1B views=5M$ is an approximation to first order. I'm sure I could be convinced the CPM is off by a factor of 5. However, there's got to be a fairly hard minimum sales/month for an IPO: I didn't know it was $60M/year.
If your goal is to form a business that will make the founders rich, it's good to have some numbers floating around in your head. Maybe I was the only one, but I didn't have these numbers in my head, and I felt they were educational :)
It might not be quite so solid a fact. I've worked on websites with closer to 20m visits a month, and they've been able to swing deals for slightly better CPMs. I suspect that many sites with over 100m visits would probably see advertising opportunities open up if they're aggressive enough, especially if they've been able to collect even a small amount of demographic information on their visitors. So the linear relationship is probably not definite.
Re:The scary math behind Web 2.0
by dpapathanasiou on Friday April 20, 2007 @11:54AM
(#15101)
If you're going to support your business through pure advertising, you need 1B hits/month to make $5M/month.
You need $5 m per month if you've accepted a large funding round and/or have large overhead.
You don't need nearly that much if your overhead is low and/or your funding is relatively modest.
If you're going to support your business through pure advertising, you need 1B hits/month to make $5M/month. Clearly there's a linear relationship.
This is an interesting fact.