Return on investment

ROI differs from return on ad spend in one decisive way: it counts profit, not revenue, and it counts every cost rather than only media spend. That makes it harder to compute and far more honest.

For creators the cost that gets omitted is almost always their own time. An activity showing an excellent ROI on out-of-pocket spend can be the worst use of a week, and nothing in the number reveals it unless time is priced in.

Long-horizon activities such as search or a newsletter report terrible ROI early and good ROI late, so the measurement window decides the verdict as much as the activity does.