In my first Hello World post on this blog, I mentioned that, since I work in Google Ads, I intended to place subtle below-the-fold display advertisements at the end of the posts on this website in order to learn more about how publishers use our product. I signed up for Google Ad Manager, which also required an AdSense account, and configured some house ads showing my family dogs. In fact, one of the main reasons this blog exists in the first place was to generate enough content to qualify for an AdSense account. Before that, jacobgoldman.dev was just a few lines of HTML linking to my socials.
Since these are “house ads”, they are non-revenue generating (of course Addy and Josie themselves are priceless). Typically publishers configure their inventory to include direct demand from their own deals with brands and/or programmatic demand from real-time auctions with many different bidders. However, I do have a few pages running AdSense ads (useful for occasional debugging at work) which produced a jaw-dropping $0.32 across 48 impressions in 2025. We can extrapolate that ~$5 RPM (revenue per mille / 1,000 impressions) could have yielded 633 x $5/1000 = $3.16 if I had ruthlessly shown only programmatic ads instead of my house ads (likely less since buyers consider below-the-fold ads to be less valuable than the 100% active viewability on my AdSense ads).
As you can see, digital advertising is absolutely a game of scale. You need millions of daily page views to produce meaningful revenue. The biggest players usually negotiate direct deals with large advertisers and use programmatic to sell unsold “remnant” inventory to the highest bidder with high minimum floors. On the other hand, I think it’s truly awesome that a small publisher like me can easily place a few ads and produce real money out of thin air.
(Disclaimer: this is just me experimenting on my own web property, I speak only for myself)