I needed something fun to do with ChatGPT tonight, so for practice, I asked ChatGPT "What's the average number of characters per post/message in an internet forum?"
Answer:
"The average number of characters per post or message in an internet forum can vary greatly depending on the specific forum and the type of content being posted. However, in general, a typical forum post or message may contain between 100 and 500 characters."
Check my math on this: using
this tool that gives me a token count of around 150 for 500 characters, and a $.002 per 1k token price, a forum with 20,000 posts per day would be about $6 - $12 a day (depending on API calls in and out).
I'd imagine a forum doing 20k daily posts is also generating a TON of pageviews and revenue.
... but what does ChatGPT say about this:
Question:
"Best-guess for daily pageviews for a forum that has 20,000 posts per day, and how much monthly revenue that would create on an average forum RPM?"
Answer:
"It's challenging to provide an accurate estimate for daily pageviews based solely on the number of posts in a forum, as the actual number of pageviews can be influenced by many factors. However, assuming an average of 100 pageviews per post, a forum with 20,000 posts per day could potentially generate around 2 million pageviews per day.
Now, the amount of revenue a forum could generate from those pageviews would depend on the forum's RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) and other factors such as the ad placement and the ad format used. On average, a forum could earn a few dollars to several dollars per thousand impressions, depending on the forum's niche and the quality of the ads being displayed.
As a very rough estimate,
assuming a conservative RPM of $2, a forum with 2 million daily pageviews could potentially earn around $4,000 per day in ad revenue or around $120,000 per month."
So, the cost to run ChatGPT API on a forum with 20k posts per day would be (at max) probably $400 a month for a site generating maybe $120,000 a month?