This morning I received an interesting email from a Fatstacks reader that enlightened me to an interesting traffic per article statistic.
Yesterday I mentioned my newish niche site gets 4K visitors per day (almost all from Sir Google).
This reader asked:
How many posts does it take to get 4000 visitors a day?
My site gets about 300 visitors a day on about 30 posts…
That niche site of mine has 400 published posts.
Do you see the pattern?
For both sites, daily traffic equals number of articles times ten.
My bigger niche site performs a tad better but the formula seems to hold true. There are about 3,500 to 4,000 articles published for search. That site gets 40,000 to 50,000 daily search visitors.
I have NOT put on my “Data House SEO” hat on so I have not analyzed hundreds of websites to assess this interesting formula.
Which means it’s purely anecdotal at this point but I think it’s illuminating.
The formula seems to hold true across 3 different sites at different stages of growth.
Another way to state this interesting traffic stat is on AVERAGE, articles pull in 300 visitors per month.
That’s 3,600 visitors per year.
Let’s assume a conservative $13 EPMV which would mean on AVERAGE, each article earns $13 x 3.6 = $46.80 per year.
That doesn’t sound so good does it, given the cost of content? I routinely spend well more than $100 per article.
And yet, IMO, this business is very good. It’s a cash suck in the beginning (unless you write content yourself) but as you stack those $46.80 revenue streams on top of one another, it adds up over the years.
When you add in the value of the site, the economics look even better.
Take my smaller niche site as an example.
To date I’ve published 400 articles averaging $120 per article. That’s a total investment of $48,000. I wrote a bunch of the articles myself but there are other costs so let’s say I’ve put in $50K.
It currently earns $1,900 per month.
That means at a 45x monthly net income multiple it’s worth 45 x $1,900 = $85,500.
So far, the site is profitable. I daresay it’s generated a decent ROI.
More importantly, it’s primed for growth. Ahrefs DR is 27 and increasing.
As DR increases and inbound links come in, existing content will get more traffic. But if I continue adding new content (and I do), the average will likely stick around the 300 visitors per month per article.
How about my bigger niche site?
4,000 articles x $120 = $480,000. This site is pretty labor intensive with VAs, images, hosting etc. so I’d say investment to date is more like $650K to $800K… maybe even $1 million (although I wrote a ton of the content myself for a few years).
Value: $70K/mo. x 45 = $3.15 million.
The ROI is far better than my smaller site and that’s very likely due to the content having a lot more time to rank and pull in traffic.
Ongoing reinvestment in relation to monthly income is far lower than my smaller niche site which means it’s ROI continues to climb.
How much traffic should your articles get?
It will vary just as revenue per 1,000 visitors varies but 300 visitors/mo per article is a reasonable benchmark. I suspect many niches do much better than that.
In fact, I talk to a lot of publishers and admittedly most of my numbers are not the greatest. My 300 visitors per month per article is average at best (perhaps not even that). My time on site and pages per visitor are not stellar. My revenue per 1,000 visitors isn’t great. My content is decent but most of it isn’t epic.
On the balance I’m an average niche site publisher at best. It definitely fits with my “good enough” mentality.
The one area I excel at is consistency.
I consistently publish new content. I consistently update older content. I’m consistent with my keyword strategy.
It’s a good thing for me that consistency works.
PLEASE NOTE – all of the above is very rough math. It’s merely anecdotal but hopefully gives you a broadstrokes idea of the economics of this content publishing business.
Also, if your site is brand new, you can’t expect such ratios. It’ll take time for your site to get some traffic coming in consistently but once it does, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that you’ll enjoy similar numbers.
