The following numbers won't inspire salivation from media kahunas accustomed to massive margins and huge ad dollars. Fortunately, kahunas don't interest me. No offense.

I'm rejecting the old model because 1) it doesn't naturally work on the Web and 2) if you set reasonable projections and hit high marks you're in for a pleasant surprise; do it the other way around and you're out of business.

A few notes:

• Target Audience Size represents the total audience reached through all distribution platforms. This includes company-owned properties (blogs, Twitter feeds, RSS) and external sites / groups (LinkedIn, Facebook). Analytics tools currently focus on incoming traffic, so I recommend conducting a weekly sweep of all your associated properties to ascertain your current audience size. This sweep should include unique visitors to your in-house sites, RSS subscribers, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn group members, etc.
• These numbers assume you're focusing on one community, but the model can also be applied to content organizations that target multiple communities. Technically, an organization could aggregate communities under one corporate umbrella.
• There's an easy way to understand the somewhat ambiguous relationship between audience, content and for-pay products: "I need X people to pay $Y per year." X represents a 2% conversion of your total audience; Y represents the average each customer will spend across all your products. For example: If you can get 3,000 people to spend an average of $50, you'll earn $150,000 (gross).