I started the site with my friend and my girlfriend back in February while I was still in college. It took off.
Like I said below, I only got direct advertisers in July, so it took awhile to grow. I was making about $1200 / month from Adsense in May/June, and some of the space has been sold to direct advertisers and I still make about $900 / month just from adsense, plus more from the advertisers.
I'm still looking for more, but the project has taken a backseat to my new project: Djangy.com
I basically went and bought a High Times magazine and contacted every. single. company. that advertised in the issue I had.
I got a handful of responses, and one of them took a chance and gave me $X to try it out. I'm still waiting to hear if he wants to continue advertising.
The other one took longer to get, but I'm sending a significant amount of traffic their away and they're seeing revenue from the traffic, so it will likely continue.
RE: traffic -- My visitors are by FAR mostly coming directly. Which is a great position to be in. The other misc. Facebook was an early source, but not very high (no pun intended). Once I added "like" buttons to each story, facebook skyrocketed to the number 2 traffic referrer. Then there is traffic from StumbleUpon, twitter, a few blogs, and lastly organic search. But the search keywords are mostly just "that high", nothing outside the name of the site.
I'm sure there is a TON I could do to get more visitors. I would like to focus on it more and turn it into something that makes alot more money than it currently does. I know if I put some more time into it, it could make a ton of money, I just have to grow it, and that takes time.
It varies between 900k - 1.3M page views per month. Fluctuates between 90k and 110k visitors. Like I said, I haven't touched it in quite some time, as I'm focusing literally all of my energy on Djangy
Built the site back in February and got my first direct advertiser in July.
I've learned that these things unfortunately take time. Trust needs to be built, traffic needs to happen, and companies are sometimes understandably reluctant to shell out a bunch of money for some ad on a website they don't really know anything about.
But if you can provide actual traffic for them, they'll pay for it.
Congrats on your success, but getting to >$1K/mo. in under five months seems incredibly fast, especially for something that requires such little maintenance.
Can you expand a little on your expectations? Maybe provide some more context?
It seems like a lot of developers let their projects tread water unless they see extraordinary profits in extremely short time frames. Maybe there was a large up-front investment?
I'm guessing that there are a lot of these projects sitting around; does anyone know of a marketplace to partner or buy/sell these types of businesses? The ones I'm familiar with (flippa, sitepoint) don't generally cater to projects with existing cashflows.
Just really curious to hear your story.