If I Run Ads How Much Revenue Will My Websites Make?

By Josh Koop •  Updated: 12/02/20 •  7 min read

Many affiliates will heavily lean on products and monetization methods through distinctly affiliate programs, this can lead to good and bad months for income. Instead I suggest using ads to help your site balance out with an additional income stream.

How much do websites make from ads? This will be based on your visitor information, visitors from the US and similar areas pay better than ads served to visitors from India, for example. The normal rate would be somewhere from $3 per thousand visits to rates of up to $100s depending on the niche and visitor.

So if the payouts can be so unknown why do people look to add on ads to their websites? It is due to their ability to add a new income from their content, income diversification is very important to your overall site health and buffers you from issues.

How Do Ads Pay the Website Owner?

What you will focus on when using ads for your website is to keep your readers engaged in the content and scrolling down continuously while viewing and interacting with the ads that are being served.

generating income with ad placements
Generating income with ad placements

This can lead ads to be a way to help you build a strong income even from a purely informational website where you don’t add on any affiliate products.

While this may seem crazy it opens you to write about anything you find interesting and not to have a financial focus.

There are two primary methods that ads can pay out for you when you go through services, this will be via impressions, or times viewed, or clicks, when someone clicks on the ad and follows it to another page.

Impression Based Advertisements

This style of ads on your site will pay you based on impressions, which is a view and typically set time displayed to a user, where the visitor doesn’t need to interact with the ad.

This can be very nice to help keep your visitors on your website while also growing the income stream as you gain more visitors by posting more content and ranking higher in the search engines.

The payment per impression tends to be much lower yield though so for this style of advertising to be lucrative you typically need a larger number of overall pageviews on your site.

Click Based Advertisements

The function of click based advertisements is that you are paid when your visitors directly interact with the ads served on your posts and pages, this can help you have a larger income but makes it more volatile.

When your visitors aren’t interested in the ads they are served you will see large ebbs and flows of income, this leads to a less reliable income stream versus one with impression based payments.

Best Ad Companies to Use on Your Website

It may come as no surprise then that there is a wide variety of options available to you, each can have their own benefits and drawbacks that can cause your head to spin if you haven’t approached it prior.

While I am only planning to cover a few very specific options below there is a host of other options available that may suit you more based on specific niches, there are many specific to gaming and other niches where you may do better to give them the try.

Best Starting Option – Google Adsense

For the starters in blogging who are at a 100-1000+ pageviews you could start by signing up for Google Adsense, if you plan to use YouTube down the road then this would be what’s necessary for partner and monetization.

Now Google Adsense overall isn’t going to make you a millionaire, but it can start to help provide you you first solid continual income from your website, note that you can only withdraw once you have over $100 in your account.

Google AdSense has 2 primary ways that it can be set up to display ads, one that is “automatic” placement, and the other which you would need to build ads and then use a plugin to place them on your pages and posts.

Low Barrier for Entry – Ezoic (10k Sessions)

Ezoic are my preferred ad network as they are technology focused and work towards building tools that can help ANY website owner maximize their content value with ads.

The Ezoic system functions by utilizing AI to help build RPM through ad spots, they call them placeholders, where it will place ads and find what works and pays the best based on the visitor.

This makes them a powerful force for a website owner who likes to learn and adapt their approach to content. The biggest tool available to Ezoic users is their Big Data Analytics, this tool compiles data to help you evaluate what makes you the most income.

Unlike the other 2 below Ezoic will accept most sites even with traffic that isn’t mostly from the US which makes them an excellent source for website owners in other countries to add more value.

White Glove Starter – Mediavine (50k Sessions)

While there are other options between Ezoic and Mediavine the next level for many bloggers will be to get themselves approved for this ad network, they started as a ad network for food bloggers so they are much more helpful for non-techie bloggers.

The Mediavine ad system will lazy load ads similar to images on your site so they tend to not have the same impact on the page speed of your website, this leads many to leave Ezoic for a more hands free approach that Mediavine provides.

Please note the last time I checked Mediavine does rely on you having a majority of your traffic from US sources so if you hit the sessions and apply but aren’t in the right market they will not accept your website.

White Glove Best in Class – AdThrive (100k Pageviews)

For bloggers who continue to grow moving their site to AdThrive can help grow income as you get more favorable ad value based on the site requirements being much higher than any of the other services listed above.

I haven’t had any experience personally with AdThrive but from the people I know who are on the service they are amazed with the service and with their returns, many times frequently going over $30+ RPM.

Final Thoughts on How Much Do Websites Make From Ads

While it may seem like you should move yourself up the ad network ladder as what is listed the ad network with the most sites that are large is in fact Ezoic.

Each niche will be different and just because there is a service to help you with higher pageviews and sessions doesn’t always mean it will reward you the most with income.

I would suggest if you are willing to work with the Ezoic system and AI to maximize value you will slowly have less and less ads that pay more and more, the issue is this typically requires a high volume of pageviews.

If you aren’t a techie and don’t find optimization to be fun or exciting, I personally love it, then moving to Mediavine or AdThrive is probably the perfect move for you to let you focus on content only.

Your ad income will continue to grow as long as you continue to generate content that can rank and receive traffic, whether from the SERPs or from social sources like Pinterest or Facebook.

Just make sure to remind yourself that you want to post more information each day to continue to grow yourself and your business and you will find yourself with ad success.

Josh Koop

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