Hubpages Income - The Real Story

Hubpages is one of the best places to come and write on the internet without outlying any of your own money.

It's free to join Hubpages today.

You have the opportunity to make money by sending traffic to your hubs and sharing the potential ad revenue with Hubpages. This happens in one of two ways; Google Adsense or the Hubpages Adprogram. It's important to remember that you will still need a Google Adsense account to participate in either potential income stream.

1. You monetize your hubs with Google Adsense.

You split the ad impressions with Hubpages 60/40. This means that sixty percent of the time the page will load your Google Adsense code and the other forty percent of the time Hubpages will display their ad code. This doesn't mean you'll get sixty percent of the income. It's almost impossible to tell what percent of the income you will get as Hubpages don't disclose their earnings from individual hubbers.

However, you only get income when someone clicks on your ad code. It doesn't matter how many times your pages are viewed as it's all about clicks and click values. Of course, more page views increases the chances of someone clicking.

There's no way to tell how much you will earn each month from Adsense or from account to account. It's down to what you've written about, how many clicks you get and the values of those clicks. That can vary significantly from month to month.

2. You monetize your hubs with the Hubpages Ad Program.

This means all the ads on the page, bar one, shows Hubpages ad code. They then decide what to pay you on a "cost per mille" basis, otherwise known as CPM. Basically you get paid a certain value per thousand impressions. You don't get paid the CPM on total views. Instead, the CPM only applies to sixty percent of your total page views. (This will be made clearer in this article later when we use actual figures to show you exactly what this means.)

CPM values vary from account to account and day to day as Hubpages decides what your CPM will be for each day you participate on the Hubpages Adprogram. It's not very transparent and there's little to no way to know how Hubpages calculates your CPM. Remember you are not paid for clicks on any of these ads. All the clicks are credited to Hubpages one hundred percent of the time.

You are only paid for clicks on a single ad unit located at the very bottom of the page, underneath the comments on the right. Again this ad is split 60/40 with Hubpages. If you are on the Adprogram then the income from this ad unit is unlikely to add significantly to your bottom line as the reader has to scroll past at least four other ads before they get to the one you are paid directly for.

As mentioned above, it's virtually impossible to say with any kind of certainty how many views you would need to make XXX amount a month from activating Google Adsense on your hubs. For this reason, we can only do this accurately with hubbers who chose to implement the Hubpages Adprogram.

When people first hear of Hubpages they wonder if it's a scam or fake or some kind of dodgy deal. They can't believe that someone will pay them to write articles about whatever they want to write about. It doesn't matter if it's about belly button fluff, as long as it's written well and hasn't been copied from elsewhere on the internet. Although why you'd copy an article about belly fluff is a little bizarre, but I have seen stranger things... Anyway, you can get paid for writing articles, but before you rush out and think it's going to make you rich please think again.

The purpose of this article is to give new and potential hubbers a reality check, so they aren't disappointed down the line after writing numerous articles and wondering why they are no closer to that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

In order to calculate how many views you need to make a decent income on hubpages there are a few maths skills we need to implement. I have made the maths as simple as possible. A lot of hubbers struggle understanding how their income is calculated or even what they have to do to achieve a decent income level. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you'll know exactly what goals and targets you need to make a decent level of income from Hubpages.

The first step is understanding your CPM. You can find this in your Earnings Report. CPM's seem to fluctuate between $1 and $7, according to what people have said in various threads in the forum and in the questions and answers section. It's hard to specify exactly what the range is as you are not supposed to share your CPM value. You can lose your Google Adsense account for this and also Hubpages tends to delete these kinds of comments very quickly.

So if your CPM is let's say $2 (just to make the figures really easy) then for every 1,000 impressions you'd receive $2. For 2,000 impressions you'd receive $4. However, if your CPM was $5 then for every 1,000 impressions you'd receive $5. For 2,000 impressions you'd receive $10. This shows you how important the CPM value and the number of impressions are in determining your income and success on Hubpages.

It's important to understand the difference between total views and total impressions. Total views are how many times your hubs have been viewed. Impressions are how many times your ad code was shown on the page, which is sixty percent of the time. So if you need 1,000 impressions to make $2 then you actually need 1666.66667 views (1,000/0.60 = 1666.66667)

If you want to make $1,000 a month from Hubpages then the table below will help you to set traffic targets so you know what to aim for. If we assume that every month has 30 days it will make the calculations easier, we just have to figure out how to make $34 a day ($1,000/30 = 33.3)

Yes you read that right. If your CPM is $2 then you need over 27,750 daily views to your hubs to make $33.30 a day, in order to make $1,000 a month. However, if your CPM is $7 then you only need 7929 views to make the same amount of money. That's almost a difference of twenty thousand views! This drives home the point about how important the CPM is in determining your success rate on Hubpages.

If you extrapolate this data out and show how many views you need a week, a month or a year, the differences become staggering. It becomes even clearer the task that lies ahead for hubbers with low CPM values.

Well I guess by now you should have your answer on whether it's possible to earn a decent income on Hubpages with the Hubpages Adprogram.

$12,000 a year may seem a lot for writing online, but for a normal full time job this would not be a lot of money. Is it likely that you'd make this kind of money from Hubpages within your first year? It's highly unlikely as my poll shows on my Hubpages experiment for 2012. Most hubbers struggle to get their first paycheck, let alone $1,000 a month consistently.

Most hubbers don't get anywhere near these type of traffic figures, and if they do it's over a span of years.

Although this hub doesn't go into how many hubs would be required to sustain these levels of traffic, it's understandable that more than a handful would be required. If I take one of the most successful hubs I have written that averages around 500 views a day then that would be approximately 180,000 views a year. On this basis I would need less than 100 hubs. Unfortunately, it's more realistic that most hubs I have written average less than 100 views a day. Some only get a handful a month if I am lucky.

If I average out the number of views I currently have (which is 670,000) against the number of hubs I have (86), then on average each hub gets 7,800 views a year (670,000/86 = 7,800. You can figure out the average on your own account so you can get accurate figures for yourself and know how many hubs you'll need on average). If we use my average hub views as an example, then we can roughly calculate how many hubs I'd need to write to meet the yearly traffic target.

Writing hubs that bring in thousands of views is part luck and part strategy or experimentation. Not every hub you write is going to hit the traffic jackpot. In fact, the majority of them will be slow burners that take a while to reach their peak traffic stream. Some will wither and die and never see a decent stream of foot traffic.

From the table above, I'd have to write at least 3 hubs a day in order to get anywhere close to achieving $1,000 a month from Hubpages.

If you have a high CPM on Hubpages then your chances of reaching a decent level of income are drastically improved.

It's important to note this is just a rough figure based on my average. I should mention that people who have high CPM's tend to write in certain areas or niches and this can result in higher advertizing revenue or income potential tends, but also tends to lead to increased competition. So it could be that those with higher CPM's may not average as much traffic per article. Each account will again differ on the basis of keywords chosen to target etc.

In an ideal word, we'd like to find niches or topics that have high traffic, low competition and high CPM's.

After reading this hub, you should have a better understanding of what's achievable on Hubpages and also the kind of goals you'll have to set and achieve in order to make the income you desire.

Good luck and let us know how you get on!