Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Hmm, not even counting the cost of content creation, how much is it going to cost to produce 1M in ad revenue?

They mention 2.5 billion views for $1M. Being very, very conservative in data transfer, that's several terabytes a month. 4k/page is 10 TB (3.858 MB/sec sustained for a month), 32k is 80 TB (30.864 MB/sec for a month), etc. A single banner image off of gamasutra.com (not even flash) was 149k.

The netlink, server hardware, and infrastructure (bought or rented ala rackspace) isn't exactly cheap.



This is highly dependent on what your site does. If you could somehow get that much traffic on a blog, the cost of bandwidth and servers would be very low (tens of thousands at the most, say 5% of your revenues).

On the other hand, if every page view is extremely heavy with a long tail of uncacheable content (e.g. Youtube) or computationally expensive (web search engine), then bandwidth and servers become a significant percentage of the revenues.


If you are doing 2.5 billion page views a month, very little of your content is likely to be coming from your own network.

The vast majority is likely to be delivered from a content delivery network like Akamai, at a much lower cost than hosting it all yourself.


if you are making a million/mo in revenue, you can afford to spend $100K/mo on servers/bandwidth.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: