A blog doing 10,000 pageviews a month on display ads earns somewhere between $50 and $250 for that month. Not per week. Per month. That is the number most "start a blog" articles skip past, and it is the single most useful fact I can hand you before you decide whether to spend the next two years writing.
So: can you make money from a blog? Yes, but almost certainly not the way you're picturing, and almost certainly not from ads. I build systems for a living and I run a blogging platform, which means I look at other people's traffic and revenue data more often than I look at my own. The pattern is consistent enough that I can describe it plainly.
Quick answer
Yes, you can make money from a blog — but the majority of blogs earn effectively nothing, and the ones that do earn rarely make it from advertising. Display ads only become meaningful past roughly 50,000–100,000 monthly pageviews, which takes most people one to three years of consistent publishing to reach, if they reach it at all. The reliable money is in selling something — services, a product, or access to you — to a small audience that trusts you, which can work at traffic levels an ad network would consider a rounding error.
Most blogs make zero, and that isn't a motivational setup
I'm not going to soften this. The distribution of blog earnings is not a bell curve. It's a long tail where the overwhelming majority of blogs sit at or near zero revenue, forever.
The reasons are boring and structural:
- Most blogs stop publishing within six months. Revenue models that depend on compounding traffic never get the chance to compound.
- Search traffic has a long latency. A new site often waits 6–12 months before ranking pages meaningfully, and that assumes the content is genuinely better than what already ranks.
- The topics that monetize well (finance, software, health, B2B) are the topics with the most entrenched competition and the largest content budgets.
- AI-generated content flooded the mid-tier of every niche between 2023 and 2025. The bar for "good enough to rank" moved up while the volume of competing pages exploded.
- Ad rates are set by advertisers bidding on your audience, not by your effort. A brilliant post read by 400 people is worth about a dollar to an ad network.
None of that means don't blog. It means the expected value of "blog → ad revenue" is close to zero, and you should pick a different mechanism if income is the goal.
The revenue models, with real economics
Here is the comparison that actually matters. RPM means revenue per 1,000 pageviews — the standard unit for ad income. For non-ad models I've converted to the same footing so you can compare directly.
| Model | Typical economics | Traffic where it starts to matter | Honest read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display ads (AdSense) | $2–$15 RPM, heavily niche- and geo-dependent | 50,000+ monthly pageviews for meaningful money | Lowest effort, lowest ceiling. Below 25k/mo it is coffee money. |
| Premium ad networks (Mediavine, Raptive, Ezoic) | $10–$40+ RPM | Entry thresholds run roughly 10k–100k monthly sessions depending on network | Real step change in RPM, but you must qualify first, and qualifying is the hard part |
| Affiliate | $5–$50+ per 1,000 readers on general content; far higher on high-intent buying pages | Works from ~2,000 targeted monthly readers | Depends on intent, not volume. 500 people comparing software beats 50,000 casual readers. |
| Sponsorship | $20–$200+ per 1,000 readers, negotiated per deal | ~5,000 engaged readers, especially a niche list | Priced on audience quality. A narrow B2B audience commands multiples of a broad one. |
| Paid newsletter | 1–5% of free subscribers convert at $5–$15/mo | ~2,000 free subscribers before it's worth running | Predictable and compounding, but you owe output forever. Churn is real. |
| Digital products | $500–$5,000 per 1,000 engaged readers per launch | ~1,000 genuinely engaged readers | Highest leverage per reader. Requires you to build the thing and keep supporting it. |
| Services / consulting | One client can exceed a year of ad revenue on a mid-size blog | ~100 of the right readers | Doesn't scale, converts best, needs the least traffic. Most under-rated path by a wide margin. |
Read that table top to bottom and the shape is clear: the models requiring the most traffic pay the least per reader, and the models requiring the least traffic pay the most. That inversion is the whole story of blog monetization.
What the ad numbers mean in practice
Run the arithmetic before you commit two years.
At a $5 RPM — a fair assumption for general-interest content with mixed international traffic — you need 200,000 monthly pageviews to earn $1,000 a month. Two hundred thousand. That is a genuinely successful blog by any reasonable standard, and it produces less than a part-time job's income, from which you still pay hosting and your own taxes.
At a $20 RPM in a strong niche on a premium network, you need 50,000 monthly pageviews for that same $1,000. Better, but 50,000 monthly pageviews from search typically means 100–300 well-researched posts and a year or two of compounding.
Now compare: one consulting client at $2,000 for a scoped project equals two months of that same blog's ad income, and can come from a single reader who found one post.
I'm not telling you ads are worthless. I'm telling you the ratio between effort and outcome is worse than nearly anyone admits, and it's worse now than it was five years ago because AI-driven search results are absorbing exactly the informational queries that used to feed mid-tier blogs.
The thresholds, stated plainly
If you want a mental model of when each thing switches on:
- 0–1,000 monthly pageviews. No model works on volume. The only thing that works is a reader emailing you. Optimize for being findable and contactable, not for monetization.
- 1,000–10,000. Services and affiliate on high-intent pages become viable. Ads will pay you $5–$50 a month; do not restructure your site for that.
- 10,000–50,000. Affiliate can become real income if your content targets buying decisions. Some ad networks open up. Sponsorships become possible with a niche audience.
- 50,000–200,000. Premium ad networks pay meaningfully. Products and paid newsletters have enough top-of-funnel to sustain launches.
- 200,000+. Ads alone can be a job. Almost everyone at this level runs three or four models simultaneously, because ad rates swing 30% seasonally and you don't want that to be your whole income.
The uncomfortable implication: for the first year or two, the correct strategy for most people is to ignore ad revenue entirely and treat the blog as a way to be found by people who might pay you directly.
Why "audience" beats "traffic"
Traffic is a number. Audience is a set of people who would notice if you stopped writing.
Ad revenue treats every pageview identically. A reader who has followed you for two years and a reader who bounced in nine seconds are worth the same impression. Every other model on that table prices the relationship instead — which is why they pay 10x to 1,000x more per person.
This is also why email matters more than any SEO tactic. Search traffic is rented; the algorithm's terms change without notice, and 2024–2025 gave a lot of publishers a hard lesson in that. A list of 2,000 people who opted in is an asset you own outright, and it monetizes at a rate no volume of anonymous search traffic reaches.
If you take one operational decision from this article: put an email signup on the blog from day one, and write to that list like they're people rather than a segment.
The platform question, and the cut everyone takes
Where you publish affects what you keep, and this is the one place I have a direct interest, so I'll be brief and factual.
Self-hosting (WordPress on your own server, or a static site) means you keep 100% of revenue and carry 100% of the maintenance — updates, security, performance, ad implementation, and the slow tax of things breaking. It's the right answer if you enjoy that work or your revenue is large enough to justify paying someone else to do it.
Hosted platforms handle the infrastructure and take a cut, either as a subscription or a revenue share. Medium's Partner Program and Substack's 10% both sit on this spectrum, with different tradeoffs around ownership and audience portability. Misar.Blog, the platform I run, uses a 75/25 revenue split in the writer's favour and supports custom domains, which matters because a custom domain is what lets you leave without losing your search rankings.
The general rule regardless of platform: check whether you can export your content and point your own domain at it. If the answer to either is no, you are building on land you don't own, and the revenue share is the smaller problem.
What I'd actually do with a new blog
Assuming the goal is income rather than a hobby:
- Pick a topic where readers have budgets. Not a topic you can write 100 posts about — a topic where the reader has a problem worth money to solve. This single choice determines more of your outcome than anything else.
- Decide the mechanism first. Are you selling your time, a product, or attention? Write the answer down. It changes what you publish. Service-led blogs need depth on narrow problems; ad-led blogs need volume on broad ones.
- Publish 20–30 substantive posts before evaluating anything. Below that sample size you cannot tell whether the problem is your writing, your topic, or normal indexing latency.
- Add email early, ads late. Ads clutter a low-traffic site and earn nothing. Email compounds from post one.
- Give it 12–18 months of consistent output before judging. And set an honest exit condition now, while you're unbiased: if at month 18 you have under 5,000 monthly pageviews and no inbound inquiries, the topic or the format is wrong, and more posts won't fix it.
That last point is the part most advice omits. "Keep going" is not universally correct advice. Some blogs are in topics that will never monetize, and continuing costs you years.
So, can you make money from a blog?
Yes — if you treat it as a distribution channel for something you sell, rather than as a product that sells advertising.
The people I see earning real money from blogs are consultants whose posts demonstrate competence, operators selling a tool to readers with the exact problem it solves, and writers with small, specific, loyal lists. The people earning nothing are, overwhelmingly, those who wrote for volume and waited for ad revenue that mathematically was never going to arrive.
Blogging is a slow, compounding, mostly unpaid activity that occasionally turns into a business when it's attached to something you sell. That's a narrower promise than most articles make. It's also true, and it lets you decide with your eyes open.
FAQ
How much traffic do I need to make $1,000 a month from a blog?
On display ads, roughly 50,000–200,000 monthly pageviews depending on your niche and audience geography. On affiliate with high buying intent, perhaps 10,000–20,000. Selling a service, it can be a few hundred of the right readers — one or two clients. The traffic requirement varies by more than two orders of magnitude based purely on which model you choose.
How long before a blog makes money?
Plan on 12–24 months before anything meaningful, and accept that a large share of blogs never get there. Search rankings take 6–12 months to develop, and monetization typically follows traffic by another few months. Anyone quoting 90 days is either selling a course or had an audience before they started.
Is blogging still worth it in 2026?
For ad revenue on general topics, it's harder than at any point in the last decade — AI answers absorb the informational queries that used to send traffic to mid-tier blogs. For establishing credibility that leads to clients, products, or a job, it works as well as it ever did. The question isn't whether blogging works; it's which outcome you're pursuing.
Should I use ads or affiliate links on a small blog?
Affiliate, and only on posts where the reader is already deciding what to buy. Ads on a low-traffic blog earn a few dollars a month while degrading the reading experience for exactly the early readers you most need to keep. Add display advertising when your traffic makes it worth more than the experience it costs — realistically, north of 25,000 monthly pageviews.
