Findings
Numbers that are not published anywhere else, because somebody had to go and measure them. Each one states the figure, how it was obtained, and the date the evidence was current — so you can judge for yourself whether it has gone stale, and re-run it if you doubt it.
Nothing here was worked out from our own data yet.
- 16,085 sites in the frame; we checked 462 of them against their network's own customer list 1 in 9 Mediavine sites cannot prove, from their own ads.txt, that Mediavine sells their ads Ad networks publish lists of the sites they sell for. Publishers publish a file called ads.txt naming who may sell their ads.
- 89 of 1,020 publishers blocking a file that does not do the job they blocked it for 89 publishers blocked Google-Extended to stay out of AI answers. Google says it does not do that Google-Extended is the name publishers add to robots.txt when they want out of Google's AI. Across 1,020 small ad-funded publishers, 89 of them — 8.7% — block it.
- 68% of sites that blocked an AI bot used a name the company behind it does not list Most sites that blocked an AI bot blocked the wrong name We read the robots.txt file of 1,020 small ad-funded websites. Only 244 of them try to block AI bots at all.
- 0.036 rank correlation between what a subject earns per visit and what it sells for The subject that earns the most per visit is not the subject that sells for the most Two questions get the same answer everywhere: which subject should I write about to earn well, and which one should I write about to sell well.
- 27,394 pageviews a month to clear Mediavine's $5,000 bar, at the measured median RPM Mediavine Journey takes you at 1,000 visits. The real tier needs about 27,000 Journey by Mediavine asks for 1,000 sessions from Tier 1 countries in 30 days. Mediavine proper asks for something different in kind: $5,000 of ad revenue a year.
- 11.9% vs 0.4% how often ChatGPT-User is blocked against OAI-SearchBot, across 1,020 publishers Publishers block the AI visitor that would have sent them a reader at least ten times more often than the one that only files them away Every site has a small text file, robots.txt, that tells automated visitors what they may read.
- 134 → 5 Amazon-affiliate businesses sold, 2020 → 2026 Amazon-affiliate businesses were 45% of verified sales in 2020. In 2026 they are 4% Across 1,819 verified sales, sites that earn commission on Amazon links fell from 45% of everything the broker Empire Flippers sold in 2020 to 4% in 2026.
- 2 cases — an observation, not a measurement Tool sites keep getting rejected for "low value content" — an observation, not a finding Two site owners in one week reported being turned down by AdSense over and over for "low value content", while having real traffic and meeting every stated requirement.
- 43x → 30x months of profit buyers paid, 2021 to 2026 — every kind of business What buyers pay for a website fell a third since 2021, and ad-funded sites were not singled out A website sells for a number of months of its profit. Sites funded by display advertising sold for 43 months of profit in 2021-22 and 29-31 in 2025-26 — a 33% fall.
- 8 quarters with no price rise, while ad slots were cut Newsletter ad prices held flat for eight quarters while the ad slots were quietly cut Cooper Press has not raised a single newsletter sponsorship price since Q1 2025 — eight quarters in a row — while cutting the number of paid ad slots by 25-33%, losing 5.5% of its subscribers, and quietly retiring 5 of its 12 newsletters without saying so.
- 0.95x December pageviews against January, on display sites Display sites get less traffic in December than in January, and earn a third more per visit Across 99 display-only businesses, December earns 1.34x what January earns on each pageview, while getting only 0.95x the pageviews.
- $5,000 Mediavine's bar — money earned, not visits The order you are told to join ad networks in is now backwards To join Mediavine Official you now need $5,000 of ad money a year, not 50,000 visits a month. Raptive dropped its bar to 25,000 pageviews.
- 1 page Google actually requires What AdSense actually requires, quoted from Google rather than from blogs Google publishes no minimum number of posts, no minimum site age and no minimum traffic. One page is genuinely mandatory: a privacy policy.
- 57.9% of questions typed into Google get an AI answer on top Google's AI answer shows on 0.9% of searches for a site by name, and 57.9% of questions An AI Overview is the answer Google writes at the top of the results page, above the links.
- $12.72 what one calculator site earned per thousand views A calculator page has room for 1-2 ads. A written page has room for 6-12. A page whose whole job is one calculator has room for 1-2 ads inside the content, against 6-12 on a 2,000-word article.
- 2.3× the gap between what people said and what they did Developers said 72% block ads. Counting actual visits gave 32%. The widely-quoted figure that 72.3% of developers run ad blockers comes from asking them.
- 138 → 9 ad-funded businesses sold, 2022 → 2026 Sales of ad-funded websites fell 93% while Amazon stock businesses held steady The broker Empire Flippers sold 138 display-advertising businesses in 2022 and 9 in 2026.
- $15.21 middle earnings per thousand pageviews, 123 checked sales What a thousand pageviews earns, by subject, from 123 sites with checked traffic and revenue Money from ads is quoted per thousand pageviews, and the trade calls that figure RPM.
How the measuring is done
Notes on method, and on markets we screened and did not pursue. These are about the work rather than about your site — published because a figure you cannot check is worth nothing.
- 54% publish a price but no availability Businesses publish their prices and hide their availability, deliberately The same 40 businesses publish a monthly price 66.7% of the time and show what is actually free to book 10% of the time. 54% have no way to book online at all.
- 3 live entries for import taxes already struck down The official US import-tax list still prints taxes that were cancelled months ago The US government's official list of import taxes still carries three entries — 9903.01.20, .24 and .25 — in full, with their explanatory notes intact and nothing marking them as dead, months after a Presidential order ended them.
- 6.7× more businesses publish a price than publish availability Searching for the thing you are measuring will manufacture your result If you build your list of businesses by searching for "X monthly rates", you have picked them BECAUSE they publish rates, and your answer is near-certain before you start.
- 2 dates cannot show you a sudden jump Three times in one week, comparing two dates hid a sudden jump Comparing a number on one date with the same number on another cannot tell growth apart from a one-off jump, or from someone changing what they count.
- A number is usually unpublished because it is expensive to collect If a number is not published anywhere, that is usually because gathering it costs a lot — so "nobody has it" and "we could get it cheaply" pull against each other.
- 0 / 9 ideas found by scanning the market that survived Nine market searches found nine gaps. Seven were already occupied. Ideas found by scanning the market for gaps: 0 for 9 survived. Measurement tools built because a decision we had to make needed the number: 3 for 3.
