Can I monetize my food blog now?
Along with “Hey, can you enable affiliates for my blog”, this is perhaps the most common question we get once a blogger gets started.
We start monetizing a blog once it crosses 40,000 page views for the US demography or 70,000 for other countries.
Here’s why we have such thresholds and more importantly, why it matters that you focus on building your audience till you hit these metrics.
Cucumbertown has two monetization mechanics for bloggers below 300,000 page views per month and a premium subscription service above the 300K threshold.
The first two monetization mechanics are via ads and affiliates.
First, let’s say we want to generate revenue via ads.
For Indian audience the CPM is roughly $0.5 -1 and the RPM is in the range of $1–2. CPM is how much you can make for 1000 pageviews per ad and RPM is the sum of all the ads in a page for 1000 page views (blogs usually have 5–8 ad per page) slots . Things can get slightly more complicated here, but lets keep this simple for now. With US audience the RPM can go somewhere between $4–8.
So if you are generating 5000 page views per month, you’ll make around 7.5 dollars per month for Indian audience.
If you are in the US, 5000 page views can earn 22.5 dollars per month. Protip: Play around with this site to get more clarity. These are very miniscule numbers that ad agencies wont even accept your blog for these page views.
At 60,000 page views with Indian audience you get around $95 per month, which again is small but something to get started.
Remember, you need to deduct tax at roughly 30% for everything you earn.
To get to some meaningful income per month you should be looking at earning at least $300 dollars in India (200,000 page views/month) or at $1000 (220,000 page views/month) in the US.
Now for affiliates:
The average affiliate conversion is 0.3% of the total page-views. i.e. Lets say someone buys something for 30 dollars. Then you get around 3–5% of it. i.e. close to 1 dollar. If .3% is your total conversion of the audience then with 5000 page views there is a likely hood of 25 people trying to purchase it. Which means you are looking at 3–5% of the 25 people purchasing the product with 30 dollars value minus tax. Here again 30 dollars was something arbitrary I put. Usually it $2–10 etc. If the purchase is from Amazon India then the cost of product comes down dramatically.
So there you go. We hope this helps clear doubts.
With bloggers who have crossed a million page views these numbers change dramatically, in most cases tripling the RPMs. In addition to this, bloggers are able to do premium subscription services, that gets them sustained revenue from the fans.
Food blogging is a long-term career. It’s very common for bloggers to go without any substantial earning outside of sponsored content for the first 2–3 years to build an audience base. With a little bit of smartness you can substantially reduce the time frame but its always in your best interest to build the audience first.
