What a thousand pageviews earns, by subject, from 123 sites with checked traffic and revenue

1,202 words · about 5 min

Watch it plot 49s · narrated · the same figures as above

Money from display advertising is quoted per thousand pageviews. A site on $15 earns $15 for every thousand pages people load. The trade calls that figure RPM, and it is the number every guide to running a website is built on.

No ad network publishes a current RPM by subject. Mediavine's last report by category is from 2020. Raptive's is visible only inside a publisher's own dashboard. Ezoic's Niche Index needs you to register and gives a score from 0 to 100 rather than dollars, so it would not give you an actual figure even once you were in.

Every table of RPM by subject you can find online is a blog quoting another blog — which is what happens to any figure expensive enough to measure.

So we worked it out. Empire Flippers is a broker: it sells websites, and it checks both traffic and revenue before a listing goes up. Take only the businesses that earn from display advertising and nothing else, and the revenue the broker checked is advertising revenue. Both figures are available month by month.

The sample: 123 businesses · 1,334 business-months · 1,174,949,344 pageviews · $6,844,447 of revenue.

Here is the spread. Read it as: a tenth of these sites earn less than $2.21, a quarter earn less than $6.88, half earn less than $15.21, and so on up.

And by subject. The middle site in each, with the number of sites it is the middle of:

Two things worth pulling out.

Bigger sites earn less per thousand. Add up all the money and all the pageviews and divide, and you get $11.62 — below the middle site's $15.21, because the large sites pull the total down.

A database or a directory sits in the worst band. "Information" at $8.41 is the shape a lot of data-driven site ideas take, and it earns half what a home or food site does.

Against the figure everyone quotes

The home-and-garden number repeated across the web is $39-43, and it comes from two well-documented sites. The middle of all 9 home-and-garden businesses measured here is $25.43. Those two sites sit near the top of their own subject, and the figure gets quoted as if it were the middle — so anyone sizing up a business on it is planning against the best quarter of the field.

What that costs in practice: Mediavine's $5,000-a-year bar needs about 27,400 pageviews a month at the figure we measured, not the ~10,700 the quoted figure implies.

How the table is produced

scripts/measure-rpm.mjs walks through the marketplace's own data, keeps only sold listings funded by display advertising alone, matches each month's revenue to that month's pageviews and works out the middle values — so anyone can run it again and get this table, or a different one and know exactly why.

It has been run twice, over samples of different sizes, most recently across 123 businesses. Every subject moved slightly between runs and the ORDER did not change at all: Finance above Home above Culinary above Technology above Information above Gaming, both times. Two separate runs landing in the same order is a stronger result than either run alone.

The middle blends nine years, and that matters

$15.21 is the middle of every checked business-month from 2017 to 2026 — not the middle of any year you could be operating in. Split by the calendar year each month falls in, the same 123 businesses look like this:

Anyone planning a 2026 site against $15.21 is planning against an average that includes 2018. The recent years sit near $21–27.

But that rise is not sites getting better at this. Follow one business across two years in a row and its RPM goes DOWN: the middle year-on-year ratio is 0.923 across 55 pairs. It is below 1 however we cut it — 0.910 over 92 pairs when we require one month per year, 0.806 over 3 pairs when we require six.

Both facts are real and they point in opposite directions. The recent years look better because newer listings arrive earning more; an individual site tends to earn slightly less per pageview each year that passes. Quoting the first without the second would be exactly the error this page corrects elsewhere.

Run it yourself: node --experimental-strip-types scripts/measure-rpm.mjs --vintage

The spread is worked out from every business, not from the subject middles. Working from the subject middles throws away the variation inside each subject and then reports what is left as the variation across the market, which understates it badly. Measured across all 123 businesses, the range from the bottom tenth to the top tenth is $2.21 to $35.05 — a 15.8× range. That is the number that matters here: quoting any single RPM against a spread that wide tells a publisher almost nothing about their own site.

Three subjects gained enough businesses to publish, and two lost them. Pet Care, News & Education, Entertainment, Religion & Spirituality and Hobbies now have at least 3 sites each. Health & Fitness and Lifestyle fell to 2 and have been withdrawn — a middle value over two businesses is a pair of data points wearing a statistic's clothes.

Grade this B, not A. The method is sound, it can be re-run and the inputs were checked by a broker — but each subject rests on between 3 and 13 sites, and these are snapshots taken at the moment of sale between 2017 and 2026 rather than a picture of the market today.

Put your own numbers in

These are the figures behind our ad revenue calculator — pick your subject, enter your monthly pageviews, and it returns the range this table implies rather than a number invented for the page.

It reports how many sites are behind each subject, because a middle over 3 sales is not the same claim as a middle over 13, and a calculator that hides that is worse than no calculator.

Download the data behind this 123 rows · CSV · CC BY 4.0 · no account, no email

Tracked as RPM-REAL-MEDIAN. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.