Let’s start with some facts and figures… According the “Executive Summary” Blog, Facebook.com has been valued at lest as high as 1.6 billion dollars. In August of 2007 Facebook had 69,296,915 unique visitors according to an article by Max Freiert on Compete.com.  Now let’s consider Facebook’s rival MySpace, the article “Was MySpace Sold on the Cheap?” by Olga Kharif from BusinessWeek.com reports that MySpace.com was sold for 560 million in 2005. According to the same Compete.com article mentioned above, MySpace.com had 26,224,486 unique visitors in August of 2007.

We don’t need to restrict ourselves to examining social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. We can look at companies like Digg.com and YouTube.com. Both of these sites get tons of traffic (YouTube gets more) and both are highly valued.

You might be asking yourself, “What do these juggernauts of online business have to do with me?” Surprisingly the answer might be, a lot.

Let’s say that you started yourself a website and you decided to slap some Google AdSense ads on it as your initial means of monetization. Let’s also assume that in the beginning without much tweaking your value per visitor is 5 cents. You can determine your value per visitor by taking your revenue for any period of time, say one month and dividing it by the number of unique visitors during that same period.

Let’s say that by some magical process you wound up with 26,224,486 unique visitors to your website this month. If you multiply that number by 5 cents you wind up with $1,311,224.3 in revenue for the month. I realize that 26,224,486 unique visitors per month is a problem that few small business owners face. But consider 1,000 visitors a day or 30,000 a month which is a much more commonly faced situation.

In this example your monthly revenue would be $1,500 a month. While $1,500 may be nothing to shout about it is a very healthy start for a budding online business. Especially when you consider a 5 cent value per visitor suggests little or no optimization effort and we are only talking about one monetization channel. We used AdSense here as an example, in reality there are many ways to monetize the traffic to your website.

You could promote affiliate products and receive a commission for every “trackable” sale that you produce. You could sell physical products of your own or information products you may have created. You might decide to sell subscriptions to a newsletter or to a special upgraded version of your website.

The point of all of this is that monetizing your web traffic is not that hard. The hard part is getting visitors to your website. If you can figure out the answer to that one critical question, you can be rich! This brings us to the fundamental rule of online business… You can always monetize web traffic!!!