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Pinterest Success and RPM Reality: The Mistake That Cost Me Big

This is a newsletter I sent to my subscribers last week. I publish the newsletters on my website; however, I edit out some information from the public versions.

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Today, as promised, I’d like to tell you about my first Pinterest-oriented website that I created after the HCU.

A Journey Through Art and AI

It was November 2023, two months after the HCU crashed hundreds of online businesses, mine included 💔

Burned out after a brutal 2023, I wanted to create something visual and fun that was different from my usual work and could scale easily.

I always enjoyed visual arts but lacked the skills—until AI came along.

AI and Photoshop allowed me to create art easily, which became a creative escape during business setbacks in late 2023 and 2024.

I spent 2024 learning AI art generation, completing a MidJourney course and selling my work on Adobe Stock, which I continue to do today. Here’s my profile: ***edited out***

☝☝☝ I left out some details from my original newsletter. If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up:

Thus, it is not surprising that my first Pinterest website focuses on Art, with all content generated using AI.

For the website, though, I used ChatGPT to create media because it effortlessly produced exactly the style I was looking for.

Unexpected Success on Pinterest

The images ChatGPT generated in December 2023 weren’t very good.
Nevertheless, within a month and a half of starting to publish my content on Pinterest, I saw my first success. A few pins went viral and brought me over 400 visitors during Christmas week.

 

With no Pinterest courses under my belt, I relied only on past experimentation with another site.

I didn’t expect success to come so quickly, so I was ecstatic! I found an easy way to drive traffic to my website, and I loved producing the content!

So I doubled down.

In 2024, the website racked up 150k+ visits in total and all from Pinterest.

As for Google, it initially ranked the website pretty well. However, it quickly flagged it as spam and squished the traffic because the content was too uniform.

I had written a PHP script using the ChatGPT API to generate text matching the images, and as a result, nearly every article ended up looking like a carbon copy.

Pinterest did not care and continued delivering traffic steadily.

The Unexpected Journey Experience

At that time, Journey by Mediavine required 10k monthly sessions for acceptance. I was tracking to hit this by Halloween, and I did.

After getting accepted in November, December brought a discovery about my website’s RPM numbers…

…and it was shocking 🤯

The RPM numbers were total SH*T 😬

I had never seen an RPM as low as what this website generated.

It was just ***edited out*** 😭

☝☝☝ I left out some details from my original newsletter. If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up:

For comparison, cooking websites earn $15 RPM on Ezoic, which is supposed to be 50% lower than Journey by Mediavine.

These days, the website RPM sits at just ***edited out***, which is equally disappointing. After all, a tiny number multiplied by another tiny number still gives a tiny number 😒

I currently earn about **edited out*** per month from the website, but spend 2–3 times that amount on my VA for post & pin management and a designer for image editing 😒

Avoid Making My Mistake

So, how can you avoid spending a year on a website that won’t generate enough revenue?

Find out your website’s RPM as early as possible.

Apply to a low-threshold monetization platform like Ezoic or even AdSense early on to estimate your potential revenue before going after higher-tier platforms.

Don’t assume! Test and make content decisions based on the financial data you see, even if it does not fully reflect the possible future income. Double down on the content that has a better RPM.

This will prepare your website to earn more money when you eventually switch to a better monetization platform

The Decision to Move On

That’s why I’ve decided not to keep it.

I enjoy this website and I enjoy creating content for it… but unfortunately, it’s just not financially viable.

I plan to try to sell it after my fiscal year ends in July, though I don’t expect it will fetch much.

Now, a question for you!

What are your thoughts on balancing passion projects with financial viability? Have you faced similar challenges?

Go to the Comments section, and let’s chat!

Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend ❤️

This is a newsletter I sent to my subscribers last week. I publish the newsletters on my website; however, I edit out some information from the public versions.

If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up for my newsletter: