How to Monetize a Blog: Ads, Affiliates and More
Five ways blogs earn, what each needs in traffic and effort, and what 1,000 visitors are worth under each, using our modelled figures.
11 min read · Updated
Most blogs make their first dollar from display ads, add affiliate links within a few months, and only later try sponsorships, products or memberships. That order is not a rule, but it follows what each model demands. Ads need almost no audience. Sponsors and members need a lot of trust.
On our modelled figures, 1,000 visits to a general-interest blog with US, UK, Canadian or Australian readers earn about $8 from AdSense and about $20 from a managed network like Mediavine. Affiliate links on the right page can beat both by a wide margin, or earn nothing. Products and memberships can beat everything, but only for blogs that have something specific to sell. Every dollar figure below is an estimate from our benchmark tables or a labelled example, and your own analytics should replace them as soon as you have data.
The five ways blogs earn, and what each one asks for
Here is the short version. The traffic column describes when the model starts to make sense, not a rule from any company.
| Model | Audience needed | Time to first payment | Effort after setup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display ads | Any, though income is tiny under 10,000 pageviews a month | Weeks, once approved | Low |
| Affiliate links | A few thousand monthly visits to pages with buying intent | Weeks to months | Medium, mostly writing |
| Sponsorships and direct deals | A defined audience a brand wants, often 20,000+ monthly visits | Months | High, you sell and deliver |
| Digital products and services | A small audience can be enough if the topic is specific | Months | High upfront, low later |
| Memberships and paid newsletters | Regular returning readers, not just search visits | Months | High, ongoing content |
Nobody has to pick one. Plenty of blogs run ads and affiliate links together, and the comparison of affiliate marketing and display ads goes into how to split pages between them.
Display ads: the baseline
Ads are the least demanding option. You paste code or turn on a plugin, and every pageview earns a little. Revenue is pageviews divided by 1,000, times RPM, and RPM depends on your network, your niche and where your readers live. The AdSense revenue calculator runs that sum with our tables.
A few concrete numbers. Our AdSense baseline for readers in Tier 1 countries is $7.00 per 1,000 pageviews, and a general-interest niche multiplies that by 0.8, giving $5.60. So 10,000 monthly pageviews is $56 a month. At 50,000 pageviews it is $280, and at 100,000 it is $560. Move to a mixed audience (30 percent Tier 1, 30 percent Tier 2, 40 percent Tier 3) and the blended AdSense figure drops to about $2.66 per 1,000 pageviews, so the 50,000 pageview blog earns closer to $133.
Those are not salary numbers. They are enough to pay for hosting and a plugin or two.
Google states its revenue share on its own AdSense revenue share page: publishers receive 80 percent of the revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee, and when advertisers buy through Google Ads, publishers keep about 68 percent. Our RPM figures already have the network's cut taken out.
Moving up to a managed network
Managed ad networks pay more per pageview because they run header bidding, test layouts and sell to more demand partners. Our tables put Mediavine at $17.00 for Tier 1 readers and Raptive at $18.00, against $7.00 for AdSense. The entry bars have been shifting, so treat these as the picture at time of writing and check each company's own page:
- Mediavine now lists a minimum of $5,000 in annual ad revenue on its requirements page, with no numeric traffic minimum there. For smaller sites it runs Journey, which asks for at least 1,000 sessions from Tier 1 countries in a 30-day period. Older guides still quote 50,000 sessions, and that figure is out of date.
- Raptive announced a 25,000 monthly pageview minimum in a post on its own blog, down from 100,000. It lists further quality requirements that the post does not spell out.
- Monumetric has historically had a lower bar, about 10,000 monthly pageviews in our data. It is the one entry figure here we could not confirm on the company's own page, so look before you plan around it.
- Ezoic has asked new sites for about 250,000 monthly users since February 2026, with an Incubator route for smaller sites. Media.net publishes no traffic minimum that we could find.
Our AdSense or Mediavine decision guide covers when to switch, and AdSense alternatives lists the rest. If you are under 10,000 pageviews, read ad networks for small websites before applying anywhere.
Affiliate links: paid when a reader buys
An affiliate link carries your ID to a store. If the reader buys within the program's tracking window, you get a commission. The store sets the rate, the window and the rules, and all three vary a great deal between programs. We do not quote commission rates here because they change and each program publishes its own.
Affiliate income is lumpy. Most visits produce nothing, and a few produce a commission worth more than the ad revenue from hundreds of readers. Pages that suit it are the ones where someone is deciding what to buy: "best budget standing desk", "Notion vs Obsidian", a comparison of two cameras. A page on the history of the standing desk will not convert, however many visits it gets.
Google has a view on how these pages should read. Its guidance on writing high-quality product reviews asks for first-hand evidence such as your own photos and measurements, honest comparisons between products, and reasons behind any "best" label. Copied manufacturer descriptions with a link attached are what its spam policies call thin affiliation.
Disclosure is not optional
If you earn a commission, readers have to be told, and the FTC is specific about how. Its Endorsement Guides FAQ says the disclosure should sit close to the recommendation, and that a single disclosure may do when the link is embedded in the review but not when the two are separated. A plain "affiliate link" label may not tell readers you are paid. Wording in the style of "I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post" is the kind of thing the FTC suggests.
A footer note, or a disclosure page that nobody clicks, is not enough. The FTC is a US regulator, so this is general information about US rules and not legal advice. Other countries have their own, so check the regulator where you operate.
Search engines also want paid links marked. Google's page on qualifying outbound links asks you to flag advertisements and paid placements with rel="sponsored", and nofollow is still accepted. Its page does not name affiliate links, but they are paid placements in practice, and most affiliate publishers mark them that way.
Sponsorships and direct deals
A sponsor pays a flat fee for a post, a banner, a newsletter slot or a series. There is no useful public benchmark for what that fee should be. It depends on audience, niche, how targeted your readers are and how well you negotiate, so we do not model it and neither should you copy figures from someone else's blog.
What brands look for is not raw traffic. They want readers who match their customers, so a blog with 15,000 monthly visits from home cooks can be worth more to a cookware company than a 150,000 visit general blog. Put together a one-page media kit with your monthly visitors, top countries, email list size and the kind of posts that perform best. Pull those numbers from your analytics, not from memory.
Disclosure rules apply in full. A sponsored post has to say it is sponsored, in plain words near the top. Links in it should carry rel="sponsored".
The practical problem with direct deals is time. You find the sponsor, agree the brief, write, revise, invoice and chase payment. For a blog that earns $300 a month from ads, one $400 sponsored post is a good week and a day of work. Whether that is worth it is your call.
Digital products and services
This is where small blogs sometimes outearn big ones. A reader who trusts your advice on, say, planning a Japan trip or learning React might pay $20 for a checklist, $50 for a course or a few hundred for an hour of your time. Ads cannot match that per reader, because the advertiser is paying for attention while the reader is paying for you.
The catch is that you need something worth buying, and it has to be made before you earn anything. Templates, spreadsheets, printable planners, ebooks, presets, small tools and paid consultations are typical. Pick the problem your best-performing posts already solve and ask what a reader would pay to have done for them or packaged neatly.
Sales platforms take a share of each sale and so do payment processors. Check the current fees on the platform you pick before you set a price, because they differ and change.
Memberships and paid newsletters
A membership charges readers monthly or yearly for extra content, community or early access. A paid newsletter is the same idea over email. Both depend on repeat readers, which is different from search traffic. A blog can have 100,000 monthly visits and almost no regulars, because search visitors arrive, read one post and leave.
So the number that matters is how many people come back. Build an email list first, from the first week if you can. If you send email to US readers, the CAN-SPAM rules ask for honest headers and subject lines, a visible unsubscribe, a postal address, and a clear label on anything that is an ad.
An illustration, with invented numbers: 2,000 regular readers, 3 percent of them paying $6 a month, gives 60 members and $360 a month. That is similar to what a 60,000 pageview blog earns from AdSense, and it takes a very different kind of work.
What 1,000 visitors earn under each model
To compare models you need one unit. We use 1,000 sessions (visits), assuming 1.5 pageviews per session. Display rows come straight from our tables. The other rows are hypothetical, built from round-number assumptions that are noted in the table, and they are not benchmarks.
| Model | Assumption | Per 1,000 sessions |
|---|---|---|
| AdSense, general niche, all Tier 1 | RPM $5.60 | $8.40 |
| AdSense, general niche, mixed audience | Blended RPM about $2.66 | $3.98 |
| AdSense, finance niche, all Tier 1 | RPM $13.30 | $19.95 |
| Mediavine-level network, general niche, Tier 1 | RPM $13.60 | $20.40 |
| Affiliate, weak page | 30 clicks, 2% buy, $2 commission per order | $1.20 |
| Affiliate, decent page | 60 clicks, 4% buy, $4 commission per order | $9.60 |
| Affiliate, strong buying-intent page | 100 clicks, 8% buy, $8 commission per order | $64.00 |
| Own digital product | 0.5% buy a $25 product | $12.50 |
The spread inside the affiliate rows is the point. A weak page earns less than the cheapest ad setup, and a strong one earns three times the best ads. The ad rows hardly move from page to page.
The 10,000 monthly pageviews page and the 100,000 monthly pageviews page apply the same maths at other sizes, and there is a short answer on 50,000 pageviews.
A sensible order by traffic stage
Under 10,000 monthly pageviews, ad income is small enough that it hardly matters. Put the effort into posts that rank and into an email list. Apply to AdSense once you have a body of original posts; the approval checklist lists what reviewers look for. Add affiliate links where they are honest recommendations.
Between 10,000 and 50,000, you are likely to be choosing between AdSense and Monumetric, or a managed network's on-ramp such as Journey by Mediavine or Raptive. Test one change at a time and give each two to four weeks. Start building a product if readers keep emailing the same question.
Past 50,000, the managed networks are open to you, and a direct sponsor starts to make sense. At 100,000 pageviews a general blog on a managed network is a few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars a month on our tables, depending on geography. Finance and technology blogs earn more, and gaming and entertainment less. The guide to RPM by niche has the full set of multipliers.
If your topic pays well per click, a higher rate still does not help when you lack the expertise to rank for it.
Taxes and record keeping
Blog income is usually taxable wherever you live. In the United States, the IRS says in Topic 554 that you generally owe self-employment tax if your net earnings from self-employment were $400 or more, at a rate of 15.3 percent on the taxable portion. That is on top of income tax.
Keep a simple spreadsheet from day one: date, source, amount, and the costs you will want to deduct, such as hosting and tools. If you are outside the US but earn from US readers, AdSense collects tax information for withholding purposes; our guide to AdSense tax info for non-US publishers explains the form. All of this is general information, not tax or legal advice, so ask an accountant who knows your country's rules.
Common questions
How much traffic do I need before a blog earns anything?
AdSense has no published traffic minimum, so you can earn from the first approved day. At 5,000 pageviews a month and a $5.60 RPM, that is $28. Real money, in the sense of covering a decent hosting plan, usually starts around 30,000 to 50,000 pageviews on ads alone.
Can I run ads and affiliate links on the same blog?
Yes, and most do. Ads work best on informational posts and affiliate links on pages where the reader is choosing a product. Keep an eye on page layout, because too many ads and links can hurt speed and trust. See ads and Core Web Vitals.
Is a niche blog better than a general one?
For sponsors, products and affiliate income, almost always. For ads, niche matters through the multiplier: finance at 1.9 and technology at 1.15 sit well above general at 0.8 in our tables. A tight niche also makes it easier to build repeat readers.
Do ad blockers matter?
They remove a share of your ad income, and the share varies by audience. Technical readers block more. Measure yours before assuming anything.
What to do this week
Open your analytics and write down three numbers: monthly sessions, pageviews per session, and the share of readers in Tier 1 countries. Put them into the AdSense calculator and the Mediavine RPM calculator to see what the ad route would pay today.
Then list your ten most-visited posts. Mark each one as a page where someone is choosing something to buy, a page where someone is learning, or neither. The first group is where affiliate links belong, the second suits ads, and the third needs a rewrite or a better purpose. If one topic keeps showing up in reader emails, that is your first product.
For the wider mechanics, how to calculate ad revenue and raising ad income without more users are the next two reads. Running an app as well as a blog? See how to monetize an app.