There’s a siren song in digital content creation, one that’s especially tempting for new publishers. It’s the idea that you can build a revenue stream by simply summarizing the day’s headlines. The logic seems sound: the raw material is freely available, the public’s appetite for news is insatiable, and the technical act of rewriting a story is, frankly, not that hard. You can set up a site, populate it with recaps of current events, and watch the traffic roll in. But then comes the cruel reality, the moment you check your ad earnings. You’ll find a number so dishearteningly small it feels like a mistake. This is the brutal truth of ad RPM, and news content sits at the very bottom of that barrel.
At its core, the problem is one of scarcity and value. When a hundred other sites are publishing the same basic facts about a major political speech or a sports final, your article becomes a commodity. In the eyes of both readers and, more importantly, the automated ad systems that determine your revenue, it is virtually indistinguishable from the rest. This commodification triggers a race to the bottom. Advertising technology is ruthlessly efficient at assessing the value of a page-view, and it places a low value on a visitor who is just passing through for a generic update before clicking back to Google to find another source for the same information.
These readers are often in a specific, and monetarily poor, mindset. They are in “information-gathering” mode, seeking a quick hit of the who, what, and where. They are not in a “consideration” or “purchasing” mindset. An advertiser is willing to pay a premium to reach someone researching the best hiking boots for a planned vacation, as that reader has clear commercial intent. An advertiser pays almost nothing to reach someone skim-reading a reworded press release about a city council meeting. The visitor’s intent is fleeting and informational, not commercial, and the ads displayed reflect that low commercial potential.
Furthermore, the advertising inventory available for such pages is often of the least desirable kind. Premium brands do not want their sleek, expensive advertisements placed next to hastily rewritten, potentially contentious news summaries. This space tends to be filled by what the industry calls “direct response” ads—payday loans, questionable supplements, or strident political fundraising. These advertisers operate on volume and razor-thin margins themselves, so they pay publishers minuscule rates per thousand views. Your RPM, or Revenue Per Mille, languishes because the entire ecosystem around generic news content is built on this low-value foundation.
There is also a hidden cost to this model: volatility. News traffic is famously fickle. You might get a surge from a viral story, but your audience vanishes just as quickly when the news cycle turns. This inconsistency makes it impossible to build a loyal, returning community, the kind of audience that commands higher ad rates because of their engaged relationship with the publisher. Instead, you are forever at the mercy of search engines and social media algorithms, chasing a traffic that is both unpredictable and notoriously cheap to monetize.
So, while the technical process of regurgitating news is straightforward, the economic model is fundamentally broken. You are competing in the most saturated, least valuable neighborhood of the internet. The path to sustainable revenue isn’t found in doing what is easiest, but in creating what is scarce: unique insight, deep expertise, personal storytelling, or transformative entertainment. That is where readers linger, where trust is built, and where advertisers are willing to pay for access. The hard truth is that in the world of online publishing, if the work is easy to produce, the rewards will almost always be equally light.
