RPM for HubPages: My Experience

Pennies rolling in for 9 years equals…

HubPages is a premier revenue-sharing writing site that’s been around since 2006 — six years before Medium launched.

I’ve been writing on HubPages for nine years, since 2014. In that time, I’ve written around 50 articles total. As of now, I have 28 published articles — I’ve deleted 12 of them, either moving them elsewhere or assigning them to the online rubbish heap.

Saying I wrote there for 9 years is inaccurate because most of this time I completely ignored the site in favor of my blogs. In actuality, I focused on the site for around a year and a half.

With my background there established, I want to share my findings on how much writers can expect to earn at HP; specifically, the revenue per thousand views (RPM). They pay through PayPal by the way.

RPM for HubPages

Writers for HP used to be required to have their own AdSense account to share in the AdSense revenue from the site. Now, writers don’t have to have their own AdSense-approved account, they can simply sign up and start earning from their articles through the HubPages’ Ad Program, as well as through their Amazon Program earnings.

This is a welcome change considering how difficult it can be to get approved for AdSense.

As you may have gathered, unlike Medium, HP has ads showing on your articles, as well as any Amazon capsules placed there. The ads really do hamper the reading experience, yet it does allow for the revenue-sharing model to continue.

Here are my stats at HubPages:

• 33,682 total views
• $250 total revenue ($210 ads, $40 Amazon)

Doing the math, this comes out to $7.42 per 1000 views. So the RPM for HubPages from my experience equals:

• $7.42

Now, if you take away the Amazon money, the RPM is:

• $6.23

In order to add Amazon capsules or modules, they have to fit with the article’s content. This means you can only add Amazon to certain articles. For instance, poetry and short stories won’t generally have Amazon in them; articles about a certain product or book will, etc.

HubPages vs. Medium RPM

Making $6–7 per thousand views isn’t too bad in my view, as these are both internal and external views. From what I’ve heard and seen about Medium’s RPM, it is fairly low in comparison, yet this is just my experience.

I’ve seen some earning reports from Medium where the RPM is around $25 for all views and nearly $40 for reads. Of course, this depends on how many of your views and reads come from internal or external sources. You can only figure this out by examining each article’s stats.

RPM for Google AdSense

For some added bonus material, I want to share my RPM experience with AdSense on my blogs.

I’ve had AdSense on 5 of my Blogger blogs for around ten years. For the last couple of years, I only have it on 3 of them. Here are the results for the past three years:

• 17,590 views
• $6.72

That equals an RPM of:

• .38 cents

As you can see, it is hard to make money with AdSense with certain blogs at least. From my experience, you have to get thousands of visitors each week to start getting clicks and making money. When it is just a trickle of views each week then chances are ads won’t get clicked.

The type of ad placement and blog content makes a big difference in having success with AdSense on your blogs, keep that in mind.

RPM in Perspective

To bring these numbers into perspective, consider the per-view amount. If you make one penny per view, this equals $10 RPM.

For the last 30 days at Medium, I’ve had 1,250 views. If I made $12.50 for the month this would be $10 RPM. From my understanding articles make money from member reading time, so the RPM is hard to calculate. If most of your views are from members then you will make much more than $10, etc.

Conclusion

Overall, HubPages is a solid place to write articles. The articles do need to be exclusive for their site only. While I don’t like certain things about HubPages, including the word processor interface and the exclusive rule, it does give decent stats and shows how many articles each author has written.

For now, I’m doing some creative writing over there to see how it performs. It helps me practice fiction writing skills without burying my articles here at Medium.

One last thing, it seems HubPages doesn’t have an affiliate program anymore. They used to offer writers this extra way to make money by referring new writers to the site (like Medium does with users), but this has been eliminated.

Happy writing.

Originally published on Medium