Suppose you create 1 web page every 100 days that generates $100 in ad revenue. Alternatively, you create 1 page per day for 100 days. Each page generates $1 in ad revenue. Either way, you end up with $100 at the end of 100 days.
The point is that there are different ways to go about deciding how much content to create—it significantly depends on the quality of the content. A single content page might make sense if it contained a valuable application like TinyURL (see Useful Free Services and Software). If your pages are low-value content, you will need a great many of them to make significant revenue from advertising.
Between the two extremes—a single page of valuable content and many pages of low-value content—lies a happy medium that will work for most content-based sites by creating enough critical mass to draw both traffic and advertisers. If you are just starting out, this happy medium is a goal to which you can reasonably aspire.
Here’s what you need, at a minimum, to have a site drawing respectable numbers at the end of one year:
100 pages of quality content “in the can” to start with
On average, one new page of quality content every day for a year (each page containing about 300 words)