Blogging income is easy to fantasize about and hard to estimate. This calculator takes your traffic and turns it into a monthly figure across the three ways blogs actually make money: display ads, affiliate commissions, and your own products.
Understanding the three income streams
Display ads are measured in RPM — earnings per thousand pageviews. RPM varies enormously by topic and by where your readers are. Finance, software and business content earns far more per view than entertainment or general lifestyle, and readers in the US, UK and Gulf markets are worth more to advertisers than global averages suggest.
Affiliate commissions depend on intent. A review or comparison post converts far better than a general guide, so the site-wide conversion rate you enter should reflect the mix of content you actually publish, not your best-performing page.
Your own products convert at lower rates than affiliate offers but keep the whole price rather than a slice of it. This is usually where the economics turn, because you control the price and the margin.
Reading the per-1,000 figure
The most useful output here is not the monthly total — it is what you earn per thousand pageviews. That number tells you whether your problem is traffic or monetization.
If you earn very little per thousand views, adding another income stream will not rescue you; you either have the wrong audience or the wrong content mix. If the figure is healthy but the total is small, you simply need more readers, and that is a much easier problem to solve.
A note on the numbers
This is a forecast, not a promise. Real blog income is seasonal, it varies with your traffic sources, and ad rates move throughout the year. Use it to compare scenarios and sanity-check plans rather than to predict a specific month.