How much can you roughly earn from Google ad-sense? Is it worth it?

Q. How much can you earn from Google ad-sense? Is it worth it?
A. Here is the rough guide for you to decide for yourself if Google ad-sense is financially worth it?

Google ad-sense is all about volume. The number of impressions served.

From my personal experience, the average RPM, which stands for Revenue Per Thousand impressions -- "M" in RPM comes from the roman numerals meaning thousand, is about $2.0 to $ 4.0 for programming key words, and occasionally you get those wow moments of around $7.0 to $9.0 RPM.

So, on average, if you want to earn $100 a day, your blog or website needs to have at least

($100/$2.0) * 1000 = 50,000 impressions, which only a very few sites will accomplish.

But, on a positive note, if you can get around 2000 impressions a day, you can roughly get

(2000/1000) * $2.0 = $4.0/day, or $120.0/month


Another way to look at this is:

Number of impressions per day: 2000
Average Click Through Rate (CTR): 1%
Average Cost Per Click (CPC): $0.20
Average earning per day: 2000*0.01*0.20 = $4.0/day or $120/month,


which is not much at all, but you are are getting paid whilst you are accomplishing other tangible and intangible benefits as a blogger like

1. Learning, while you are blogging. I pro-actively learned a lot in programming as a blogger. Without blogging, and the small income it brings with it, I wouldn't have had the motivation to proactively learn  the Java 8 new features or the sought-after frameworks. 
2. Improving your written and researching skills.
3. Maintaining a repository of your knowledge, which will be handy as a quick reference guide to get your work done.
4. The repository of your knowledge can open more doors in terms of publishing your own eBooks via POD (Print-On-Demand) publishers.

Also, nothing is stopping you from having 3-5 other blog posts each earning $100+/month.

If you are one of those minority bloggers who can drive traffic to your blog or website to reach around 15,000+ impressions a day, you can open more doors through other online income generating options like

1. Affiliate programs to promote others' products and services.  
2. Selling your own books, products and services.
3. Reviews and public speaking assignments as a subject matter expert.

There are thousands of blogs and websites on programming topics, and you need to have great and unique contents to attract real traffic. May be things were different 3-5 years ago, but now a days things are highly competitive.

So, blog

1. to get your knowledge and skills relevant to get a good salary as a programmer, and possibly expand your career into freelancing.
2. to show your prospective employers that you are passionate about your chosen profession as a programmer.
3. to get a good traffic, and a decent following.
4. to create your own brand, and potentially open more doors as a software engineer.

Don't blog

• just for ad-sense or any other affiliate advertising income alone. You will be disappointed.

Google ad-sense is still a decent avenue to earn some passive income, but the main focus must be on writing quality content that is useful to you and others. So, stop searching for that secret ad-sense tip, and start paying more attention to drive more traffic with unique content.