Ask HN: Is Google Adsense worth it for a small website?

[tablock]

I've made a small website and over the past year it has averaged on a monthly basis 4000 visitors, 40% bounce rate, 4 min avg. sessions and 10,000 pageviews.

The website is focused on a niche area and takes a few hours to maintain each month as it's a directory of resources. Similar to Startup Stash (http://startupstash.com/), but a different area and on a smaller scale.

I've been doing cold-emailing to secure advertisers, managed to secure a few, but overall not a positive response. And it is a time intensive exercise; identify relevant companies, tailor the message etc.

So I've been thinking about using Google Adsense. Does this make sense for such a small website? Any other suggestions on how I can monetize a curated website? Not looking for huge sums, but it would be fun if it could generate something.

By the way, I'm new to all of this so appreciate any advice.

[enkiv2]

Adsense pays a fraction of a cent per click-through, and less (sometimes nothing, depending on the site) per ad impression. It doesn't pay out until you credit reaches $100. So, with your level of traffic, you could conceivably get paid $100 a year by adsense, if none of your visitors used adblock.

On the other hand, adsense doesn't take much effort to set up, so it may be that the ten or twenty minutes of your time spent setting up adsense ads once will be worth the hundred dollars down the line.

In my experience: I run adsense on many youtube videos and several sites, and have done so since 2006. My balance went up to $8 during 2006-2007, and is currently at just under $10. I have never gotten a pay out. At the current rate, I will get paid in 99 years. I do not get 10k pageviews per month in aggregate across all my sites, though.

[tablock]

Thanks, appreciate the insight.

[selfmadecelo]

I can chime in with some numbers from my small site.

This month Adsense shows 23,489 page views with an estimated earnings of $7.53. I've only added it in the middle of December so January will be the first full month of having Adsense.

Hope that helps.

[tablock]

Thanks for the numbers. I don't think it will be worth it for such a small payout. I've been against ads from the start, but at the end of the day, it takes time to maintain a website. I'll have to look at other options.