I read this story over the weekend on Tim O'Reilly's blog, and this New York Times article sums it up well. According to VC Jeremy Liew, the traffic required to get a content site earning $50 million a year in revenue is impossibly high - around 200 milllion pageviews a month minimum for a highly targetted site and up to 4 billion a month for a general interest site. And let's face it, could there be one thing, or genre or topic that 6,666,666 million people a day could reliably be interested in checking out?
But - if you and three of your friends would like to make a decent living, or you have visions of setting up a nicely narrowcasted blog network a la B5 media, that's another matter. Making a decent living with low overhead is possible with the ad revenue from small, highly targetted sites, something that O'Reilly called a "lifestyle business"; in other words, you'll never make a fortune, but you also won't have to work for The Man, and can wear your pajamas all day.
link to original post