on what kind of ad space is being sold. Video ads in video content may make the content creator more money than a small side banner ad for example. You get the idea. Some of the most useful tools, in this case, are things like the Google Adsense Calculator, to help work out the average value of a site’s traffic depending on the industry (if the site uses Google ads).
In addition to selling display advertising, websites may also make money through sponsorship, endorsement, and affiliation. That means rather than just selling ad space on a site, a business may instead sell blog space, social media association, or product reviews. This is a small selection of what’s available, as people take this to different lengths depending on the nature of their business and partnerships.
To work out how much a site makes in this way, the best thing you can do is dig around the site for rates. It’s very likely you’ll see a price list for the various advertising opportunities that are on offer. When you find which is the most common and how often this kind of thing happens, you can scale it to fit whatever you need and see what the income is likely to be. It does take some legwork and maybe even an inquiry to the site holder for their advertising costs, but it’s easy enough to do.
If you really want to find how much a site makes, the best thing to do is research. Find out information like their web traffic or see their published sales figures, stats, and pricing. There are tools out there that can help with this such as SiteWorthTraffic and Oko.uk, but these are only estimated as every industry, niche, and service is completely unique.
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