Data
Every figure on this site comes from a measurement we ran. These are the measurements themselves — the tables, not the articles about them. Each one states how it was obtained, what it does not cover, and when it was last checked. Download them, check them, and use them.
Free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution — CC BY 4.0. Credit Plain Reckoner with a link to the dataset page.
- 1.17 billion pageviews What a thousand pageviews earned from ads, by subject, across 123 broker-checked businesses $6.84m of verified revenue · 1,334 business-months · 123 businesses
- $704m transactions Months of profit paid for an online business, by kind of business, from 2,661 completed sales 2,661 completed sales · 10 business models · 2014 to 2026
- 16,076 domains in the frame Which AI crawlers 1,020 small ad-funded publishers name and block in robots.txt 1,200 domains drawn · 1,020 readable files · 9 AI crawlers resolved against every one
- 16,085 sites in the frame Where a publisher’s ads.txt and their ad network’s own seller list disagree, across 462 checked relationships 500 domains drawn · 462 checked relationships · 426 confirmed by both files
Why this exists
The numbers everyone repeats about running a website — what sites earn per thousand views, what ad networks require, what a site sells for — trace back to a blog citing a blog, with no original source at any point. We went and measured them. Publishing the measurement rather than only the conclusion is the difference between a figure you can check and one you have to take on trust.
If you use one of these, we would rather you copied the number and linked the page than asked permission. That is what the licence is for.