Ad revenue questions? What is the reality?

[Salinger]

As I'm developing my website, some questions I am still wrestling with are:
How much money can a site with modest traffic actually bring in from advertising revenue?

How much traffic do you need in order to generate a reasonable income from ads alone?

I'm currently leaning toward a mostly subscription-based model, with ad revenue secondary. If instead I make the content free, could the additional traffic (and corresponding ad revenue) make up for the foregone subscription revenue?
I tend to think not, but maybe someone can shed some light on the numbers needed. How much more traffic/ad clicks would I need to offset say, $19/month?

 

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[Andrew]

Two big variables -- niche and country of origin.

What you are asking right now is as generalized as asking can I make money selling stuff? Big difference between selling cars to Americans and apples to Iranians.

Moderate value niche with US traffic, $19 a month is easy. Say you are get $1 CPM (very low for a niche content site), you'd need about 612 pageviews a day.