It is the first question every blogger asks and the only one that matters, so here is the actual arithmetic rather than reassurance.
Be clear about who moves. The reader who arrives from Google, screenshots the ingredients and never returns is not going to install anything. That reader is most of your traffic and most of your ad income, and nothing here touches them.
The reader who moves is the one who already knows your name and cooks from you most weeks. They are a small share of your sessions and they were already the least profitable per visit, because they arrive direct, they know where the recipe card is, and they scroll past everything you are paid for.
Take a blog at 100,000 sessions a month with a $20 session RPM. That is roughly $2,000 a month. Suppose 2% of those sessions are your regulars, and suppose every single one of them stops visiting the site entirely, which they will not.
| Ad revenue lost | 2% of $2,000, so about $40 a month |
|---|---|
| What replaces it | Of those 2,000 loyal sessions, some number of people pay you a few dollars a month directly. Two hundred at $4 is $800. After the $49 and the 5%, which is $40, you keep $711 of it. |
| The honest catch | You have to actually get 200 people to pay. That is the real question, and it is a question about your audience, not about software. |
Run those numbers on your own RPM before believing them. The point is not the exact figures, it is the shape: the views at risk are your cheapest, and the readers at risk are your most valuable.
If your entire income is ad RPM and you have nothing to sell and no intention of asking readers for money, do not do this. There is nothing here for you. An app adds a place for loyal readers to pay you; if nobody is ever going to be asked to pay, all you have done is move traffic off the page that earns.
Also do not do it if you have fewer than about fifty recipes. There is not enough there for anyone to open twice.
Ad income is a claim on other people's traffic. Google decides, Pinterest decides, and increasingly an AI answer uses your recipe and sends nobody. You cannot email a page view. When any of those change, and they do change, the income changes with them and you find out afterwards.
A list of people who chose to pay you is a different kind of asset. It is smaller, and it is yours. The case for building one is not that ads are bad. It is that everything you have is currently a claim on someone else's platform, and diversifying is ordinary business sense.
Your blog stays the canonical source and every recipe in the app links back to your post. The app is not a crawlable copy of your site competing with it in search; it is a reading surface for people who already know your name. If a platform ever asks to publish your recipes on its own indexed domain, that is the moment to ask this question much harder.
Only the sessions from readers who switch, and those are your regulars, who are also the cheapest sessions you have. On the worked example above it is about $40 a month at a $20 RPM. Run it on your own RPM before believing it.
No. Put it in front of the regulars, in your newsletter or at the bottom of the recipes they already cook. Site-wide navigation sends drive-by search traffic somewhere that earns you nothing, which is the version of this that genuinely does cost you money.
Stop after three months. The cost of finding out is roughly the $40 a month of ad revenue plus whatever the platform charges, and you keep the reader list either way.
