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This is how you make money on the Internet–not with a bang but with a very slow crawl to more viewers.

So now it turns out I need around 1,500 readers to get that $5 for my hypothetical site. Say I want to pay myself $500 for the month. It’s not a ton of money. I need 150,000 page views. That jumped right up there, didn’t it?

And that’s assuming you get a $5 CPM rate from your ad dealer and half of your visitors use ad blocking software.

Ben Kuchera of the Penny Arcade Report breaks down how Internet ads actually pay out and why donation projects like Kickstarter might be the easier way for everyone to be happy.

Ad-blockers, the games press, and why sexy cosplay galleries lead to better reporting