[terra_t]

How much you make on ads depends on your site, your audience, and all that.

Looking at quite a few sites, I see results that are counterintuitive: for instance, you can make more money running ads on a Chevy forum than you can on a Cadillac forum.

You might think that Caddy owners have more money than Chevy owners, however, it turns out that Chevy owners like to trick out their cars with aftermarket parts and Caddy owners (even poor owners of 20-year old Cadillacs) like to have OEM everything... Most of the ad spend is on aftermarket parts... GM isn't going to spend money on caddy forums because the people on Caddy forums know more about GM's products and GM's product plans than the people who make the ads.

I think it's also about supply and demand. Even though people spend a lot on cars, car products and car services, my experience is that there are a lot of topics that pay better than cars. The trouble is that there are too many car sites out there already, so the spend gets diluted Every gearhead and his brother has a web site about cars.

You've got to watch out for "otaku topics" like Anime. Unfortunately, anime fans are weirdos (the kind of ~guys~ who dress up like a purple-haired princess for Halloween) who don't spend a lot of money on stuff, and particularly don't spend a lot on anime because they download it all off bittorrent long before commercial dubbers start negotiating for the rights. 2/3 of the people who like anime already have a website or a livejournal or deviantart page about it, so talk about dilution... Christ, you can't pay for the storage and bandwidth costs for your images...