$Rich
I picked 5 sites that have an audience heavily skewed toward the wealthy, including linkedin.com, wsj.com, expedia.com, yelp.com and cbssports.com. These sites appear to have nothing in common. But dig a little deeper and you see that they all attract a very wealthy audience, consisting largely of people making over $100K per year.
So how do they do it? How do these sites attract a wealthy audience. They each appeal to different aspects of a wealthy lifestyle. Linked in appeals to business people. Wall Street Journal appeals to people with investments. Expedia appeals to people who can afford to travel. Yelp appeals to people who eat out a lot. CBS Sports... well that one is a mystery to me.
Poor
Here we have five sites that are skewed toward people earning less than $30k per year, including mininova.org, onemanga.com, gamefaqs.com, y8.com and ultimate-guitar.com. You may not have heard of these sites before, but they are all very popular sites, each getting in excess of 3 million unique visitors per month. So why haven't you heard of them? I know a little something about Alexa's demographics and the reason you haven't heard of these sites is because you, a reader of the Alexa Blog, are unlikely to be under the age of 25 or earn less than $30k per year.
So what do these sites do that attracts the young and poor? Mininova is a "torrent" download site where people can go to find free downloads, mostly of movies. The mere mention of the word torrent sends the older and wealthy crowd running in the opposite direction. In contrast, Hulu, which is a free video site where people can watch TV shows and movies, appeals to the wealthy with its clean and simple interface and no mention of torrents. One Manga, the second site on our poor list is a Japanese comics site, which as you can imagine appeals to the younger crowd. Game FAQs is a community help site about video games. Y8 is a free online game site. Ultimate Guitar is a free sheet music site geared toward aspiring rock stars.
Advertisers are a pretty smart bunch and they know who it is they want to reach. You won't find any Lexus ads on the poor sites and conversely, you won't find any Taco Bell ads on the Rich sites. Each site's demographics determines who will want to advertise there. The question for you is what kind of site are you building and who will it attract? The answer to that question will ultimately decide who will be willing to advertise on your site and how much money you can potentially earn via advertising.
