Everyone who starts a blog eventually asks the same question: if I get this much traffic, what will it earn?
Nobody can promise you a number, because ad income swings with your topic, your audience’s country and the time of year. What you can do is build a model from your own figures and see which lever moves the result most. This website ad revenue calculator turns traffic, ad placements and click rates into a monthly and yearly estimate, and shows the page RPM you would be earning.
How to use the Website Ad Revenue Calculator#
- Enter monthly visitors. Take the figure from your analytics.
- Enter pages per visit. Pageviews divided by visitors gives this number.
- Enter ad units per page. Count the ad slots a visitor sees on a typical page.
- Enter CTR and CPC. Use the click-through rate and cost per click from your ad reports. If you have none yet, test a few realistic guesses.
- Enter your revenue share. This is the percentage of the ad money you keep. 68 percent is the share Google AdSense pays on display ads.
The chain from visitors to money#
Ad income is just a chain of multiplications:
Impressions = pageviews × ad units per page
Clicks = impressions × CTR
Revenue = clicks × CPC × your share
With the default numbers, 50,000 visitors a month who each see 1.8 pages give 90,000 pageviews. Three ad units per page makes 270,000 impressions. A 1 percent CTR means 2,700 clicks. At $0.30 per click that is $810, and at a 68 percent share you keep $550.80 a month, or about $6,610 a year.
RPM, CPM and CPC: which is which#
- CPC is what an advertiser pays when someone clicks an ad.
- CPM is what an advertiser pays for 1,000 ad impressions, whether or not anyone clicks.
- Page RPM is what you earn per 1,000 pageviews. It’s the number most publishers watch because it folds everything into one figure.
In the example, $550.80 divided by 90,000 pageviews times 1,000 gives a page RPM of $6.12. If you already know your RPM, you can skip the chain. Multiply your pageviews in thousands by the RPM and you have your revenue.
How much traffic do you need?#
Turn the question around. How many pageviews does it take to earn $1,000 a month at different page RPMs?
| Page RPM | Pageviews needed per month |
|---|---|
| $2 | 500,000 |
| $5 | 200,000 |
| $10 | 100,000 |
| $20 | 50,000 |
A site that earns $20 per thousand pageviews needs a tenth of the traffic of a site earning $2. That gap is why niche matters so much.
Why two sites with the same traffic earn different amounts#
- Niche. Advertisers pay more to reach people searching for insurance, software or finance than for entertainment or general news.
- Country. Visitors from higher-income countries usually earn more per click and per impression.
- Season. Ad prices tend to rise in the run-up to the end of the year and dip in January.
- Page layout and speed. Where the ads sit and how fast the page loads change how often they’re seen.
Because of all that, the defaults in the calculator are placeholders and not typical values. Put in your own numbers from your ad reports.
A few honest warnings#
The ad networks have strict rules, and the most important one is simple: never click your own ads or ask friends to. It gets accounts banned. Stuffing a page with ads can also push visitors away and hurt the traffic you’re trying to monetize. And the figure this calculator gives is a model, not a forecast, so use it to compare ideas and not to quit your job.
Where the number comes from#
With 100,000 monthly visitors, 2 pages each, 2 ad units per page, a 1 percent click rate, a $0.30 click value and a 68 percent publisher share, revenue is 100,000 × 2 × 2 × 0.01 × 0.30 × 0.68 = $816 a month. Many sites earn more from impressions than from clicks, so your own page RPM is the best number to track. Content topic, audience country and the number of ads all change it.
Frequently asked questions#
It depends on pages per visit and your page RPM. With the default numbers, a page RPM of $6.12 and 1.8 pages per visit gives about $11 per 1,000 visitors.
Multiply clicks by cost per click and by your revenue share, which is 68 percent for AdSense display ads. Clicks come from impressions times your click-through rate.
It varies enormously by niche and audience country. Compare it with your own history and your own category, not with a number from another site.
At a page RPM of $6 you need about 16,700 pageviews a month. At $3 you need about 33,300.
No. It’s a model based on the numbers you enter. Real earnings change with seasons, ad quality, policy and audience.