It really depends on the audience as to how much you can sell adverts for (and, of course, on how good you are at selling those adverts).<p>It isn't at all impossible to get $10-$20 CPM for basic standard banner adverts, then you can charge higher rates for, as an example, video pre-roll adverts, and you can work on bespoke marketing campaigns to complement banner advertising, which again can provide higher profit margins.<p>The above is from personal experience. For example, the company I've been with for the past few years (essentially since they decided to expand away from being a single website) manages to employ a handful more staff than Reddit on 20m monthly page views.
In stark contrast to B2B where if you get the right niche you can be charging a few thousand per client per month. Even one client == ramen profitable. Then again I guess it's not as cool as having the millons of users required for B2C!
those numbers are probably off...I mean reddit can be considered a very popular consumer internet product(top 150 on Alexa)...and they just hit 1 billion page views per month, and they are having trouble paying for more than 5 people.<p>So if $100mm = 100 billion page views/yr. Then by that logic reddit should be making ~12 million a year, which doesn't seem to be that case.<p>And that would be in addition to the subscriptions people are buying.
Here's a link to the question on Quora:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/What-is-considered-a-significant-number-of-users-for-a-free-consumer-internet-product" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/What-is-considered-a-significant-number...</a>