Affiliate Marketing vs Display Ads for Bloggers

Display ads pay a small, steady amount for every pageview. Affiliate links pay nothing on most pageviews and a decent commission on a few. Which one earns more depends on the page, not the blog, and the quickest way to see it is to put both in the same unit: dollars per 1,000 pageviews.

On our modelled figures, a general-interest blog with US, UK, Canadian or Australian readers earns about $5.60 per 1,000 pageviews from AdSense and $13.60 from a managed network like Mediavine. An affiliate page needs to beat that. A product comparison with a motivated reader often does, by two or three times. A history-of-the-topic post almost never does. All dollar figures here are estimates from our benchmark tables or clearly labelled examples, so swap in your own analytics numbers when you have them.

RPM and EPC are two views of the same money

Display ad income is quoted as RPM, revenue per 1,000 pageviews. If a page earned $11 from ads over 2,000 pageviews, its RPM is $5.50. The guide to eCPM explains the sibling number measured per ad impression.

Affiliate income is usually quoted as EPC, earnings per click. Divide commissions by the number of clicks on your affiliate links. Some dashboards show it per 100 clicks, so check which one yours uses before comparing anything.

To compare, convert EPC into RPM. Take the clicks your affiliate links get per 1,000 pageviews and multiply by EPC. If a page gets 50 affiliate clicks per 1,000 pageviews and each click is worth $0.40 on average, the affiliate RPM is 50 times $0.40, which is $20. That is the number to set beside your ad RPM.

Two inputs drive it. One is how often people click (a function of the page and where the link sits). The other is how often a click turns into a purchase and how large the commission is (a function of the product and the program). You control the first much more than the second.

The break-even point

You can flip the question around: how much must an affiliate click be worth to match what the ads already earn on that page? The answer is ad RPM divided by affiliate clicks per 1,000 pageviews.

Read the table like this. A blog on AdSense with a 2 percent affiliate click rate needs each click to be worth 28 cents to break even. Reaching it takes, say, one clicker in twenty buying and a $5.60 commission on the order, which is plausible for a well-matched product and out of reach for a loosely related one. The same click rate on a finance page earning $13.30 RPM needs 67 cents a click, which is a much higher bar.

The bottom row is worth noticing. If most of your readers are in lower-paying countries, display ads are cheap, so affiliate links need very little to compete. Check that the program ships to and pays for those countries first, because rules differ by program and some are limited to certain regions.

Click rates are not something we can benchmark for you. They swing from under 1 percent on a page that happens to mention a product to well over 10 percent on a table of "best X for Y" with prominent buttons.

Worked examples, by page type

These three pages are hypothetical. Each gets 2,000 pageviews a month from Tier 1 readers on AdSense, and the niche is technology (multiplier 1.15, so an RPM of $8.05) for the first two and news and entertainment (0.65, RPM $4.55) for the third. The affiliate assumptions are round numbers picked for illustration.

Expressed as RPM, the comparison page earns $20 from affiliates against $8.05 from ads. The how-to page earns $1.20 against $8.05. The news post earns 30 cents against $4.55.

Ads are the dependable earner on two of the three pages. That matches the usual pattern: informational and entertainment content has readers who are not shopping, so display is the better fit. Buying-intent pages are the exception.

Which content suits which model

Display ads suit anything with steady, broad traffic. News, how-to explainers, recipes, travel logistics, game guides and reference pages all attract readers who have no reason to click a store link but will see an ad. The more pageviews per visit, the better, since each pageview carries ads. Our guide to website ad formats shows what each unit costs in reader experience.

Affiliate links suit content where a reader is comparing options or about to buy. Reviews, comparisons, "best of" lists, setup guides that need specific gear, software tutorials where a paid tool is the natural next step. Pages built around problems that products solve work too, as long as the recommendation is honest.

Some content works for both. A guide to starting a podcast has readers who read three posts a session (good for ads) and also need a microphone (good for affiliate links). Those pages can carry both without trouble.

Niche changes the balance. Finance and business pay the most per ad view in our tables, with a multiplier of 1.9, so the bar for affiliate links is high there, though finance programs can pay well too. Gaming (0.7) and news and entertainment (0.65) pay the least, which means affiliate links on a gaming page have a lower bar to clear. Our RPM by niche guide lists all the multipliers.

Running both on the same site

It is normal and usually sensible. The trouble is on the pages where they overlap, and there are three things to watch.

Ads can take the reader away

A display ad click sends the reader off your page, often before they have reached the affiliate link. On a comparison page, that costs you a likely commission to earn a small ad click. Consider fewer ad units, or none, on the pages where affiliate links do the most work.

Here is the sum for a hypothetical tech blog with 90,000 pageviews a month, all Tier 1, on AdSense. Suppose 13,500 of those pageviews land on comparison pages, and the rest on how-to posts. Ads on everything earn 90 times $8.05, or $724.50. Affiliates earn $20 RPM on the comparison pages ($270) and $1.20 on the rest ($91.80), a total of $361.80. Both together: $1,086.30.

Now strip the ads from the comparison pages. You lose 13.5 times $8.05, which is $108.68 of ad income. To break even, affiliate income on those pages has to rise from $270 to about $378, a lift of roughly 40 percent. Plenty of pages will not manage that, so test it on a few pages for several weeks and look at actual numbers before removing ads from anything.

Too much stuff on the page

Google's publisher policies, in the "inventory value" section, rule out ads on screens with more ads or other paid promotional material than publisher content. You can read the wording on Google's publisher policies page. A short page that is mostly affiliate boxes with a few ad units around them is the pattern it describes. Pages that are full of useful text do not have this problem.

Layout matters for speed too. Pop-ups, sticky ads and large product boxes can all shift the page as it loads, and our guide to ads and Core Web Vitals covers measuring that. For placement basics, see the AdSense placement guide.

Thin affiliate pages hurt everything

Google's spam policies describe thin affiliation as pages where product descriptions and reviews are copied from the merchant, or content spread across many sites by an affiliate program with nothing added. It says affiliate pages are fine when they add value, with original reviews, testing, comparisons or useful navigation as examples.

A site with a pile of thin affiliate pages can lose search visibility, and that takes ad income down with it. A related risk for AdSense is rejection for low-value content, covered in fixing the low value content message. Google's guidance on high-quality product reviews asks for first-hand evidence, such as your own photos, plus honest comparisons and reasons for any "best" label.

Disclosure rules

If you earn a commission, you owe the reader a disclosure. In the United States the FTC sets the standard, and its Endorsement Guides FAQ has a section on affiliate links. In short:

• Put the disclosure close to the link or recommendation. A single disclosure may work when the link sits inside the review, but if the review and link are separated, readers may not connect them.
• Say it plainly. The FTC says a bare "affiliate link" label may not tell people you are paid, and a "buy now" button does not either. Its example wording is "I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post."
• A line on the home page does not cover every post.

Individual programs add their own wording. The Amazon Associates Operating Agreement requires the statement "As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases" to be clearly and prominently displayed. Other programs have their own terms, so read them.

For search engines, mark affiliate links with the sponsored value:

<a href="https://example.com/product" rel="sponsored">Product name</a>

Google's outbound links documentation asks for rel="sponsored" on advertisements and paid placements, and says nofollow still works. It does not use the word affiliate, but the idea is the same. This is general information about US rules, not legal advice. Outside the US, look up the local regulator's guidance.

Timing and seasonality

Ad prices are not flat across the year. Our seasonality index puts November at 1.25 and December at 1.36 against a January low of 0.78, so the same pageviews earn about 75 percent more in December than in January. Our guides on why revenue drops in January and preparing for Q4 explain the pattern.

Affiliate income tends to follow buying seasons, with gift and sale periods lifting commissions. We do not have a table for it. Treat that as a general pattern, and check your own history before you plan around it.

Payment timing differs as well. AdSense pays monthly after a $100 balance, whereas many affiliate programs hold commissions for a period and pay on their own schedule. Read each program's terms.

Common questions

Can I use AdSense and affiliate links together?

Yes. We did not find a rule in the AdSense policy page we checked that bars affiliate links, only the limit on paid promotional material outweighing content mentioned above. Keep the pages useful and the ad load moderate.

Which makes more money for a new blog?

Usually display ads at first, because they need no purchase decision. Affiliate links can pay more per reader on a few good pages, but they need ranking posts first. Under 10,000 monthly pageviews, both are small.

Do I need a lot of traffic for affiliate marketing?

Not as much as for the top ad networks. A page with a few hundred well-matched readers can earn commissions. Affiliate programs have their own approval rules, which vary, so check them.

Should I replace ads with affiliate links?

Rarely. Try it on a handful of buying-intent pages and compare weeks, as in the example earlier. For informational pages, the ads usually win.

What to do next

Pull your page-level data first. In your analytics, list your top 20 pages by pageviews and note which ones are comparison, review or "best of" pages. Calculate each one's ad RPM from your ad report, so you know the number affiliate links must beat.

Then add or improve affiliate links on the buying-intent pages only, with a disclosure next to the first link. Leave the how-to pages alone. After a month, convert both to dollars per 1,000 pageviews and compare.

The AdSense revenue calculator gives you the display baseline for any traffic mix, and the AdSense vs Mediavine comparison shows what moving to a managed network would add. If you are still choosing the overall mix, how to monetize a blog covers sponsorships, products and memberships too.