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How Much Traffic Does a Publisher Need to Be Profitable?

Publishers can use display ads and affiliate marketing ads to earn revenue from their content. If these ads bring in more revenue than the publisher spends on content production, distribution, and administrative costs, as well as any other expenses, the publisher will earn a profit. This article is about how to estimate how much you’ll earn in ad revenue from the articles you publish.

Using CPM to Estimate the Value of Your Ads

If you’re earning revenue from PPC ads you need to know the average value of an ad impression on your site. A publisher who’s creating premium content is likely to be a member of a premium ad network and may have a CPM of $20, so they’d earn $20 from each 1000 ad views. It’s likely that a visitor to your website will see more than one ad as well. In this article, I’m assuming that you’re publishing long articles and the average reader will see 10 ads while they read them.

If you’re not a member of a premium ad network it’s likely that your CPM for each ad will be much lower. It’s possible that you could have a CPM of $1 or less for each 1000 views, especially if your site is using plain Adsense and doesn’t rank for valuable keywords. Your CPM could also be a lot higher if you are targeting a specialty area like finance or law.

Viewability and Visibility

These metrics are basically synonyms and they’re used to estimate how many of your ads your readers actually see. You can modify these metrics by placing ads in different spots on your website, but be careful. If an ad shows up at the top of the article or in the middle of the article, it’s more likely that readers will see it, but it’s also more likely that the ad will annoy them. Intrusive ads may make your readers unhappy. Your site will also be slower if you have more PPC ads on it.

Premium ad networks can optimize your ads for you so you have the appropriate number of ads in the appropriate places. In general, readers are likely to see most of the ads on your website. According to Statista, the average visibility for mobile display ads was 68 percent in 2023.

Calculating the Value of Your Traffic

You can calculate the revenue from PPC ads by tracking the number of ads each visitor sees, multiplying that by your CPM, and then multiplying that by the ads’ visibility. So if the average visitor to your site saw 10 ads while they were reading the article, and your CPM was $20, you’d earn an average of 0.68 * 10 * $20 * 1/1000 per visit. That works out to 13.6 cents per visit. That isn’t a lot, and this calculation assumes you’re a member of a premium ad network that pays well. With a CPM of $1 you’d earn 0.68 cents per visit instead.

Breaking Even and Earning a Profit

In my previous articles I calculated that the direct cost of publishing a high quality article was $230 and the cost with indirect expenses included was $385. So to break even on your direct publishing costs alone, you’d need to average 1,691 views per article. If you needed to earn enough revenue to pay for your other costs, such as administrative costs and office expenses, as well you would need to get 2,831 visits per article on average.

Remember that this figure refers to average views. So if you published one article that got 20,000 views and four more articles that each got 1,000 views, the average views per article would be 4,800. It’s likely that a few of your most popular articles will generate most of the ad revenue for your website.

Again, these calculations assume that you’re part of a premium ad network that displays highly valuable ads on your site. If you weren’t part of one of these networks and had a CPM of $2 instead, you’d need 28,310 views per article to cover the cost of a high-quality article.

For a news site, that means you may need to get this many views in one day because the news will be out of date the next day. In some cases, the article may become out of date in a few hours. That’s why it’s really important to create evergreen articles that rank for high-volume keywords. It might take a publisher a few years to break even on many of its articles. But as you can see, even if you’ve made it into a premium ad network, you will need a relatively large audience just to break even as a publisher.

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