How Long Takes to Earn First 100 Dollars from Adsense – Simple Calculation

After we have successfully joined the Google Adsense program, the next target for most of us is to reach the payment threshold 100$. How long does it take? When I started blogging and joined Google Adsense program back in 2008, this was the question came to my mind. Searching on Google did not return much useful information. Let me explain and show the simple calculation it may help in identifying the time period you need to make your first 100 dollars from Adsense.

The truth is, it is not straight forward or valid for all blogs. It is difficult to predict and confirm the time-span to make your first 100 dollars from Adsense. Because the earning from Adsense is completely different for every blog, topic, traffic source and country of the visitors.

UPDATE: I’m updating this post almost after 9 years (from the original version) to reflect the current market.

Below was my first check from Google Adsense which took quite a long time.

How Long Takes to Earn First 100 Dollars from Adsense

In my experience, Google Adsense is one of the best programs to make money from blogs until you become a pro blogger to create your own product or start affiliate marketing. Getting the first payout 100 dollars is a very painful period for any bloggers. It took 29 months to reach 100 dollars in the year 2010 for me ( Yes, I had some gaps in my blogging life), but now things are much better.

Let’s go to the point. This is just an average calculation with assumption. None of the Adsense publishers are allowed to publish their exact details stats like RPM, CPC, and CTR publicly which is against Google Adsense TOS.

Important Factors

There are a few factors involved in deciding the time period to earn your first 100 dollars from Adsense. I’m not going to explain deeper, as a blogger you must be knowing about them well.

Page CPM (Cost Per Mile) directly impact the formula and your current CPM/RPM can say that when you will make your 100 dollars.

Few factors impact earning ultimately.

  • CTR ( Click Through Rate)
  • RPM is a new factor ( Revenue Per Mile)
  • Your blog niche (topic)
  • Type of visitors (whether they are your regular, or new visitors, coming from search engines, direct, social media…etc)
  • Page views
  • The number of Ads you show on your website.

Playing around with the above factors and tweaking them will lead you to make money quicker.

As said earlier, CPM (now it is RPM in Adsense) decides everything here. Adsense CPM indicates how much you earn from every 1000 page impressions with Adsense ads (no matter how many ads on them) from your blog.

If you earn 5$ from 2500 page impressions, your RPM is,

(5/2500)*1000 = 2$

You earn 2$ from every 1000 impressions.

How Long Does it Take to Earn First 100 Dollars From Google Adsense [Updated in 2019]

Here is the point, I can’t tell what is the best RPM at the moment, it completely depends on your blog niche and traffic source. If you and I have different blog topics and main visitors are coming from different countries, then our CPM/RPM will have a big difference.

Since the ad competition keeps increasing, the bidding prices from the advertisers keep rising. So, as publishers, we can get benefit from the higher competition among advertisers. The RPM is kept increasing compared to earlier years. When the advertiser pays the highest price for a click (which is CPC), our RPM goes up.

At the current market, anything between 2$ to 5$ RPM is a good rate. If it is less than 2$, then you must do something to improve it. If it is above 5$, you are doing a good job.

In this example, we will take 3$ as average RPM and to make the calculation easy, we will do it for the first 105 dollars.

So with 3$ eCPM/RPM to earn 105 dollars, you need 35,000 page impressions.

(1000/3)*105 = 35,000

This figure can be less or more for you because it depends on type visitors, the source of traffic and country of origin which make these impressions.

Let’s go to the next step.

When a visitor visits your blog, he or she checks average of 1.5 pages on your blog.

To get 35,000 page impressions, you need 23,340 visitors.

(1/1.5) * 35,000 = 23,340

Again, this 23,340 visitors can be from direct, referral, social networking, and search engines sources.

Mostly the search engine traffic users (who come from Google, Bing and Yahoo search) will be useful for any CPC programs including Google Adsense. Because they are the new users will probably click the ads on your website. Your regular visitors and social networking users may not be interested in the ads showing up in your blog.

65% to 75% search engine traffic will be healthy for a blog in my opinion. In this example, we will take 70%.

So, in 23,340 visitors, you need 70% of organic traffic, which is 16,338 visitors

(70/100)*23,340 = 16,338 visitors from Search Engines

Final

It is around 16,400 real users you need from search engines to make the 100 dollars from Adsense.

Now you need to see your Google Analytics and find out how many real users you are getting from search engines (traffic source=search engines). That will give an idea that how long you should wait and work to get your first 100 dollars from Adsense.

Wow, that’s a big number.

Now you can get a rough idea based on your average CPM (Also called RPM) and daily search engine traffic to know when you will get the first 100 dollar Adsense check.

If you are getting around 100 visitors via search engine daily, then it may take around 6 to 7 months to get your first 100 dollars from Adsense.

But one thing, Your blog will not be getting the same 100 daily search engine visitors for the next 6 months, it will gradually increase when you update your blog with unique content regularly. So, once you do blogging properly with correct techniques, then you can reach 16,500 search engine visitors quickly and get your 100 dollars.

Finally, it all depended on your Adsense optimization methods to get higher CTR, CPC and CPM, organic traffic and keyword selection. But to know these techniques, it will take some time for new bloggers.

I hope that I have thrown some lights in giving the direction and few ideas about making your first 100 dollars from Google Adsense.

If you find it useful, please share it.

A part-time blogger who makes enough money to leave the full-time job, but still enjoying both jobs :) . Sharing the knowledge here to help everyone to build better blog and make money online.

  • Dear Dinesh,
    Please help me with my blog? I am not getting much visitors and I don’t know how to increase it, please have a looks at my blog and suggest me with the required changes and ad placement or corrections that i should make…….

  • Excellent.!!!
    Very Well Described…:)
    I Started My Blog In Spetember 2012.Working Hard To get Organic Trrafic So I Can Apply For Adsense.(Now after 4 months getting little bit organic trrafic but still way to go) 😀
    Thanks For The Rough Idea how Much Will I Earn When I have Adsense On My Own Blog.

  • Google adsense requires you to have enough contents for your adsense to be approved. That is always my problem when I started. I already gave up with adsense, but I don’t wanna give up blogging!

    So I signed up with WordPress. I was not aware before whether there is an opportunity to make money at WordPress but I got significant traffic. around 50 to 100 views a day. When I learned about WordAds, I signed up and fortunately approved. It’s my first month and I am having just 100+ visits a day so I am not sure how much will I earn. Do you have any idea?

    The problem with wordpress is just that you need your own domain to be able to run advertisements. You are not allowed to have affiliate links.

    • ‘Health’ is something big. You may need to narrow down your topic and see the competition. If you are confident, then take it to the next step.

  • An extremely useful post. Earning first $100 can be challenging indeed, especially for new bloggers. It’s a tough process but it’s worth the wait and effort, because during this period we also learn how to blog professionally.

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