How much does the average blog make? This is a common question that many people have when it comes to getting into online business.
It’s a worthy question, as most would probably like to know what to expect before getting themselves into what could be a hefty investment.
Nevertheless, whenever this question is asked the answer is inevitable – “It depends.”
It depends on things like:
- your niche/industry
- where your audience comes from
- how engaged your audience is and how often they come back
- how you monetize the site (ads, affiliate, selling your own products or services)
And it largely does, as each site is different in how it’s monetized (if it is at all) and the extent to which it can be.
Much of this depends on the site’s niche (e.g., finance, fitness, cooking, etc.), content, the extent to which it’s marketed, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, the reputation of its author(s), and much more.
However, I understand that this answer isn’t very fulfilling, so I decided to do some background research to determine a general ballpark figure.
This study is based on the two basic variables of interest – monthly unique visitors (a measure of traffic) and the resultant monthly revenue.
These numbers can be found by looking at website up for sale on Flippa. For those unfamiliar with Flippa, it’s like the eBay of websites and has a website valuation tool.
Website owners regularly use Flippa to auction off their digital properties. In such cases, it’s essential to be transparent about how much traffic and revenue a site gets each month as those figures are instrumental in determining a website’s value.
I collected data for 108 website listings that were listed on Flippa. I omitted data for websites that have an exceptionally high traffic-to-revenue ratio (e.g., 1000:1 or higher), as those sites are simply monetized sparingly or not at all.
On the same token, I omitted sites with a very low traffic-to-revenue ratio (e.g., 5:1 or lower), as it’s simply untenable to make that much revenue for the average website, which is informational in nature and not a landing spot where visitors are hungry to make a purchase.
Usually, the only websites that can make those types of claims are for those involved in consulting work and have an established name or personal brand.
Or are selling a widely publicized product or series of products directly on their site. For instance, I found one site that was making more than USD$2,000 per month off around 1,700 unique monthly visitors.
On the other side of the spectrum, I found a website with 200,000+ visitors earning under $100 within the monthly timeframe. These are exceptions, not the norm.
The former is extremely rare and not that viable, while the latter has plenty of untapped revenue potential that simply hasn’t been exploited, or the traffic is mostly from poorer countries (e.g., Pakistan, Turkey).
I was looking to get a reasonable estimate based on a standard website that is monetized based on Google AdSense (or some type of compatible advertisement scheme) and perhaps affiliate marketing as well.
These filters can be applied when searching for sites on Flippa. This would mesh well with the standard monetization scheme of a mainstream blog or personal website. Including outliers into the analysis would simply skew the results and obscure any useful findings.
How much the average blog makes in 2024: Statistics
The results came as follows:
Monthly Unique Visitors
Mean 60,392
Standard Deviation 76,433
Median 22,230
Monthly Revenue
Mean $1,839
Standard Deviation $4,807
Median $471
The mean (average) monthly unique visitors came in at roughly 60,000, with the average resultant revenue coming in at $1,839 per month.
Based on average figures, every 33 unique visitors produced $1.00 of revenue, or about $0.03 per visitor.
However, since I designed this study to provide estimated revenue-to-traffic figures to the average blog or personal website on the net, we would best be suited to using median figures to get our approximated figures.
Even though I excluded sites that provide unorthodox traffic-to-revenue ratios, I still included many sites that had plenty of traffic and high revenue overall if these proportions were entirely within the reasonability range.
High traffic and corresponding high revenue, nonetheless, still takes a strong brand, hefty marketing efforts, and heavy investment that simply isn’t practical for someone who simply wants to start a blog or website and make a bit of money doing so.
By looking at the median – more of a “true average” in this case – we can ascertain what is more accurately the standard traffic-to-revenue expectation, rather than by looking at the mean where higher traffic revenues might lead us astray in this determination.
The median website being sold had a monthly unique traffic stream of 22,230 visitors, with a corresponding revenue of $471.
This leads to a 47:1 visitor-to-revenue ratio, meaning that every 47 unique visitors leads to a $1.00 revenue on average, or about $0.02 per click.
Interpolations from this data suggest that for anyone looking for make $5,000 per month ($60,000 annually) from a blog or website, one should expect to take in over 200,000 unique visitors per month, or nearly 7,000 per day.
This is a lot of traffic that even a lot of very well-known individuals would have difficulty doing even by running the site on a full-time basis and having extensive knowledge when it comes to SEO and other forms of online marketing.
Unless, of course, they were to sell their own products.
But for many, advertisement revenue and white-listing others’ products to sell in the form of affiliate marketing might be a more realistic monetization strategy.
This would be particularly true for those who run their sites solo and focus the bulk of their efforts on frequent updates by way of adding content.
Conclusion
With all this said, I must naturally assert the reality that how much revenue you earn from a website is contingent on multiple factors and harken back to the unsatisfactory (but true) “it depends” answer.
Even for a given website, traffic will change fairly constantly across many timeframes – depending on the time of year, day of the week, and hour of the day.
Moreover, the traffic-to-revenue ratio will inevitably change wildly as well. It really isn’t as simply as saying that “every 47 visitors will earn you $1.” That is simply to provide a type of guesstimated figure based on the data I collected.
Other websites that have site worth calculators, such as WorthOfWeb estimate the traffic-to-revenue ratio to be closer to 60-70 visitors per every $1 of revenue. And for many websites in my sample, that was genuinely the case. For others, it was 100:1 or even higher.
So it really depends on the site, niche, content, design, popularity, ongoing marketing and advertising schemes (ads, affiliate marketing), and much more.
Getting a website off the ground is truly the toughest challenge. Months might go by before you can even get advertising on your site, let alone earn any money at all. And websites also cost money to get up and running and to maintain. It can definitely be a tough business.
But I hope this study was of some value in helping many obtain a rough approximation to what kind of traffic numbers one might need in order to achieve a certain revenue level.
