Running your own publication
「The reader is not the payer」
Readers pay you nothing. Advertisers and affiliates do. That gap is where “a good post” and “a post that earns” separate — and where most people fall through.
Publish on a site you own and earn from ads and affiliates. There is no unit price here — revenue is views × RPM, not one sale for one job. The risk points the opposite way from the models above: nothing until it works, then it keeps arriving while you sleep.
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- To first revenue
- AdSense has to approve you, and approval needs posts and real visitors first. We have not been approved yet ourselves. With no sample, we do not estimate how long it takes.
- Startup cost
- ₩0~50,000
- Coding
- not needed
- Sales
- not needed
- Automation
- 2/5
We have zero cases with a verified earnings figure, so we do not invent a revenue range. This model earns by views rather than by unit price, so the arithmetic lives in the ad-revenue calculator — as a range.
Where the money goes
- What the advertiser paidYou never see this number
- − the platform's cutAll of this happens inside Google
- = RPMYour share per 1,000 views — already net
- × views ÷ 1,000That is your revenue
- − VAT and income taxDepends on how you are registered
- = what you keepOnly this counts as earning
There is no unit price in this model, and there never will be. Revenue is views ÷ 1,000 × RPM, so “price per job” is not a quantity that exists here.
Put an expected view count into the ad-revenue calculator instead. It returns a range, not a single number — RPM swings ±50% with placement, device, season and visitor country.
Who you sell to
- ⚠️ Readers are not customers — they pay nothing
- Advertisers (Google sits in between; you never meet them)
- Affiliate partners (they pay for purchases your writing produced)
How the money comes in
- Ads (revenue = views ÷ 1,000 × RPM)
- Affiliate links (a share of purchases that complete)
- Sponsorship (arrives after readers do, not before)
- Your own product (unlike the three above, you set the price)
Steps
- Pick one subject you already know — search only rewards writing that knows something
- Before writing, put in one line who searches what and lands here
- Put an expected view count into the ad-revenue calculator and read the range — it never gives a single number
- Meet the AdSense prerequisites first: legal pages, enough posts, real visitors
- After ten posts, look at what actually gets read and aim the next ten there
Risks
- 🔴 Mass-producing with AI kills this model outright. Google's spam policy on scaled content abuse targets exactly this. Using AI is not the violation; adding volume without human review is
- Korean-language pages earn a fifth to a tenth of English ones for the same post and the same traffic (`research.md` §2.1). Worth knowing before you commit to one language
- The money is late and uncertain. The six models above pay per job. This one pays nothing until it works
- If the ad account is suspended, revenue is zero that day. This is a house built on someone else's platform
- RPM swings ±50% with placement, device, season and visitor country. A good month does not predict the next one
Do this today
- Write down three subjects you know better than most people
- For one of them, write the single line: who searches what, and lands on this
- Put 10,000 monthly views into the ad-revenue calculator and judge from the range it returns