<b>I switched from affiliate to display ads and my income tripled. Then I switched back.</b>

<b>I switched from affiliate to display ads and my income tripled. Then I switched back.</b>

Month 10: my houseplant-care site did $400/mo on affiliate links. Plant gear converts badly, mostly cheap impulse buys. Frustrating.

Month 11: I qualified for a premium ad network at 30k sessions. Slapped on display ads. Revenue jumped to $1,200/mo overnight without me selling anything. I felt dumb for not doing it sooner.

Month 14: but the ads made the site feel like a billboard. Bounce rate climbed, time-on-page fell, and I suspected Google was watching. Then a core update trimmed me 15%.

Month 15: I got surgical. Killed the ugliest ad slots, kept ads on pure-info pages, but on my few buyer-intent pages I went back to clean affiliate placements. Ads for the curious crowd, affiliate links for the ready-to-buy crowd.

Month 17: $1,650/mo combined, and engagement metrics recovered.

The setback: chasing the easy ad money, I temporarily nuked the user experience and probably handed Google a reason to demote me.

The takeaway: display ads aren't better or worse than affiliate, they fit different intents. Carpet-bombing every page with ads is leaving money and rankings on the table. Match the monetization to what the visitor came to do.