Why You Should Run an English Blog (AdSense Revenue and Header Bidding)

Lately, I’ve been seriously thinking about how to boost my AdSense revenue. I tried rearranging ad placements on my website and experimented with all kinds of strategies—but none of them led to a dramatic increase in income (except for some popup techniques and menu tweaks).

Then it hit me: “In the end, running an English blog is the real answer!”
In this post, I’ll explain why starting an English blog can significantly improve your AdSense earnings, especially when combined with strategies like header bidding.

English Blogs and Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a platform that displays ads in designated spaces on your blog and shares revenue based on impressions or user interactions. That’s why it’s one of the most common monetization channels bloggers consider.

But here’s the question: Why should you run an English blog to succeed with AdSense?

Why Start an English Blog?

When people begin blogging, many eventually consider switching to or launching an English blog. In fact, many members of our WPlaybook community already run English blogs! 😄
There are three main reasons for this trend:

AdSense CPC (Cost Per Click) Is Higher

To increase your AdSense revenue, one of the most critical factors is the cost per click (CPC). Whether one person views your blog or clicks an ad, there’s a huge difference between a $1 ad and a $10 ad.

Let’s look at an example:
When searching for keywords related to cooking in Google Ads, one of the top-bidding keywords was “tofu recipes” — and the CPC was $10.28.
That’s pretty high, isn’t it?

The $10.28 figure refers to the RPM (Revenue Per Mille), which means if 1,000 people view that particular ad, the blogger would earn $10.28 from it.

So, what about English blogs?

English blogs typically enjoy higher ad rates in the global advertising market. Since English is widely spoken and understood worldwide, advertisers are willing to pay more to place their ads on English-language content.

Below is an example:
We changed the region to the United States and searched for the keyword “cooking” — let’s take a look at the CPC (Cost Per Click) results.

First, the highest bid for related keywords in the U.S. is $19.26, which is about twice as high as in Korea. But there’s an even more striking difference — and that’s in the minimum top-of-page bid.

If you scroll up and check the minimum bid for Korean cooking-related keywords, you’ll see that most are stuck around $0.xx levels.

But what about the U.S.?

For the top keyword “prepared meal delivery,” the lowest bid is $5.34. Even for the general keyword “cooking,” the minimum bid is $3.10.

Yes, that’s the minimum.

To put that in perspective — compare it to $0.30, which is the minimum bid for the Korean keyword “tofu recipes.” That’s a 10x difference. And when compared to the third-place Korean keyword, spring rolls, the difference is a staggering 30x.

In short, this means that if an English blog and a Korean blog receive the same number of clicks or impressions, the English blog could earn at least 5 times more in AdSense revenue.

Wapple:WPlaybook

It’s a massive difference, right?
And that’s not all — the biggest reason for the gap in AdSense revenue between Korean and English blogs isn’t just CPC. It’s traffic.

Massive Traffic Difference – Google Dominates

English is a global language, and an English blog targets a worldwide audience. Compared to Korean blogs, this means English blogs can attract significantly more traffic. As users from various countries visit your blog, ad impressions and click-through rates naturally increase.

Let’s bring back the examples we looked at earlier.
This time, take a look at the red box on the left.

You can see that in terms of monthly visitors, Korean blogs are typically in the 1,000 to 10,000 range, whereas U.S.-based blogs tend to attract between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors per month.

But here’s the catch — these stats are limited to Korea and the U.S. only.

If we refer to a more accurate global metric, like Ahrefs, we find that the keyword “cooking” gets approximately 3,400 global searches per month.
And keep in mind — this is just on Google.

On the other hand, what about cooking? Let’s take a look.

The keyword “cooking” gets 80,000 monthly searches in the U.S. and 2.56 million searches worldwide. The reason for this significant difference lies in the absolute population size and, secondly, the fact that almost all searches are done through Google — this is a major advantage of running an English blog.

Ability to Use AdSense Management Services

The key difference between Korean blogs and English blogs is whether or not you can use AdSense management services.

AdSense management companies provide various services such as ad optimization, revenue maximization, and ad placement to help blog owners generate higher income. Think of them as a delegated manager for your ads.

For your information, many Korean bloggers don’t even know this exists. Why? Because they’re fundamentally not eligible to use it. To use these services, the first condition is to run a self-hosted blog. In other words, you must create and operate your blog with WordPress.

Tistory? Google Blogger? They get disqualified at the very first condition.

AdSense itself is one of the advertising platforms with relatively low cost-per-click rates among various ad platforms. In fact, most people running English blogs use platforms like Ezoic or Mediavine. But why do these companies generate more ad revenue?

That’s because these companies resell ad inventory through real-time bidding. In other words, they use AdSense as a baseline for ads on your blog, then auction it off saying, “Who will pay more than the current ad?” Naturally, the highest bidder’s ad gets shown on the blog. Another thing these companies are good at is placing video ads on blogs. Since video ads generate much higher revenue than display ads, they can significantly increase your blog’s earnings.

So, these companies take a percentage of the extra revenue generated. Typically, blogs with an RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) of $12 to $30 can increase to $45 to $65, according to reports. I will try this myself and share my review later.

Recommended tools when running an English blog

The first thing to consider when operating an English blog is choosing a translation service that can translate your blog content into English. The second is selecting a grammar checker to fix any errors in your writing or translated text.

First, there are various WordPress translation plugin services. Beyond WordPress plugins, there is a service called Weglot that can translate websites into multiple languages.

Weglot Link

Weglot is a service that can translate not only WordPress sites but also other types of websites. I recommend checking out the details below for more information.

• Go to Weglot

Also, among WordPress plugins, popular ones include Polylang and TranslatePress. For detailed reviews on these, please refer to the following article!

The second tool to know about is Grammarly, a real-time grammar checker that catches errors in English sentences. Grammarly is a widely used free grammar checker, even by native English speakers in the U.S. It also has a Chrome extension, so you can enable it while writing blog posts and get real-time grammar checks. Be sure to give it a try!

Go to Grammarly

To learn more about Grammarly, please visit their website.

• Go to Grammarly

In Conclusion

Today, I discussed why you should consider running an English blog if you want to increase your AdSense earnings. But does that mean you have to run an English blog? Not at all. You can run a Korean blog—just make it a branding blog or a niche expert blog!

AdSense is one of the lowest-paying monetization methods online. Especially if you’re using WordPress, there are over 10 other ways to generate income with it. Isn’t it foolish to rely solely on AdSense?

For example, my site Statistics Playbook only recently added AdSense. Does that mean I haven’t made money? Over the past two years, Smart Statistics Life has brought me about 127 million KRW in revenue, with a net profit of around 100 million KRW.

Even during the past five months, when I was focused on WPlaybook, I’ve been recording an average monthly revenue of about 3 million KRW.

Since you’ve started a WordPress blog, I encourage you to try and experience various methods such as affiliate marketing, building communities, selling courses, creating payment gateways to sell your own services and products, and many more. And WPlaybook will be with you every step of the way. 🙂