A Website Costs $11.08 a Year Plus Hosting, and Earns Nothing for 6 to 18 Months. Here Is the Sheet Before the First Cent

Why this pays

Most people who ask what a website costs are asking about month one, and month one is the cheapest month the site will ever have. The real bill is the 18 months a new site typically spends earning nothing, and the real question is what has to be true before the first ad network pays. Both are on the sellers' own pages.

Eighteen months of a site that reaches AdSense in month 6 and Monumetric in month 12 has spent under $300 and been paid twice. Zero in the income column until the first gate is the normal case, not a failure, and the sheet that says so on day one is the whole play.

The play, in three lines

1. Buy the .com at Porkbun for $11.08 and write it on the sheet twice, this year and next; put it on Cloudflare's free plan or $5.88 hosting with self-hosted WordPress, so nothing forbids ads.
2. Install analytics, publish the first posts, then apply to AdSense, the one network with no traffic gate.
3. Write four dates next to four gates, and two months after each, the date the cash lands.

The path above walks every step. What follows is the reasoning behind each and the numbers you quote from.

Where the money comes from

• Advertisers, through a network's share. AdSense passes 80% of AdSense for Content revenue, about 68% when advertisers buy through Google Ads; Ezoic no less than 82%; Raptive at least 75%; Mediavine at least 75%.
• Amazon, if the site carries product links. About 60 days after the month, after three qualifying sales inside 180 days kept the application open.
• A buyer, if it never gets there. A $29 Flippa listing, a 20% Motion Invest commission under $20,000, or Empire Flippers once the site nets $2,000 a month. The exit line belongs on the sheet from day one.

The pain you are selling the cure for

The reader arrives from a search with a question and leaves the moment the page answers it. They never see the ad network's gate, the renewal price or the NET 65 payment term. All of that pain is yours, and its shape is always the same: a site started on a promo price and a free subdomain, which in month 13 pays triple for the name, is not allowed to run ads on the plan it is on, and has nothing in the analytics account the networks want to read. The cure is the sheet, written before the first post.

Step one: the name, at its renewal price

• A .com at Porkbun costs $11.08 to register, with WHOIS privacy, Let's Encrypt SSL, email forwarding and URL forwarding included.
• It renews at the same $11.08: $10.26 registry wholesale plus the $0.20 ICANN fee plus $0.62 in card fees, no first-year-only promo.
• The renewal is the number for the sheet. In month 13 the site pays it having earned nothing yet.

Step two: somewhere to put it

• Cloudflare's free plan costs nothing; paid website plans from $20 a month.
• Namecheap Stellar shared hosting: $5.88 a month, $70.56 a year, for 3 hosted domain names and 20 GB of SSD, and it runs WordPress.
• A dedicated Hetzner AX42-1 is EUR 97.30 a month plus a one-off EUR 49.00 setup fee, excluding VAT. That is where a site that already pays for itself moves to.
• The first year's hosting line is $0 to $70.56.

Step three: a publisher whose terms allow ads

• WordPress.com's free plan: 1 GB of storage on a WordPress.com subdomain, with WordPress.com's own ads shown to your visitors. Paid plans from $4 a month billed yearly, and running your own ads requires Premium or higher. On that platform the site pays before it earns.
• Self-hosted WordPress on the $5.88 hosting has no such gate, and it satisfies the AdSense line that matters: AdSense only runs on a site whose HTML source you can edit.
• Ghost is the other self-hostable option; its hosted plan's bundled domain is free for a year only.

Step four: posts and analytics before any application

• AdSense's eligibility page asks for original content that meets its policies, access to the HTML source, and an age of 18, and names no traffic figure.
• The networks above it read your analytics before your application: Raptive requires Google Analytics on the site to apply; Mediavine wants clean, human, brand-safe traffic it can see.
• Analytics before the first post, the first posts before the first application. The blog guide walks the AdSense application step by step.

Step five: the gates, in order

• AdSense: free to join, no traffic figure, 80% of revenue, released at $100.
• Monumetric: the entry Propel tier runs from 10k to 80k pageviews a month, with a USD 99 one-time implementation fee.
• Ezoic: no less than 82% of Net Revenue, less deductions for invalid traffic, traffic quality and chargebacks.
• Raptive: at least 25,000 pageviews a month, consistently; at least 75% of ad revenue each calendar month.
• Mediavine: a minimum of $5,000 in annual ad revenue.
• Each gate is a date on the sheet. Until the first date, the income column reads zero.

The wait after you qualify

• Mediavine pays in US dollars NET sixty-five days after the end of the month the revenue was earned.
• Amazon Associates pays about 60 days after the end of the month.
• AdSense pays between the 21st and 26th of the month after the balance reaches $100.
• A second date beside each gate: the month the first money lands, roughly two months after it is earned. A site that clears Mediavine in month 13 sees the cash in month 15.

What ends it

• Google can cut ad serving or disable an AdSense account at any time for policy breaches; a disabled account is barred for good.
• Amazon can end the Associates agreement at any time, with or without cause, on 7 calendar days' written notice.
• Neither clause touches the domain or the posts, which is why steps one and three bought a name you own and a platform you control.

The exit price, before you need it

• Flippa: a $29 flat fee for a 60-day Entry listing under $10K; median time to close for sub-$50K sales in 2023 was 15 days.
• Motion Invest: a 20% seller commission on a sale under $20,000.
• Empire Flippers: not before the site nets $2,000 a month averaged over 12 months.
• The content-site page prices the sale properly.

A realistic first eighteen months

Year one: $11.08 for the name, $0 to $70.56 for hosting, $0 or a WordPress.com Premium plan for the platform, $0 for AdSense, perhaps $99 for Monumetric. Year two begins with another $11.08 and another $70.56. Income: zero until the first gate, then a network's share of ad revenue, arriving about two months after it is earned. Under $300 spent, paid twice, if AdSense comes in month 6 and Monumetric in month 12. That is what a website costs before it pays you a cent, and the sheet is the deliverable.

What to do today

1. Register the .com at Porkbun and write $11.08 on the sheet twice.
2. Open the Cloudflare free plan or the $5.88 hosting, install WordPress, install analytics, publish the first post.
3. Write four dates next to four gates, and two months after each, the date of the cash.