Ad revenue vs subscription calculator

Enter your monthly pageviews and the ad RPM you actually earn (net revenue per 1,000 pageviews, taken from your ad manager). Then set the subscription side: the share of visitors you expect to convert, your monthly price, and your monthly churn rate. Open the advanced panel to model a hybrid — the share of pageviews you would put behind the paywall reduces ad income proportionally. Everything recalculates live in your browser and is stored in the URL, so you can share a scenario with your team.

Both sides of the comparison use simple, transparent arithmetic:

• Monthly ad revenue = pageviews ÷ 1,000 × RPM.
• Ad revenue after paywalling = pageviews × (1 − paywalled share) ÷ 1,000 × RPM.
• New subscribers each month = pageviews × conversion rate.
• Subscribers in a given month = last month's subscribers, minus churn, plus new subscribers. MRR = subscribers × price.
• Subscribers needed to replace ads = monthly ad revenue ÷ price.
• Months to break even = the first month where subscription MRR meets or beats your post-paywall ad revenue (we iterate 24 months).

Prices are net of VAT and payment fees, and both acquisition and churn are held constant.

Take 100,000 monthly pageviews at an £8 RPM. That is £800 a month from advertising. Paywalling 30% of pageviews trims it to £560.

On the subscription side, 0.5% conversion adds 500 subscribers a month at £5, and with 4% monthly churn the base compounds to 4,841 subscribers by month 12.

• Subscription MRR at month 12: £24,206
• Subscribers needed to match today's ad revenue: 160
• Months to break even against post-paywall ad revenue: 1

The gap widens over time: ad revenue is flat unless traffic grows, while the subscriber base keeps compounding until new signups equal churned subscribers.

Display RPMs for general-interest publishers commonly land in the low single digits to low teens in pounds, with premium niches — finance, B2B, technology — earning considerably more and long-tail content earning far less. The important comparison is not RPM against price, but yield per reader over time: an ad-funded reader is worth a fraction of a penny per visit, while a subscriber is worth their price every month they stay.

The trade-off is reach versus yield. Hard paywalls convert a smaller share of visitors and shrink ad impressions, but the readers who convert retain better and are worth multiples of an ad-funded visit. Metered and hybrid models keep most of the ad income while still building recurring revenue — which is why most publishers land on a mix rather than an either/or.

Sources

• Playwire — display ad RPM benchmarks for publishers
• Editor & Publisher — reader revenue and paywall reporting
• State of Digital Publishing — paywall models and conversion benchmarks

Benchmarks vary widely by market, content type and ad stack. Replace them with your own ad manager and billing data as soon as you have it.