[{"title":"Is Plain Reckoner free, and do I need an account?","href":"/faq/#free","answer":"The publisher calculators, public-site checks, research findings and published data downloads are free to use without an account. Source-working requests are separate: availability depends on the records and permissions.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"How much data is behind the benchmarks?","href":"/faq/#data-size","answer":"The RPM study covers 123 sale-selected businesses and 1,334 business-months, aggregating 1,174,949,344 reported pageviews and $6,844,447 ad revenue. The four published datasets contain 4,266 rows of different units, with possible overlap. These totals are not individual visitor logs or a count of unique sites.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Does the median RPM predict what my site will earn?","href":"/faq/#forecast","answer":"No. The median describes businesses in a historical, sale-selected sample. It is not a representative census of publishers or a forecast for your site. Country, content, traffic mix and ad delivery can differ. Use your own matched traffic and earnings to calculate actual RPM.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"What is the difference between session RPM and page RPM?","href":"/faq/#rpm-units","answer":"Both divide revenue by a traffic count and multiply by 1,000. Page RPM uses pageviews; session RPM uses sessions. Monetized-session RPM uses a narrower, provider-defined denominator. Compare the same unit and revenue definition before interpreting a change.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Why can traffic go up while ad revenue goes down?","href":"/faq/#revenue-drop","answer":"Revenue depends on both traffic and earnings per thousand. In a synthetic example, 20% more pageviews combined with 40% lower page RPM produces 28% less revenue: 1.20 × 0.60 = 0.72. This arithmetic does not identify the cause of an RPM change; check matched dates, reporting definitions, ad delivery and audience mix.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Are my CSV files and comparison figures uploaded?","href":"/faq/#csv-privacy","answer":"The two-period comparison reads CSV files locally in your browser and does not upload or save those period figures. Its template requires date, traffic and revenue_usd columns with complete, contiguous days. It is not an automatic converter for every provider export. The separate benchmark panels save their own figures on this device; shared benchmark URLs include those figures.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Can the ad-network checker guarantee Mediavine, Journey, Raptive or Ezoic approval?","href":"/faq/#network-approval","answer":"No. It screens published requirements using the figures supplied. Worldwide visits, pageviews, sessions and qualifying sessions are different measures. Networks may also review revenue, geography, domain age, content and traffic quality. Confirm the provider’s current rules and its assessment before applying.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Is the website value calculator a verified sale price or appraisal?","href":"/faq/#valuation","answer":"It is a historical listing benchmark based on sold-status records and their stated multiples. Final closing prices are not verified. The calculation is not an offer, appraisal or promise that a buyer will pay that amount. Net profit and gross revenue must be kept distinct.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Can I download, reuse and cite the data?","href":"/faq/#reuse","answer":"The complete published CSVs and combined JSON are available without an email gate under CC BY 4.0, with attribution to Plain Reckoner and a link to the dataset page. Retain the method, date, row definition and limitations. The expanded RPM file adds calculated columns to the same 123 businesses; it does not add independent observations.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Is Ask the research a live human or generative AI chatbot?","href":"/faq/#source-finder","answer":"It is an instant FAQ and research source finder. It matches questions locally to published answers, shows excerpts and links to their sources. It does not generate new claims, diagnose private accounts or connect you to a live operator. Questions are not uploaded or stored; clear the conversation to remove it from this page.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"What does the public-site scan inspect?","href":"/faq/#public-scan","answer":"The scan reads a bounded sample of public pages and publisher files to report observable signals such as ad-network references, policy links, advertising records and crawler directives. It does not log into analytics or prove revenue, audience quality, legal compliance or a complete site audit. A missing or unreachable file is not automatically a failed policy.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Can search engines and AI tools read the FAQ and research?","href":"/faq/#ai-access","answer":"The FAQ and research findings are served as public HTML with headings, source links and dates; reading them does not require the question widget or an account. The site’s robots.txt permits public content and excludes /api/. Crawler permissions, indexing and selection for an AI answer are separate matters, so accessibility does not guarantee a citation.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Dataset size: rows, columns, businesses and pageviews","href":"/data/","checked":"2026-10-20","answer":"The RPM study covers 123 sale-selected businesses and 1,334 business-months, with 1,174,949,344 reported pageviews and $6,844,447 ad revenue in aggregate. The four public datasets contain 4,266 rows of different units, with possible overlap. These are not individual visitor events or unique sites. Complete CSVs and a combined JSON download are free; an expanded RPM view adds calculated fields without adding observations."},{"title":"Traffic up, ad revenue down? Find the RPM drop before changing networks","href":"/notes/traffic-up-ad-revenue-down/","answer":"More traffic can still earn less: in a worked example, 100,000 pageviews earning $1,000 become 120,000 earning $720. Page RPM falls from $10 to $6. Matched reporting periods separate the arithmetic traffic and RPM changes; dashboard breakdowns are needed to investigate their causes.","checked":"2026-10-20"},{"title":"Ezoic requirements: 250,000 active users, with a grandfathering exception","href":"/notes/ezoic-requirements-250000-active-users/","answer":"Ezoic’s current general entry requirement is 250,000 monthly active users, not 250,000 pageviews. Its help page preserves an exception for publishers already monetizing before 19 February 2026, subject to continued use, and describes a possible Incubator route below the general minimum.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Low Journey RPM after launch: check the reporting window before switching","href":"/notes/journey-low-rpm-after-launch/","answer":"Journey’s help page says its default 30-day analytics view includes initial onboarding and ramp-up, which can depress the displayed average after launch. Check complete earning dates, traffic units and the underlying revenue before interpreting a low RPM as a network comparison.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Journey needs 1,000 premium sessions, not just 1,000 visits","href":"/notes/journey-premium-sessions-requirements/","answer":"In a hypothetical 30-day period with 2,000 total sessions and a 40% qualifying share, only 800 sessions count toward a 1,000-session threshold. Journey’s current requirement refers to premium sessions; total worldwide visits are not a substitute.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Listing price is not sale price: the valuation distinction we needed to fix","href":"/notes/listing-price-vs-sale-price-website-valuations/","answer":"Empire Flippers’ 2026 report lists a 2025 average listing multiple of 28.69 months of profit and a sales multiple of 23.93. Its public listing API exposes listing-price fields. A listing marked sold does not, by itself, turn its listing price into a verified final transaction price.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Mediavine mRPM can rise 67% without earning another dollar","href":"/notes/mediavine-monetized-rpm-vs-rpm/","answer":"With hypothetical earnings of $600, 50,000 total sessions and 30,000 monetized sessions, all-traffic RPM is $12 and monetized RPM is $20. The apparent 67% improvement changes the denominator, not the $600 earned.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"How many pageviews do you need to make $1,000 a month?","href":"/notes/pageviews-to-make-1000-a-month/","answer":"At the measured median page RPM of $15.21, $1,000 a month in advertising revenue takes about 65,747 pageviews. Across the same sample’s low and high RPM benchmarks, the target ranges from 28,531 to 452,489. These are scenarios from 123 broker-checked display businesses, not an AdSense earnings forecast.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Raptive requirements: 25,000 pageviews is only the first check","href":"/notes/raptive-requirements-25000-pageviews/","answer":"Raptive lists a 25,000-pageview monthly minimum, but its smaller-site band also needs a 50% audience share from five named countries. The published share falls to 40% at 100,000 pageviews. Clearing the pageview number alone does not establish eligibility.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"A $12 session RPM can be the same earnings as an $8 page RPM","href":"/notes/session-rpm-vs-page-rpm/","answer":"In a worked example with $600 of revenue, 50,000 sessions and 75,000 pageviews, session RPM is $12 and page RPM is $8. The 50% difference comes entirely from the traffic unit; earnings do not change.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"1 in 9 Mediavine sites cannot prove, from their own ads.txt, that Mediavine sells their ads","href":"/notes/ads-txt-that-cannot-be-confirmed/","answer":"Ad networks publish lists of the sites they sell for. Publishers publish a file called ads.txt naming who may sell their ads. Both are public, so the two can be checked against each other — and nobody does. Across 462 publisher-to-network pairings, 36 could not be confirmed from the publisher's own file: 20 serve no ads.txt at all, 6 name no ad network, 5 name a different one, 4 return a web page where a text file should be, and one declares an account we could not match in the provider’s roster. The rate is not the same everywhere. Mediavine sites failed to confirm 11.1% of the time against Raptive's 3.1% — a 3.6-fold difference on the same test.","checked":"2026-09-03"},{"title":"89 publishers blocked Google-Extended to stay out of AI answers. Google says it does not do that","href":"/notes/google-extended-does-not-do-what-publishers-think/","answer":"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. Google's own documentation says it controls whether your pages train future Gemini models, and that it 'does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.' AI Overviews are part of Google Search. So a publisher who blocked Google-Extended to stay out of the answer box has not left the answer box; they have opted out of training and kept everything else. Nothing tells them, because a robots.txt file never reports back.","checked":"2026-09-03"},{"title":"68% of files naming AI crawlers also carry legacy bot names","href":"/notes/publishers-block-ai-crawler-names-no-vendor-publishes/","answer":"In the historical 1,020-file sample, 244 files named AI crawlers and 167 of those also carried names classified as legacy in our crawler registry: 68.4%. Naming is not blocking: 216 files blocked at least one evaluated crawler at the site root, while 28 named crawlers without blocking any there. These files do not reveal owner intent, actual crawler compliance or lost traffic.","checked":"2026-09-03"},{"title":"Historical RPM rankings differ from listing-multiple rankings","href":"/notes/what-a-site-earns-does-not-predict-what-it-sells-for/","answer":"Across the 11 niche pairs shown here, historical page-RPM medians and listing-multiple medians have a tie-aware Spearman correlation of about 0.073. The rankings differ, but this small sample does not establish no relationship, identify causes or predict a site’s final sale price. The earlier 0.036 figure did not reproduce from the published table.","checked":"2026-09-03"},{"title":"Journey vs Mediavine: sessions qualify one route, revenue the other","href":"/notes/what-it-takes-to-graduate-from-mediavine-journey/","answer":"Journey’s entry requirement counts qualifying sessions; Mediavine Official’s counts annual advertising revenue. At a historical sample median of $15.21 page RPM, a hypothetical steady year would need 27,395 pageviews per month to reach $5,000. That calculation is an income scenario, not a Mediavine traffic requirement or eligibility result.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"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","href":"/notes/ai-crawler-policy-is-a-vendor-default/","answer":"Every site has a small text file, robots.txt, that tells automated visitors what they may read. Across 1,020 small ad-funded publishers, 11.9% block ChatGPT-User — the one that fetches a page in order to answer somebody's question and link back to the site — while 0.4% block OAI-SearchBot, which only files pages away for search. That is at least a tenfold difference, and the sample cannot say whether it is tenfold or a hundredfold. 76.1% say nothing about AI visitors at all, and 29.9% of the files carry wording a supplier put there rather than a decision the owner made. First measured on 106 files and re-measured here on ten times as many; every share held.","checked":"2026-09-02"},{"title":"Amazon-affiliate share fell in one broker’s historical record","href":"/notes/amazon-affiliate-exits-went-to-near-zero/","answer":"The historical broker analysis reported Amazon-affiliate labels on 45% of its 2020 sold-status records and 4% of its incomplete 2026 records. That is a change in the observed category mix, not a like-for-like full-year sales-volume decline or proof that search traffic caused it.","checked":"2026-08-31"},{"title":"AdSense low-value rejections on tool sites: what two reports cannot prove","href":"/notes/adsense-low-value-content-on-tool-sites/","answer":"Two owners reported repeated AdSense low-value-content rejections on software sites. Their accounts can suggest questions to investigate, but they do not establish why Google rejected either site, whether all requirements were met, or whether tool sites are rejected more often than article sites.","checked":"2026-08-30"},{"title":"Historical website listing multiples fell across several business models","href":"/notes/multiple-compression-is-market-wide/","answer":"In the historical sold-status snapshot, display listing multiples were 43x monthly SDE in the 2021–22 listing cohorts and 29–31x in the 2025–26 cohorts. Similar changes appeared in two comparison groups. These are listing fields grouped by listing year; 2026 is incomplete and final closing prices are not verified.","checked":"2026-08-30"},{"title":"Newsletter ad prices held flat for eight quarters while the ad slots were quietly cut","href":"/notes/newsletter-rate-cards-frozen-while-inventory-was-cut/","answer":"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 showing fewer newsletters in the observed published list.","checked":"2026-08-30"},{"title":"Display sites get less traffic in December than in January, and earn a third more per pageview","href":"/notes/q4-is-an-ad-rate-effect-not-a-traffic-effect/","answer":"Across 99 display-only businesses, December earns 1.34x what January earns on each pageview, while getting only 0.95x the pageviews. These are rate and traffic associations in the selected sample, not direct evidence of auction causes. The traffic curve is quietly working against it. Each business is compared only against its own twelve months, to reduce the influence of growth; the detrending assumptions still matter.","checked":"2026-08-30"},{"title":"Ad network requirements in 2026: compare the units before the numbers","href":"/notes/ad-network-entry-thresholds-2026/","answer":"Mediavine Official lists $5,000 annual ad revenue; Journey specifies 1,000 qualifying sessions in 30 days; Raptive starts at 25,000 monthly pageviews with traffic-share conditions; Ezoic generally requires 250,000 monthly active users, with documented exceptions. These are different gates, not one traffic ladder.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"AdSense requirements: published rules are not an approval checklist","href":"/notes/adsense-requirements-what-google-actually-says/","answer":"Google’s general AdSense eligibility page requires original useful content, policy compliance, site access and an eligible account holder; it does not give a universal article-count or traffic quota. Privacy disclosures and other applicable policies still matter. Meeting a short numerical checklist cannot guarantee approval.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"AI Overview rates depend on the query sample: a September 2025 snapshot","href":"/notes/ai-overviews-by-query-intent/","answer":"Ahrefs reported AI Overviews on 57.9% of question queries and 0.9% of navigational queries in its September 2025 desktop dataset. These historical keyword-sample rates are not current probabilities for every Google search, and a result-page feature rate does not measure traffic lost by an individual publisher.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Calculator pages and article pages: two examples do not establish an RPM gap","href":"/notes/calculator-pages-carry-a-sixth-of-the-ad-slots/","answer":"The historical examples showed fewer in-content ad slots on short calculator pages than on long articles, but their earnings figures came from one business each. Neither a universal ad-slot ceiling nor a format-wide revenue penalty follows from those observations.","checked":"2026-08-27"},{"title":"An ad-blocking survey and one publisher’s count are different populations","href":"/notes/developer-ad-block-rate-measured-not-surveyed/","answer":"Read the Docs publishes a 32% ad-blocker figure for its audience. Comparing that with a developer survey does not establish that the same people exaggerate their behavior: the populations, units and methods differ. Our earlier 2.3-times behavioral-gap claim was not supported.","checked":"2026-10-19"},{"title":"Ad-funded website sales in a historical broker snapshot: compare complete years","href":"/notes/display-advertising-site-sales-collapsed/","answer":"Our August 2026 broker snapshot reported 138 display-advertising records for 2022 and 31 for 2025, a 77.5% decrease between complete years. The 2026 figure was year-to-date, so the previous 93% headline compared unequal periods. These records do not establish that search changes caused the decline.","checked":"2026-08-29"},{"title":"What a thousand pageviews earns, by subject, from 123 sites with checked traffic and revenue","href":"/notes/rpm-by-niche-from-verified-sales/","answer":"Money from ads is quoted per thousand pageviews, and the trade calls that figure RPM. Across 123 businesses funded by display advertising and nothing else, the middle one earns $15.21 per thousand pageviews. Finance sites earn $29.73, home sites $25.43, information sites $8.41, gaming sites $6.48. The spread is enormous: the bottom tenth earn $2.21 and the top tenth $35.05, a 15.8x range.","checked":"2026-08-29"}]