Blog income calculator
The calculator shows what a blog can bring in over a month from four channels at once: ads, affiliate links, your own product and donations. You enter your traffic and your assumptions, the tool multiplies them out using the formula for each channel, and shows the total, the share each channel contributes and the income per 1,000 sessions. A new author needs this earlier than it seems. Long before the first dollar arrives, the important thing is already visible: which channel in your particular setup can produce real money, and which one stays small change even if traffic doubles. And how many sessions it takes to reach the figure you want — that is the second half of the tool, the reverse question.
Traffic and currency
Income channels
Fill in the fields above and the calculation appears here.
This is a model built on your own assumptions, not a forecast. The tool only multiplies the numbers you enter: if the RPM or the conversion rate is a guess, the result is a guess with exactly the same precision.
Everything is calculated in your browser. Your traffic and income numbers are never sent anywhere and never stored.
How each channel is calculated
Ads are calculated from pageviews, not sessions: sessions are multiplied by pages per session, the result is multiplied by the fill rate and divided by a thousand, then multiplied by the RPM. RPM is the income per 1,000 impressions after the ad network's cut, and it is the number your dashboard reports. Affiliate links are a chain of three links: session, click on the affiliate link, purchase. Two shares multiply, so a 3% click-through and a 2.5% conversion give not 5.5% but 0.075% of sessions. This is the main reason the channel almost always looks smaller than expected. Your own product: sessions are multiplied by the purchase conversion and by the price, and the platform fee is subtracted from the result. Donations: sessions are multiplied by the share of donors and by the average payment; a membership counts as one payment per month. The income per 1,000 sessions is the whole total divided by traffic. It is the only figure worth using to compare one month with another, or your blog with someone else's.
Which numbers count as ordinary
Display RPM commonly runs about $5–15 for general content on a mainstream ad network, and higher in finance, software and other niches where advertisers bid hard. It depends on where your readers live far more than on how well the text is written: the same article can pay several times more on US and UK traffic than on traffic from cheaper markets, which is why the example ships with an RPM of 8 rather than a number pulled from any one blog. The fill rate is rarely above 90%, because ad blockers take part of the inventory. Click-through to an affiliate link in a review article runs to a few percent; in an article with no clear recommendation it is a fraction of a percent. Click-to-sale conversion for most affiliate programmes sits between 1% and 5%. Session-to-purchase conversion for your own product, on a blog with no warm-up sequence, runs in hundredths and tenths of a percent. The share of donors is smaller still: 0.05% of sessions is already a decent result for a blog with a loyal audience. If the numbers you enter are noticeably above these reference points, the total will look good and will not happen.
The reverse question: traffic needed for a target
All four formulas are linear in the number of sessions: doubling traffic doubles the income of every channel. So the traffic you need is one division — the target divided by the income from a single session with your current set of channels. That is both the strength and the limit of the calculation. The strength is that the answer is instant and easy to check in your head. The limit is that linearity does not always hold in practice: extra traffic often arrives from different sources and with different quality, RPM can drop as you reach a wider audience, and product conversion can go the other way and rise once people recognise your name. So read the required traffic as an order of magnitude, not as a plan: "roughly five times more" is a useful conclusion, "103,480 sessions" is self-deception.
What the calculator deliberately does not do
It does not pull exchange rates. The currency choice is only the symbol next to the number: you enter every amount in one currency and nothing is converted inside. A rate means a network request, and this tool has to work without one. It does not know your topic and will not fill in a "typical RPM for your niche": no reliable average like that exists, and an invented number is worse than a missing one. It does not count tax, hosting costs, writer payments or ad spend — this is gross channel income. It ignores seasonality: the yearly figure is simply the monthly one times twelve. Above all, it forecasts nothing. It multiplies your assumptions. If the assumptions are guesses, the result is a guess with exactly the same precision.