The short version: No, a blog post does not need adverts to earn money, and for most small and mid-sized blogs, display ads are the weakest option on the table. I’ve run blogs with banner ads and blogs with none at all, and the ones without ads made more money, not less, because they pointed readers toward something worth paying for instead of interrupting them with something worth ignoring.
I want to get this out of the way early because it’s the bit nobody wants to say out loud: display advertising on a blog is mostly a consolation prize. It’s what you do when you haven’t built anything else to sell. I’ve done it. I ran Google AdSense on an old blog of mine for the best part of two years, back when I still believed traffic was the whole game. Average earnings across roughly 40,000 monthly page views? About £180 a month. That’s not a typo. Forty thousand people read my stuff and I made less than what I’d earn from three hours of consulting.
What happens when you add adverts to a blog post
Here’s the mechanics of it, because most people who ask this question have never put an ad unit live and watched the numbers come in. You sign up with a network, most commonly Google AdSense, though there’s also Mediavine and Ezoic for blogs with 50,000-plus sessions a month. You get given a code snippet, you drop it into your theme or your header, and ads start showing based on what the network thinks will get clicked.
Payment is per click or per thousand impressions, known as RPM, revenue per mille. On a typical small business blog, RPM sits somewhere between £3 and £12, depending on niche. Finance and insurance blogs do better because advertisers pay more for that audience. A blog about, say, freelance productivity or small business marketing, which is closer to what most of my readers write about, tends to land at the lower end.
Do the maths. If your RPM is £5 and you get 10,000 page views a month, you’re looking at £50. If you get 100,000 page views, you’re looking at £500. That’s the ceiling for most blogs that aren’t in the top 1% of traffic for their niche. And getting to 100,000 monthly views on a blog takes years of consistent publishing, decent SEO, and usually some paid promotion along the way. The juice, in most cases, is not worth the squeeze.
The routes that pay better
Here’s what I’d tell anyone starting today, and what I wish someone had told me in 2011 instead of letting me waste two years chasing AdSense pennies.
- Sell your own thing. A course, a template pack, a done-for-you service, a consulting call. One reader who buys a £500 consultation is worth more than 100,000 ad impressions.
- Build an email list from the post. Every blog post should have one clear next step, and for most of my posts now that’s a lead magnet tied to a service. Readers who join a list convert at rates ad clicks never will.
- Affiliate links, done selectively. Recommending one tool you use, with an honest review, tends to earn more per reader than a banner ad ever will, because it’s contextual and trusted rather than intrusive.
- Sponsored content. Once you’ve got a decent, engaged readership, brands will pay to have their product or service featured inside a post. I’ve written in detail about what sponsored content is and how much a blog should charge for it, and the rates for a blog with even a modest, loyal audience beat ad revenue comfortably.
- Services and consulting. This is the one that’s earned me the most over fifteen years of blogging. The post is the shop window, not the shop.
A real example: the post that made me £0 in ad revenue and £4,200 in consulting
A few years back I wrote a long, practical post about what small businesses need to understand about AI tools before they buy anything. No ads on it. No affiliate links either, if I’m honest. Just a useful breakdown, and at the bottom, a link through to a consultation page. That single post, over about eighteen months, brought in three separate client enquiries that turned into paid work worth £4,200 combined. If I’d run AdSense on that same traffic instead, at a generous RPM of £8, I’d have made somewhere around £60 for the whole period.
That’s not a fluke, and it’s not because my writing is special. It’s because ads monetise attention in the cheapest, most indirect way possible, while a clear call to action monetises intent directly. A reader who’s just spent four minutes reading a detailed post about, say, what AI tools mean for a non-technical business owner, is a warm lead. Sticking a banner ad for someone else’s software in front of them is, frankly, a waste of that warmth.
The uncomfortable bit most blogging advice skips over
Here’s the thing nobody selling you a “how to monetise your blog” course wants to admit: for the vast majority of blogs, ads don’t fail because the strategy is wrong, they fail because the traffic never gets big enough to matter, and most blogs never will get that big. There are millions of blogs online. Fewer than 1% ever hit six figures in monthly traffic. If your entire monetisation plan rests on ad impressions, you’ve built a plan that only works at a scale almost nobody reaches.
The people telling you “just add more content, grow your traffic, ads will follow” are usually selling you content writing services, an SEO course, or hosting, and they benefit either way, whether your ad revenue ever materialises or not. That’s worth sitting with for a second, because it changes how you should plan from day one. Build for conversion, not volume. A blog with 2,000 monthly readers who trust you and buy from you will out-earn a blog with 50,000 readers who click a banner once and disappear.
Where analytics fits into this decision
If you’re weighing up ads versus a service-led model, you need to see what your readers do, not guess. This is where a lot of bloggers get lazy. They install Google Analytics once and never look at it again. Every meaningful action on your blog, a click on a consultation link, a download of a lead magnet, a scroll to the bottom of a post, is what Google Analytics calls an event, and I’ve written a full breakdown of what counts as an event in Google Analytics and why almost everything does. If you set that up, you can see, in black and white, whether your readers respond better to a “buy this” link or a “click here for ads” experiment. Most of my clients are shocked when they see the numbers side by side.
And if you’re running a multi-page site and wondering whether tracking needs to live everywhere, the answer is usually yes, but not for the reason people assume. I go into the specifics in whether you need Google Analytics code on every page, which matters more than most bloggers realise once they start trying to work out which posts drive revenue and which ones are just sitting there collecting dust.
What I’d do if I were starting a blog today
I’d skip ads entirely for at least the first year. Here’s the step-by-step version of what I’d build instead.
- Step one: Pick one thing to sell, even if it’s a £47 mini course or a £150 audit. Not fifteen things. One.
- Step two: Write posts that solve one specific problem your buyer has, using real numbers and real examples, not vague advice. Readers can smell filler content from a mile off.
- Step three: End every post with one clear next step, a link to your offer, your list, or your booking page. Not three options fighting each other.
- Step four: Track what happens using proper analytics, not vanity page view counts.
- Step five: Once you’ve got consistent traffic and a loyal readership, layer in sponsored content or affiliate deals as a bonus, not your foundation.
Content writing itself has changed a lot in the last couple of years too, and it’s worth understanding what counts as content writing today and what doesn’t anymore, because the blogs earning well now are rarely the ones churning out generic 500-word posts stuffed with keywords. They’re the ones going deep on fewer topics with real expertise behind them.
When ads do make sense
I don’t want to pretend ads are never right for anyone, because that’s not true either. If you run a high-traffic hobby or news blog where building a product isn’t realistic, sponsored content and ad networks are legitimate income. Big publisher sites like The Guardian or the BBC run on advertising models at massive scale, and that works because their traffic is in the tens of millions. If you’re a small business owner or a consultant blogging to build authority and bring in clients, though, ads are almost always the wrong tool for the job. You’re not running a media company. You’re running a lead generation engine that happens to look like a blog.
If you’re unsure which model fits your situation, it’s worth getting a proper outside view rather than guessing, and if you want help figuring out how AI and content fit together for your specific business, it’s the kind of thing an AI consultant for small business can map out with you in an afternoon rather than the six months it took me to work out the hard way.
Frequently asked questions
Can a small blog make money without any ads at all?
Yes, and for most small blogs it’s the better route. A blog with under 20,000 monthly views can earn far more from one paid service, one course sale, or a handful of consulting enquiries than it ever would from ad impressions at that traffic level.
How much traffic do I need before ads become worthwhile?
Generally you need somewhere around 50,000 to 100,000 monthly page views before ad revenue becomes meaningful, and even then it usually earns less per reader than a well-placed offer or affiliate link would.
What’s a realistic first monetisation step for a brand new blog?
Pick one product or service to promote at the end of every post, build an email list from day one, and track clicks so you know which posts drive enquiries rather than just page views.
Do affiliate links count as adverts?
Not in the way most people mean when they say adverts. Affiliate links are contextual recommendations, chosen by the writer, and they typically convert far better than display ads because the reader trusts the recommendation rather than tuning it out as noise.
