How can I estimate the advertising revenue for my start-up?

You're right, I'll respond yet this question needs a TON of specifics: 1. What type of site is it? Piggybacking on social deal sites is a little vague, and those sites are based on deals and coupons. That traffic is highly competitive, and your competition has tons of money. 2. Your traffic numbers are low, and need page views - how many pages will those people visit, ie 5 pages (which is high) would mean 450,000 page views. 1-2 visits, which is often "normal" would mean just 90-180,000 page views. You need to determine your CTR based on the number of pages viewed and visitors, plus a wide variety of other factors. 3. CTR of 2.5% is pretty high - for ads, you'll see 0.25%, 0.50%, sometmes higher, but to rely on a 2.5% CTR, you better be doing something amazing, and your page views will likely be low... 4. You figured your clickthrough rate on 90,000 visitors, no page views - that click rate is really being optimistic. Getting started, to get those numbers in traffic will take time, and audiences need to respond. Piggybacking again is hard to figure out - in the coupon/deal space, you can get high clickthroughs, just how are you reaching these users in n UBER competitive market. 5. CPC - that's a really high number, who's paying you that? I'm assuming you got that from Google Adwords research? Adsense doesn't monetize that well, you'd want to look at coupon and deal sites to get some metrics, but again, they are aggregating tons of deals, and people visit them...so your competition has a huge head start. 6. To figure out your revenue, as you said, it's making it up...you don't know if they'll be responsive, if they'll click, if you'll get traffic...and frankly your numbers in the deal/coupon space are really low, so you're not going to be a major player. I'd check CPC numbers for coupon sites if possible, research the affiliate world where many of these sites exist, and don't just trust Google. AdWords are a whole different game, that's what people pay to generate traffic for those keywords from Google, which is the best and highest intention traffic on the Internet - no web site comes close to generating AdWords level per click revenue...just not realistic. 7. Figure out who is going to pay you per click? AdSense? Don't think you'll get that high a figure, I'm not researching the deal space or coupon space at this stage, but I'd cut that number way, way down, at least in half. But if you are making projections for a startup, you're basically doing Alice in Wonderland, and making it up. What you are making up could make sense on paper, but in functionality you are many months/years away from generating that high quality traffic, in a space that is known for average/lousy traffic, except for a few big players like RetailMeNot, LivingSocial, Groupon, etc. Best I could do with limited details.

I've been running ad campaigns online for a while, both SEM/Adsense and other ad networks. The two questionable numbers to me are: 3000 daily direct visitors - not sure how you plan to achieve this without any SEO. Even with great SEO, your capped on the search volumes for certain search terms; i.e. how many people at any given time are searching for that particular keyword and how many click through on to your site. Example: Organimi has great SEO for Org Chart Tool - top 3 in most related search terms as well but if I look at our CTR for those terms, its < 80% (why is another blog post in the future but it could be due to meta description, intent behind keywords etc). 2.5% CTR: This is probably really really high. Display advertising is becoming less popular because the CTR's have gone down sharply (partly due to adblock, partly due to banner blindness), 0.05% would be optimistic IMHO. Hence the general movement towards native advertising/sponsored content and content marketing. I ran a month long campaign on a popular blog in our market, with over 300,000 monthly uniques. The campaign itself resulted in 127 visits, a very small CTR. Ofcourse the ad design could have been a huge factor among other things but just to provide some data based on personal experience on why I think the 2.5% CTR is really high. I am assuming you are building some sort of website where you will monitize traffic via ads. Although I've personally not done this, I've run ads via ad networks on various blogs/websites and from discussions I've had with them - its impossibly hard to make any money. Usually their model is a flat fee ($100's to $1000's) for a 30 day ad space (varying in dimensions) or a you sponsor a post ($1000's) which helps them not pollute their audience with unnecessary ads. Unrelated: I imagine porn sites have the highest CTR's though. Take this with a pinch of salt. It's not a one size fits all but since I was asked to answer, I provided my two cents. Here's a shorter answer: look at other people in your space and try to research what their numbers are.

Thanks for A2A! Detailed answers here already so not sure I can add much but I will try a condensed version CTR: Extremely high. Even a .2-.5% might be on the higher side but then depending on ad placement etc. you might be able to get it CPC: 1) Adsense is a 68-32% rev share so any Keyword CPC that you use - do a 68% right off the bat 2) A good chunk of adsense ads (text & banners) actually come from Google Display Network where the CPCs can be very low Bottomline is that I would discount all the variables by a significant % and then build out projections again. I don't know enough about the piggyback business to be specific but in general, generating $6k from 90,000 visitors is unlikely irrespective of the ad network. Affiliate ads might give you that kind of yield if the audience is super responsive Hope this helps!

While it is hard to say with generic information, your CTR seems extremely high and your CPC seems very high. Perhaps 0.20% and $0.70 respectively might be more reasonable to estimate on a speculative project like this. That puts you more in the $126 range per month. This assumes your traffic estimate is reliable which I wouldn't even venture to guess at.

You need real data. and $100 can help you get that. How? 1. Set up a launch rock page with your value prop and a signup. 2. Run adword campaigns - be careful about selecting target keywords, and ad copy. 3. You will get a decent idea of conversion (signups), CTR and spend.

I'd love to know more about the business. But, in general, advertising is bought and sold on a CPM basis. I've seen CPMs anywhere from $0.50 to $10.00+ Therefore, at 90,000 views and even at a $10.00 CPM, the estimated revenue is just under $1,000 / month. However, since you're mentioning CTR and CPC, I may be off.

You need to keep in mind average CPC's for the Search Network and Display Network are very different.  I tend to error on the side of caution when getting this speculative but would agree with your likely going to get 15 - 20% verse the 60% you elude to in your question.  In addition the last time I saw the stats albeit a year or more ago the average CPM cost is about $20 so even if you get that your only at $1800 assuming you calculated the estimated visitors correctly which is complicated enough when you take into consideration Organic CTR's for keyword ranking and impression share which will not be 100%.