How a Pinterest Blogger Discovered Their Traffic Was Worth Four Times What They Were Earning

Spend 5 minutes in any Pinterest group from South Asia and you’ll notice a pattern. People are talking about pins, boards, trends, Canva templates… the Pinterest stuff. Almost no one is talking about what happens after the click… the Monetization stuff. Meanwhile, in another corner of the internet, website and app publishers obsess over that exact part. They test, tweak, switch things up, chase better returns from the same traffic. 

We sit right in the middle of that gap,  and every now and then, a Pinterest publisher walks in and finds out what their traffic has actually been worth this whole time. This one did, earlier this year. A DIY and home crafts blogger helping everyday people turn creative ideas into hands-on projects. Their setup was what most people use: basic ads, nothing broken, nothing exciting either. High-intent DIY enthusiasts came in every day, but the revenue didn’t come close to reflecting the quality of what was arriving.

So we got to work.

STEP 1: MOVED THEM ONTO GOOGLE AD EXCHANGE

The first thing we did was migrate them off AdSense and onto AdX. From the moment that switch happened, the same traffic was now being exposed to a much bigger, much more competitive pool of advertisers. Instead of a small closed auction, it was now a live, real-time bidding war every time someone loaded a page. The RPM started climbing almost immediately.

STEP 2: FLOOR PRICE OPTIMISATION

Floor prices are the minimum you’re willing to accept for your ad inventory, and getting them right is an art in itself. Set them too low and advertisers pay less than they would have. Set them too high and ads stop filling altogether. The sweet spot is somewhere in between, and it’s different for every site.

We analysed their niche, the session behaviour, the visitor quality, and set floors that reflected what that inventory was actually worth. The RPM climbed further.

STEP 3: VIDEO OUTSTREAM ADS

The third move was introducing video outstream ads. These are short video ads that sit within the content of a page without interrupting the reading experience. For earnings, video is a different league. Advertisers pay a significant premium for video over standard display ads. 

Once we layered these in, daily revenue jumped 30% in March and 45% in April,  on top of everything that had already improved. Each step built on the one before it. That compounding is the whole point.

THE RESULTS

Here is what happened to the RPM over 3 months:

• January:  $6.59 RPM
• February:  $8.82 RPM
• March:  $14.30 RPM

That is 117% growth in RPM in 90 days. The blogger did not change the Pinterest side of things at all. The difference was entirely in how that traffic was being monetised.

WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOUR RPM COULD LOOK LIKE?

Pinterest publishers in South Asia are sitting on some genuinely good traffic and collecting a fraction of what it’s worth. That’s because the monetisation infrastructure that serious publishers use hasn’t reached this community yet. Most people don’t even know it exists. And that’s exactly the gap we work in.

If your RPM is under $10, we should talk. If it’s under $5, we should talk urgently. We’re actively working with Pinterest publishers from this region and we know this traffic well. Reach out on Facebook or LinkedIn, tell us where you are right now, and we’ll show you where you could be.