Has anybody ever built a 1 million+ page view site?

[ausername]

Per month that is.

Obviously any details are completely optional, can understand secrecy if it still exists and not past its peak.

Although historic stories of now dead sites also interesting.

Has been a longstanding ambition of mine to get to that sort of level, I actually had a network of interlinked sites which achieved that collectively each month but never a single domain.

1 million page views per month would be a huge benchmark figure for me.

Although 310,000 uniques per month would be another (10,000 per day in a 31 day month).

 

[martin-s]

We're well past that now, but it's a long, hard slog for sure.

 

[dee]

We're well past that now, but it's a long, hard slog for sure.

Wow.. Do you mind me asking is that one site or a network ?

 

[martin-s]

There are other related sites, but we easily beat those figures just from the one.

 

[ausername]

I actually used to hit 1 million page views per month with a hubpages account, but they took 40% of ad impressions and its hardly the same thing. That doesn't count.

 

[Edwin]

Yes, but that was back in the glory days of the late 90s to early 2000s. Peaked at about half a million uniques a month. Now it’s down to 10% of that because the subject’s not so relevant to most people ie the raw searches are way, way lower.

 

[JMI]

Was doing around 8 million recently.. GA comes alive much more with high traffic, over kill for most. For low traffic WP I used to use NewStatPress, was good enough for most things except e-commerce and it keeps it all in house + good if you plan to sell site as stats are clear to see.

 

[dee]

There are other related sites, but we easily beat those figures just from the one.

Is that your current venture ? The one your putting most of time into. Not your 'other' stuff.

Was doing around 8 million recently..

8 million a month is insane. Must be a popular niche

 

[martin-s]

Anyone fancy giving us a bit of feedback on our latest content project?

www.101adventurers.com

I'll warn you in advance - it's a bit of a mammoth page. 17,500 words roughly, and lots of big imagery.

 

[Admin]

I don't have 1 site that does 1 millions views a month. The sites I have adsense on do collectively sometimes achieve 1 million. I have clients who do several million on a single site per month, one UK client does 5 million a month and it's in part due to the work ive done which feels good.

 

[woffer]

I was trying to see where the backlink drop was, only a small comment link. Love the piece though, is the idea to get some PR behind it or to let it organically be found? was it done as a genuine interest or is the longer term thinking still business related?

We do various pieces and have had features in various national newspapers and top online publications. Never gone to that kind of level before though. Kudos for some great work

Anyone fancy giving us a bit of feedback on our latest content project?

www.101adventurers.com

I'll warn you in advance - it's a bit of a mammoth page. 17,500 words roughly, and lots of big imagery.

 

[dog]

Teach us your SEO and traffic skills.

Was doing around 8 million recently.. GA comes alive much more with high traffic, over kill for most. For low traffic WP I used to use NewStatPress, was good enough for most things except e-commerce and it keeps it all in house + good if you plan to sell site as stats are clear to see.

 

[ausername]

Anyone fancy giving us a bit of feedback on our latest content project?

www.101adventurers.com

I'll warn you in advance - it's a bit of a mammoth page. 17,500 words roughly, and lots of big imagery.

Like it, is the intention just to drive traffic to Amazon? Or part of a wider plan once traffic established?

 

[ausername]

As is typical with my personality type, my initial buzz about my hobby forum domain died down and its now about 3rd in my list of domains I want to develop... sitting in a category all on its own called "lets see if this hobby does actually continue grow into something big in 2018 before wasting time, money and energy"

Entering the very crowded world of 'lyrics' sites, will be a tough one to crack but I've gone genre specific and the first dedicated to this genre (after Rap Genius took VC money and rebranded as Genius, and started publishing Taylor Swift lyrics). This site.

If I can eventually establish traffic then I'd look to sign up as an itunes affiliate and have purchase links on every 'album' plus 'track' page. I know how competitive this niche is, but I like the idea of giving it a shot because its a UK specific genre so most traffic will be British, and there are soooooo many Awin affiliate schemes with fit it, especially fashion (Converse, Brown Bag Clothing, etc), I'm already accepted into HMV for another site.

Unfortunately Discogs doesn't have an affiliate scheme because some of the early stuff and EPs which got very limited vinyl presses are worth some serious dollar, £50 - £100 a lot of it. Suffice to say that I don't give away traffic to large profitable commercial operations for free!

(Go ahead, tag me optimistic, I don't care )

 

[boxfish]

(Go ahead, tag me optimistic, I don't care )

Why are you so focused on traffic figures?

 

[ausername]

Why are you so focused on traffic figures?

If you are referring to my original post, then its because I have a personal ambition to build a site which gets 1 million views per month. Alexa top 50,000 is another one (without buying traffic, organically).

If you are referring to my most recent post, then I'm not sure how you got that impression... because I was pretty clear that I was targeting a niche which was UK specific in order to promote UK affiliate programs, but evidently you don't make any affiliate sales if you don't have any traffic... not really a chicken or egg situation is it? That is definitely a numbers game. The more visitors = the more banner clicks = the more 30. 60 or 90 day cookies planted on computers all over the land?

But my bread and butter is a small eCommerce business, and of course I only pay attention to £'s with that one, gross and net, and 'conversion rates' get monitored fairly frequently.

 

[mibut]

Anyone fancy giving us a bit of feedback on our latest content project?

www.101adventurers.com

I'll warn you in advance - it's a bit of a mammoth page. 17,500 words roughly, and lots of big imagery.

Like it but not sure about it being one page (search engine wise) and do you have permission to use all of those photos.

 

[boxfish]

because I was pretty clear that I was targeting a niche which was UK specific in order to promote UK affiliate programs, but evidently you don't make any affiliate sales if you don't have any traffic... not really a chicken or egg situation is it? That is definitely a numbers game. The more visitors = the more banner clicks = the more 30. 60 or 90 day cookies planted on computers all over the land?

Yeah but all the traffic is looking for lyrics to songs. It's got to be among some of the worst converting traffic there is, same as forum traffic.

 

[Systreg]

You should put a wig and make-up on, and record yourself singling all the songs , could go down well on YouTube and might get some rev there from that.

 

[Adam H]

I've had a few sites generating 1 - 5 million PV's a month between 2009 and 2014 ( All since sold ). The revenue each one generated we're drastically different, with one getting around 3 million page views only generating £500 a month on a good month, was the worst niche id ever been in especially with mostly UK traffic and the rest US, unfortunately it was also the niche/topic I loved so stuck with it probably 3 years longer than I should have and lost a chunk off the value. Dedicated servers which could cope with traffic spikes were expensive back then too, made it hardly worth running the site at all after taking into consideration where my time could have been spent.

Alexa.......laughable, I'm not totally sure what its like today and I don't wish to know. I can't imagine its a metric id ever take seriously. Best Alexa achieved way back then was inside the top 9k worldwide, it was a webmaster related site and was getting around 3 - 5k unquies a day. Other sites around the 9k Alexa, in non webmaster niches were probably hitting 50k uniques a day if not more, total garbage of a metric. It had a fraction of the traffic of one of my other sites in the sports niche rated around 250k Alexa.

Numbers are nice, but only count if they are numbers worth having, revenue was secondary for me luckily as sale value was always the end game. Live and learn. Id probably do it all differently if I had the time to do it again.