Every website owner eventually faces the same decision: how should this thing make money? The three realistic answers are display advertising, affiliate marketing, and selling your own products. They are not interchangeable, they suit very different audiences, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason a site with genuine traffic earns almost nothing.
Let us compare them properly — not by which sounds most appealing, but by the economics and the trade-offs each one demands.
The metric that matters: earnings per thousand visitors
Comparing revenue models is impossible using total income, because that conflates the model with the traffic. The useful measure is how much you earn per thousand visitors. It lets you compare a small site to a large one, and it tells you what would happen if traffic doubled.
Rough real-world ranges:
| Model | Per 1,000 visitors | Effort to set up | Trust required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Display ads | $2–$40 | Very low | None |
| Affiliate | $10–$150 | Medium | High |
| Own products | $50–$1,000+ | Very high | Very high |
Those ranges are wide for a reason — topic and audience matter enormously — but the ordering is remarkably consistent. Products beat affiliates, and affiliates beat ads, on a per-visitor basis, almost universally.
So why does anyone run ads?
Display advertising
How it works: you show ads, and you are paid per thousand impressions regardless of whether anyone buys anything.
The genuine advantages:
- It monetises everyone. This is the key property. Every visitor earns you something — including the ones who will never buy anything from anyone.
- It requires no trust. A reader who has never heard of you and will never return still generates revenue.
- It is passive. Set it up once. No sales, no support, no product to maintain.
- It is topic-agnostic. You can write about anything.
The genuine disadvantages:
- Terrible per-visitor economics. You need enormous traffic for meaningful income.
- It degrades the reading experience, which costs you speed, rankings and returning readers.
- You control nothing. Rates move, policies change, accounts get disabled.
Choose ads when: your readers arrive from search, get an answer, and leave forever. Recipe sites, reference sites, news, general how-to content. These readers are not going to buy anything — but they can still be worth something.
Affiliate marketing
How it works: you recommend a product, and earn a commission when a reader buys through your link.
The genuine advantages:
- Far better per-visitor economics than ads, often by five to ten times on the right content.
- No product to build. No support burden, no refunds, no maintenance.
- It can be genuinely useful. Helping someone choose well is a real service.
- Recurring commissions exist — particularly in software, where you may earn monthly for years from one referral.
The genuine disadvantages:
- It only works on high-intent content. Informational articles convert poorly, so much of your traffic earns nothing.
- It is trust-dependent, and trust is easy to spend and hard to rebuild.
- You do not own the relationship. The merchant can cut rates, close the programme, or simply stop paying.
- Attribution is fragile. Cookie windows expire; other referrers take the credit.
Choose affiliates when: your readers are actively researching purchases. Software reviews, gear guides, tool comparisons, anything where the reader’s next step is a buying decision.
Your own products
How it works: you create something — a course, template, tool, membership — and sell it directly.
The genuine advantages:
- By far the best economics. You keep nearly everything, and you set the price.
- You own it completely. No network, no merchant, no algorithm sitting between you and your income.
- It compounds with reputation. A good product sells the next one for you.
- You can serve people properly, rather than pointing them at someone else’s solution.
The genuine disadvantages:
- You must actually build it, and it must be good. This is months of work with no guarantee.
- Support, refunds and maintenance are now your problem, permanently.
- It requires real trust, which requires real audience, which requires real time.
- It can fail completely. You can spend three months building something nobody buys.
Choose products when: your audience has a specific, expensive, recurring problem you can genuinely solve — and you have enough of an audience to validate demand before you build.
The answer most mature sites arrive at
Framing this as a choice is itself the mistake. Nearly every successful publisher ends up running layers.
- Ads as the floor. They monetise the vast majority of readers who will never buy anything. Small per-visitor, but applied to everyone.
- Affiliates in the middle. On the commercial content, where readers are already deciding.
- Products at the top. For the small fraction of readers who trust you enough to buy directly — and who account for a wildly disproportionate share of revenue.
A site with 100,000 monthly visitors might earn $800 from ads, $1,500 from affiliates, and $4,000 from a single product. The product is the largest line by far — but it only exists because the ads and affiliates funded the years it took to build the audience.
Ads monetise strangers. Affiliates monetise researchers. Products monetise believers. You need all three, in that order.
What to do at your stage
- Under 10,000 monthly visitors: do not obsess over monetisation. Ads will earn you almost nothing at this volume. Build content, build an email list, and if you need money now, sell a service.
- 10,000–50,000: add ads for baseline income, and start writing high-intent affiliate content. Watch which content converts — it is telling you what your audience will eventually pay for.
- 50,000+: move to a premium ad network, mature the affiliate content, and seriously validate a product. You now have enough audience to know what they need.
The single most common mistake is skipping straight to the model with the best economics. Products are the most lucrative — and the most likely to fail, because they demand an audience and a trust you have not built yet. Earn the right to sell, and the sale becomes easy.
Frequently asked questions
Can I run ads and affiliate links on the same page?
Yes, and most established publishers do. They serve different readers: ads monetise the majority who will never buy anything, while affiliate links monetise the minority who are ready to act. Just be careful not to make the page so cluttered that neither works.
Which model should I start with?
Whichever matches your readers’ intent. If they arrive from search, get an answer and leave, ads are your only realistic option. If they arrive researching a purchase, affiliate content will earn several times more from the same traffic. Look at what your readers are actually trying to do.
Do ads hurt affiliate conversions?
They can. An aggressive ad layout distracts from your recommendation and slows the page, and both cost you conversions. On your highest-intent commercial pages, it is often worth reducing or removing ads entirely — the affiliate commission is worth more than the impressions you gave up.
When should I build my own product?
Once you have enough audience to validate demand before building. The economics are the best available, but so is the failure rate, because a product requires trust that takes time to earn. Sell someone else’s solution first; build your own when you know exactly what is missing.