Amazon Associates vs display ads: I ran both on the same site
Month 1: A home-coffee site, 30k sessions/month, pure Amazon affiliate. Earning about $480/month — a 3% commission on cheap gear is rough.
Month 4: I split the site. Half the URLs kept affiliate-only, half I added Mediavine display ads (I'd just crossed their 50k threshold). Same content, same traffic split.
The numbers after 60 days: affiliate-only pages = $9.20 RPM. Pages with both = $14.10 RPM, BUT affiliate clicks on those dropped 22% because ads ate attention and screen space.
Month 8: I stopped treating it as either/or. Buyer-intent pages ("best grinder under $200") stayed ad-light to protect affiliate clicks. Informational pages ("why does coffee taste sour") went ad-heavy — those visitors never buy anyway.
The takeaway: don't pick a monetization model for the whole site. Match it to intent per page. Ads monetize browsers, affiliate monetizes buyers, and stacking both on a buyer page just cannibalizes your best income.
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Amazon Associates vs display ads: I ran both on the same site
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