RPM by niche, computed from 90 sites with verified traffic and revenue
Median RPM across 90 display-only businesses is $17.03. Home is $23.93, Finance $31.01, Information $10.82, Gaming $9.46. Larger sites earn LOWER RPM.
- How it was measured
- Empire Flippers sold listings where monetisation is display advertising and nothing else, so vetted gross revenue is ad revenue. Matched revenue to pageviews month by month across 1,029 business-months, 453.9M pageviews and $5.28M of revenue. Excluded the 2014-16 cohort whose pageview field yields an implausible $40 median.
- Evidence current as of
- This corrects us
- We had been planning against $39-43 from two dual-verified sites. That is the p75-p90 of its niche, not the centre.
No ad network publishes current RPM by niche. Mediavine's last by-category report is from 2020. Raptive's is visible only inside a publisher's own dashboard. Ezoic's Niche Index is registration-walled and expressed as a 0-100 score rather than dollars, so it would not give you an absolute figure even unlocked.
Every by-niche RPM table you can find is a blog quoting another blog.
So we computed it. Empire Flippers vets both traffic and revenue before listing. Filtering to businesses monetised by display advertising and nothing else means the vetted gross revenue is ad revenue, and both figures are available per month.
n = 90 businesses · 1,029 business-months · 453,924,535 pageviews · $5,276,840 of revenue.
| RPM | |
|---|---|
| p10 | $4.62 |
| p25 | $10.12 |
| median | $17.03 |
| p75 | $26.64 |
| p90 | $35.64 |
| Niche | n | median |
|---|---|---|
| Finance | 3 | $31.01 |
| Lifestyle | 5 | $27.83 |
| Home | 11 | $23.93 |
| Health & Fitness | 6 | $21.50 |
| Culinary | 12 | $21.01 |
| Food & Beverages | 9 | $20.63 |
| Technology | 9 | $18.02 |
| Information | 13 | $10.82 |
| Gaming | 7 | $9.46 |
Two things worth pulling out.
Bigger sites earn less per thousand. The revenue-weighted pooled figure is $11.62 against a median of $17.03 — large sites drag it down.
The database or directory format sits in the worst band. "Information" at $10.82 is the shape a lot of data-driven site ideas take, and it earns half what a home or food site does.
What this corrected for us
We had been planning against $39-43, from two dual-verified home-and-garden sites. Home's median here is $23.93. Our figure was the p75-p90 of its own niche, and we had been treating it as the centre.
The practical consequence: Mediavine's $5,000/year gate needs about 24,500 pageviews a month at the real median, not the ~10,700 our number implied.
Grade this B, not A. The method is sound and the inputs are broker-vetted, but per-niche n runs 3-13 and these are sale-window snapshots spanning 2019-2026 rather than a current cross-section.
Tracked in our ledger as RPM-REAL-MEDIAN, RPM-UNKNOWN. If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it in place and say what changed.