Everyone wonders “How much money can I make?” when first starting up a website. It’s only natural to daydream about your potential future levels of success after all.
It may have been the very first question you asked yourself when deciding whether or not to add online advertising to your site. If you tried to ask the internet though we expect you were frustrated.
It’s always been surprisingly hard to find a straight answer to this basic question. This is why we did some research for you.
After reviewing every article we could find on the subject, The Online Advertising Guide has come to the conclusion that on average you can make $10 Page RPM through online advertising. This is through AdSense, which is the most popular starter ad network.
This means that for every 1,000 page views a site gets, it will likely earn $10.
Calculate How Much You Can Make From Online Advertising
Note: This is for estimation purposes only, real figures will vary.
If you want to experiment with different scenarios (page views, RPMs etc), use our RPM calculator here.
Why this is only an estimate.
Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to predict how much money you can make, as every site has a unique earning potential.
If your site is well made, and covers a popular topic with rich advertisers (such as gambling) you could make loads of money. If your site is poorly made about a topic that few advertisers can succeed by advertising on (such as religion or politics), you will likely never make much money at all.
On top of this, ad networks like to keep revenue figures to themselves. While there is lots of data out there about how much it costs to buy ads, there is precious little about how much money you can make.
This $10 Page RPM figure, however, is mentioned time and again on forums and blogs. Other figures we found almost never fell outside of the $5-$15 range, which again reinforces that $10 is a good average.
It is only an estimated average, however. That is why we have set three benchmark figures – $5, $10 & $15 for low, average and high performing sites respectively.
PLEASE NOTE: While we often use different currencies throughout the site in examples, in this case, we actually mean $10 US Dollars as the average. We asked around some British websites, and the $10 USD average still worked when the currency was converted.
Use $10 Page RPM as a benchmark.
This $10 figure is useful as it gives you a benchmark to see if you are doing well.
If you have a Page RPM of above $10 then great! You likely have the basics of your site setup done correctly.
If you have a Page RPM of below $10 then you should probably review your setup (perhaps experiment with new page layouts, ad networks and ad sizes).
You should not obsess over this benchmark, however – you should always seek to improve on how your site is actually doing. Work out your own site’s benchmark by calculating the Page RPM of your first 3 – 6 months (use our RPM calculator for convenience). Once you have your own benchmark, then try and improve on it!
By comparing your site to its own past performance you will be able to improve in a logical way.
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