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What should you charge for a sponsored post?

20 October 2026

In how many clicks one affiliate sale takes we found that links pay pocket money on a small site. A sponsored post is the other way readers can earn for you without a sale: a business pays you to publish something about it. The question every owner gets stuck on is the first one: what do I charge?

Two ways to price a sponsored post

A sponsor is buying attention, so the fair price starts with how many readers the post will reach. But on a small site that number is small - and you still spend the same hours writing it.

• Audience price is the views over the post's life times a price per 1,000 views. Most views come in the first month, from your home page, newsletter and social posts; search and links add a trickle after that.
• Time price is the hours it takes you times your hourly rate - writing, publishing and the emails with the sponsor.
• Quote the higher of the two. Below it you are paying to publish someone else's advert.
• The R250 per 1,000 views is our estimate - there is no published South African rate card for small blogs, so treat it as a starting point and raise it if sponsors say yes too fast.

Work out your sponsored post price

Type your visits a month, the share who see a new post in its first month, the views it keeps getting after that, how long it stays up, a price per 1,000 views, your hours and hourly rate, and your traffic growth. The calculator shows both prices, which one to quote, and the traffic at which your audience becomes worth more than your time - with a chart.

Prefer a full page? Open the sponsored post price calculator on CalcSA. To see what the same readers earn from affiliate links instead, try the affiliate clicks per sale calculator.

Worked example: the calculator's defaults

A site with 10,000 visits a month, where 5% of visitors see a new post in its first month and it then gets 20% of that every month, kept up for 12 months, at R250 per 1,000 views, taking 4 hours at R400 an hour, with traffic growing 3% a month.

• The post reaches 1,600 readers - 500 in month one, then 100 a month for 11 months.
• The audience price is R400 - 1,600 views at R250 per 1,000.
• The time price is R1,600 - so quote R1,600.
• The audience overtakes your time at about 40,000 visits a month.
• At 3% growth that is month 47 - almost four years away.

Three more cases, same defaults except the one shown:

• 50,000 visits a month: the audience is worth R2,000, so quote R2,000.
• A post that keeps 40% of its first month: 2,700 readers and R675 - evergreen posts are worth more to a sponsor.
• Two hours instead of four: your time is R800, and the audience passes it at 20,000 visits.

Estimates. The 5% first-month share, the 20% later views, the R250 per 1,000 views, the R400 rate and 3% growth are assumptions, as in the calculator. Your WebCounter pages report shows what your own recent posts got.

Two years of sponsored post prices, by site size

Audience price of one sponsored post as traffic grows 3% a month, for sites starting at 10,000, 25,000 and 50,000 visits, against four hours of time at R400:

• The 10,000-visit site stays below its time price for the full two years - quote on time.
• The 25,000-visit site crosses R1,600 around month 16 - from then on, quote on the audience.
• Re-price every few months: a quote based on last year's traffic undersells this year's.

Reading your counter for this

Your WebCounter counter gives you the visits, and its pages report shows how many views your own recent posts got - the number a sponsor actually wants to see. No counter yet? Get your free WebCounter counter - it takes a minute and costs nothing.

• First-month share is a recent post's views in its first 30 days, divided by your visits for that month.
• Later views: look at a post that is three months old - its views last month against its first month.
• Count bots out - a sponsor who checks will trust real readers more than a raw count.
• Send the sponsor a screenshot of a comparable post's views - it closes the deal faster than a rate card.

Sources

• The R250 per 1,000 views, 5% first-month share and 20% later views are our estimates - no published South African benchmark was found for small blogs.
• Labelling: the Advertising Regulatory Board's code expects advertising to be clearly recognisable as such - mark the post as sponsored; we did not re-check the current clause.
• Calculator: CalcSA, Sponsored post price.

Estimates only. What a sponsor will pay depends on your niche, how closely your readers match their customers and how much they trust your numbers; your own counter is the test.