How Much Money I Made from 45,000 Page Views On My Blog

After growing my personal finance Instagram account to 50k+ followers, I decided to add blogging to my list of mediums. In December of 2022, I committed to posting two blog posts per week, and I’ve stuck with it so far! Read on to see how much money I made from 45,000 blog views (you might be surprised).

Why I began blogging

I began blogging for the following reasons:

1. The Instagram caption word limit prevents me from conveying as much nuance as I’d like, and often leads to misinterpretation and angry comments. Creating long-form content allows me to expand on my thoughts and provide a more comprehensive picture of any argument I present.
2. I’ve witnessed several fellow “finfluencers” lose their accounts due to hackers, impersonators, and Meta’s general incompetence. I figured that diversifying the platforms I create content for can only be a good thing. That’s also why I now have a newsletter 😉
3. Instagram content is ephemeral. You might get engagement on a post for a week or so (longer if it goes viral), but people won’t come across that post 3 months later…unless they’re Insta-stalking you. Blogging, on the other hand, presents an opportunity to create evergreen content. Your blog post could show up in search engine results even 10 years after publishing.
4. I was already paying to host and maintain this website, and I wanted to offset those costs. If you’re curious, here’s how much it costs to run Organized Finance.
5. Perhaps the most important reason of all: I love writing, and it doesn’t feel like work to me!

How much money I made from 45,000 blog views

In the 7 or so months since I began blogging seriously, I’ve published 60+ posts and received 45k+ page views from visitors to my blog.

Here’s how much money I made from those 45k+ blog views:

A whopping $89.99! Currently writing my resignation letter and planning my new career as a full-time blogger.

That’s probably lower than you expected. Here’s why:

If your daily page views & visitors have increased, why have your earnings decreased?

In the chart above, you can see that my earnings have actually decreased over time, despite increased page views and visitors to my website. Here’s why:

User Experience > Ad Revenue: By default, Ezoic places 10–15 ads on medium-sized blog posts. As you can probably guess, this leads to higher ad revenue but a pretty chaotic user experience. A few months ago, I reduced the number of ads Ezoic is allowed to place on blog posts. As expected, ad revenue soon decreased as well.

Why does Ezoic report lower page views than WordPress does?

In the image above, you can see that Ezoic only reports about 22k page views, while WordPress reports 45k+ page views. The discrepancy is primarily because I don’t allow ads on my links & recs page, my newsletter sign-up page, and my website home page, so Ezoic doesn’t register visits to those pages. It just so happens that those are my most-visited pages, and so my reluctance to place ads on them in favor of the user experience is costing me:

Why don’t you allow more ads to be placed on your website?

Engagement > Ad Revenue: While I may be making less money from ad revenue than I was before, I’m making more money from digital sales, referral bonuses, and affiliate commission (all of which stem from my website). This little experiment has validated for me that a good user experience makes visitors more likely to actually read my content and click my links-which, in turn, results in more blog-driven profit (even if not from ads).

Questions?

If you have any more questions, feel free to comment below!

Originally published at https://organized-finance.com on July 2, 2023.