Publisher Insider

Case studies and operating notes from the team behind 300M+ Facebook followers under management.

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Today is one case study. A publishing site fed by about 10 tiny-to-medium Facebook pages, and what the 90-day revenue report actually says about where the money comes from.

$445,802 in 90 days. Facebook sent almost all of it.

A publishing site we work with. About 10 tiny-to-medium Facebook pages behind it. Referral traffic from Facebook, plus display ads on the site.

90-DAY REVENUE

TRAFFIC SOURCE REVENUE

Here is the part most people get wrong when they look at a Facebook page business. They stare at Content Monetization and treat that as the whole story. On this site, Content Monetization is roughly 1% of revenue. The rest is referral traffic to the site, where display ads do the work.

The 90-day site ad report shows $445,802.34. Facebook alone accounts for $380,055.39 — more than four of every five dollars on the report. One day, September 27, added $9,286.36. Those are not Content Monetization payouts. Those are readers who clicked a Facebook post, landed on the site, and generated ad revenue there.

That is why Facebook referral traffic matters more than the feed checkbox most page owners obsess over. CM is nice. It is real money. But if you stop at CM, you are looking at the tip. The site is where this portfolio actually paid.

If you run pages and you still think of Facebook as “a place that pays you inside Facebook,” this report is the correction. Facebook is the distribution. The site is the cash register.

See the 90-day revenue breakdown →

Zoom in on the clicks. The rest of the mix still trails Facebook.

RELATED 30-DAY CUT

WEEKLY SESSION RPM

REVENUE BY TRAFFIC SOURCE

After Facebook’s $380k, the same 90-day report lists Google at $26,790.27, email through Aweber at $14,736.96, Pinterest at $9,817.91, and direct at $9,150.60. Useful lines. None of them replace the Facebook pipe.

A related 30-day cut on a site in the same world showed $170,378.19 with 99% Facebook referral traffic — about 7 small pages, followers from 15k to 900k, all organic. Same lesson at a shorter window: Facebook is doing the sending.

On the weekly card (Sep 20–26): 455,820 sessions and $45,540.82 in ad revenue — a $99.90 session RPM on a $2.62 CPM, with 38.05 impressions per session and 80.9% viewability. Session RPM is the number that tells you whether the traffic is actually worth sending.

And on the traffic-source card, Facebook still fills the site: about 62.7% of sessions and $380,055.39 in revenue. Email readers can earn more per thousand sessions ($193.18 vs Facebook’s $103.02), but email only brought about 1.3% of sessions. Volume still comes from Facebook.

So the operating lesson is simple: protect and scale the Facebook referral engine. Keep CM healthy, but do not confuse the feed paycheck with the business. For this site, roughly 1% is Content Monetization. Almost everything else is referral — and Facebook is the referral that matters.

See revenue by traffic source →