The short version: most bloggers earn somewhere between 2 dollars and 30 dollars per 1000 pageviews from display ads alone, depending on niche, traffic source and which ad network they use, but that number is almost never the whole story of what a blog earns. I’ve had months where a post pulling 40,000 views made me less than a single affiliate sale did. Views are vanity. RPM is a starting point, not the finish line.
What “per 1000 views” means
When people ask how much bloggers earn per 1000 views, they’re usually asking about RPM, which stands for revenue per mille (mille being Latin for thousand, not marketing jargon someone invented last year). RPM is calculated like this:
(Total earnings ÷ Total pageviews) x 1000 = RPM
So if a blog post earned 8 pounds from 4,000 views, the RPM is 2 pounds. That’s it. It sounds simple because it is simple. What’s not simple is that RPM swings wildly depending on three things nobody mentions when they quote you a single tidy figure: your niche, where the traffic comes from, and which ad network is serving the ads.
Real RPM ranges by niche (from ad network data and my own sites)
I’ve run blogs in the marketing and business space for over a decade, and I’ve watched RPM shift depending on the topic of the specific post, not just the blog as a whole. Here’s what tends to hold true across the industry:
- Finance, insurance, legal: 15 to 40 pounds RPM. Advertisers pay a fortune for eyeballs near topics like mortgages, credit cards and B2B software.
- Business, marketing, career advice: 8 to 20 pounds RPM. This is my patch, and a well-optimised business post can sit comfortably in this range.
- Food, home, lifestyle, DIY: 5 to 15 pounds RPM. Huge audiences, decent ad demand, but more competition for the same advertisers.
- Parenting, travel, general how-to: 3 to 10 pounds RPM. Big traffic potential, softer advertiser demand per click.
- Entertainment, celebrity gossip, memes: 1 to 3 pounds RPM. Massive pageviews, tiny per-view value, because advertisers pay less to reach a distracted, fast-scrolling audience.
Notice the range within each category can be five times wider than the gap between categories. A business blog post about “how to start a consultancy” can out-earn a celebrity gossip post with ten times the views, simply because the advertisers bidding on that audience are willing to pay more per click.
What the ad networks themselves report
Mediavine, one of the bigger ad management companies for mid-sized blogs, has publicly stated average RPMs across its network typically sit between 15 and 25 pounds for approved sites in the US and UK, though that’s an average across a whole network of food, lifestyle and DIY blogs, most of which get pulled up by a handful of high performers. Raptive (formerly AdThrive) reports similar ranges, generally 15 to 30 pounds depending on season, with RPMs almost doubling every November and December because retailers pile advertising budget into the run-up to Christmas.
Ezoic, which accepts smaller sites earlier in their growth (often from 10,000 sessions a month rather than the 50,000 many bigger networks require), tends to report lower average RPMs, often 5 to 15 pounds, because it’s working with a wider mix of newer, smaller, less established blogs.
Google AdSense, the network almost everyone starts with because there’s no traffic minimum, usually pays the least: 2 to 10 pounds RPM for most niches, sometimes less if your traffic comes heavily from countries where ad rates are lower or from mobile users who bounce fast.
A real example from my own experience
A few years ago I published a long guide on building a personal brand on LinkedIn. It did well, picked up shares, ranked for a decent keyword, and pulled in around 42,000 views over its first year. Display ad income from that single post, using a mid-tier ad network, came to roughly 380 pounds across the year. Do the maths and that’s an RPM of just under 9 pounds, which is entirely normal for a business blog post.
In the same period, a shorter, scrappier post about one specific piece of software brought in 6,000 views and generated over 1,100 pounds through a single affiliate partnership, because every reader who clicked through was actively looking to buy something that day. The RPM on that post, if you only counted the affiliate income, was north of 180 pounds per thousand views.
That gap is the thing almost nobody says out loud when they answer this question: pageviews and purchase intent are not the same thing, and display ad RPM punishes you for having a broad, browsing audience while affiliate and product income rewards you for having a narrow, buying one. If you want the fuller picture of how these income streams stack together, I’ve written before about the full range of ways to monetize a blog beyond ads alone, because ads are usually the smallest slice, not the biggest.
The uncomfortable truth about chasing RPM
Here’s the bit that gets skipped in most of these breakdowns. A high RPM sounds brilliant until you realise it usually means low volume, and a large audience almost always drags your average RPM down, not up. The bloggers who brag about a 25 pound RPM are frequently running smaller, tightly niched sites with a few thousand monthly sessions, not the mass-traffic machines people picture when they imagine blogging riches.
Meanwhile the bloggers pulling half a million monthly pageviews are very often sitting on RPMs closer to 6 or 8 pounds, because scale dilutes intent. You can’t rank for “best chef’s knife under 50 pounds” for every single visitor, and by the time you’re that big, a good chunk of your traffic is coming from less commercial, more casual searches. Bigger audience, thinner margin per head. Nobody puts that on a course sales page because it doesn’t sound aspirational, but it’s how the maths works out for almost every blog I’ve watched grow past six figures in annual traffic.
Step by step: working out what your blog could realistically earn
If you want a rough forecast rather than a fantasy number, do this:
- Step 1: Pick your niche’s realistic RPM band from the list above. Be honest about which category you sit in, not which one you wish you sat in.
- Step 2: Estimate your monthly pageviews using Google Analytics, or a target if you’re not there yet.
- Step 3: Divide pageviews by 1000, then multiply by your estimated RPM. 30,000 monthly views at an RPM of 10 pounds gives you 300 pounds a month from display ads.
- Step 4: Now add affiliate income, sponsored posts, digital products or services separately, because these rarely scale with pageviews in a straight line the way ad income does. A post with 2,000 views and one well-placed affiliate link can outearn a post with 20,000 views and none.
- Step 5: Recalculate your blended RPM (total income from all sources, divided by total views, times 1000) so you can see your real number rather than just the ad network’s number.
Most established bloggers I talk to, once you blend every income stream together, land somewhere between 15 and 50 pounds per 1000 views. The ones earning a proper living from blogging almost always have that number pushed up by something other than display ads: an email list that sells a course, a service page that converts, or affiliate deals that pay out well above what a banner ad ever could.
Where the real money hides
If you’re building a blog purely to hit a certain RPM, you’re optimising the wrong thing. I’d rather have 5,000 loyal monthly readers who trust my recommendations than 500,000 who bounce off a listicle and never come back. The blogs that eventually turn into full incomes tend to follow a similar path: build an audience, build trust, then sell something beyond ad space, whether that’s a product, a service or your own time. I laid out the full mechanics of this in how to make money blogging, and it’s worth reading before you spend a year chasing pageviews for their own sake.
There’s also a practical side worth mentioning: if you’re using AI tools to speed up content production so you can publish more often, that’s fine, but it changes your cost structure, not your RPM. The revenue per view stays tied to advertiser demand and audience intent regardless of how the post got written. If you’re weighing up whether outside help with your content or growth strategy is worth the spend, it’s worth reading about what an AI consultant for a small business costs before assuming it’s out of reach, because for a lot of solo bloggers it’s cheaper than a year of trial and error.
What tends to move RPM up in practice
- Traffic from the US, UK, Canada and Australia pays significantly more than traffic from countries with lower advertiser spend, sometimes three to five times more for the same content.
- Search traffic almost always out-earns social traffic, because someone typing a specific question into Google is closer to a decision than someone scrolling Instagram.
- Longer, more detailed posts tend to earn more per view because they hold attention longer, which means more ad impressions per visit, not just more views.
- Seasonal timing matters more than most bloggers admit. November and December RPMs can be double what they are in February or March across almost every niche, purely because of retail ad spend.
- Switching ad networks as your traffic grows changes your income, not just your admin. Moving from AdSense to a managed network once you clear the traffic threshold is one of the few single changes that can lift RPM by 50 percent or more overnight.
I remember a conversation with a blogger a few years back who was convinced her traffic had “stopped working” because her income flatlined despite views climbing. What had happened was simpler: her traffic mix had shifted from mostly search to mostly Pinterest, and Pinterest visitors, lovely as they are, browse fast and bounce faster, which tanks the ad impressions per session. Same views, different value. That’s a distinction that gets lost every time someone quotes a single RPM figure as if it’s fixed.
A quick sanity check before you plan your income around this
If someone tells you bloggers earn a flat rate per 1000 views, ask them which niche, which ad network, which country’s traffic and which season, because without those four answers the number is close to meaningless. It’s a bit like asking how much a house costs. Technically answerable, practically useless without the postcode. For more on how blogging income has shifted over recent years rather than the folklore version, it’s worth digging into older breakdowns like how to make money from blogging, which covers the shift away from pure ad reliance that’s happened across the industry.
For the adjacent case, read How Many Blogs Are Published Every Day (And Why That Number Won’t Help You Much).
Related reading: 102 million views on instagram money.
Every platform’s pay rate in one place: the creator pay rates guide.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good RPM for a blog?
Anything above 10 pounds per 1000 views is solid for most niches, and above 20 pounds is strong. Finance and business blogs can push well past 30 pounds, while entertainment and general lifestyle blogs often sit under 10 pounds even when they’re doing everything right.
Do more pageviews always mean more money?
No, and this trips up a lot of new bloggers. A smaller, more targeted audience with strong buying intent frequently earns more overall than a much larger, more casual audience, because RPM tends to fall as traffic becomes broader and less commercially focused.
How many views do I need to make a full time income from blogging?
At a blended RPM of 20 pounds, you’d need around 150,000 monthly views to clear 3,000 pounds a month from combined income streams, though many full time bloggers earn that with a fraction of the traffic once they add affiliate deals, digital products or services on top of ad revenue.
Which ad network pays the most per 1000 views?
Managed premium networks like Mediavine and Raptive typically outpay Google AdSense once your blog qualifies for them (usually 50,000 or more monthly sessions), often by two to three times the RPM, because they negotiate directly with higher paying advertisers on your behalf.
