Display Advertising Easy

What it is

Display advertising is the sale of space on your pages to advertisers, priced per thousand impressions (CPM) and paid to you as a share of what the advertiser spent. You place a script, the network runs an auction for every impression, and the winning ad appears. Google AdSense is the entry point almost everyone starts with; header-bidding partners such as Mediavine, Raptive and Ezoic run a wider auction and keep a share of the higher price.

How the money flows

Advertisers bid through demand-side platforms for the attention of a particular reader on a particular page. The network or ad management partner takes its cut (AdSense keeps 32% of display revenue; managed partners keep 10-25% of a larger pie) and pays you monthly once you pass the payout threshold, usually $100 on NET-30 terms. What you actually bank is best measured as session RPM: total revenue per 1,000 sessions across every unit on the page.

What it pays

A US-heavy general-interest site earns roughly $5-12 session RPM on AdSense and $15-30 with a managed partner running header bidding, sticky units and video. Finance and insurance content can run $40-100 RPM; gaming and entertainment sit at $2-8. An audience mostly outside the US, UK, Canada and Australia earns a quarter to a half of these figures. Season matters as much as niche: December can pay double what January pays.

Requirements and who pays

AdSense, Ezoic, Adsterra and most self-serve networks have no traffic minimum, only content-policy and quality reviews. The managed partners have hard gates: Journey by Mediavine from around 10k sessions, Mediavine at 50k sessions, Raptive at 100k pageviews, and all of them want a majority of traffic from tier-1 countries. Restricted niches (gambling, adult, CBD, vape, piracy) are refused nearly everywhere; see the niche pages for the networks that do accept them.

Pitfalls

Every extra unit earns a little more and loses a few readers; the sites that earn best run four to six well-placed units, not twelve. Layout shift from late-loading ads is the usual reason a content site fails Core Web Vitals, and invalid traffic (bots, click farms, incentivised clicks) gets accounts closed with the balance forfeited. Treat display as the floor of your revenue, then add a method that scales with trust rather than traffic.