Revenue Per Mille
Revenue per mille (RPM) is the total revenue earned per one thousand pageviews or sessions on a website. “Mille” is Latin for thousand. The formula is straightforward:
RPM is the most useful single metric for comparing monetization efficiency across different revenue models, traffic sources, and time periods, because it normalizes revenue against the fundamental unit of web attention — the pageview.
RPM should not be confused with CPM (cost per mille), which is an advertiser-side metric: what the advertiser pays per thousand ad impressions. A single pageview may contain multiple ad units, so a page with three ad slots each earning a 6.00 in CPM-based revenue but counts as one pageview for the RPM calculation. Additionally, RPM captures all revenue — ads, affiliate commissions, subscription allocations — not just advertising.
Typical RPMs vary enormously by niche, geography, and monetization model. As of 2025, rough benchmarks for U.S.-audience English-language content:
| Revenue model | Typical RPM range |
|---|---|
| Programmatic display ads (general content) | 8 |
| Programmatic display ads (finance, insurance, legal) | 50 |
| Premium ad networks (Mediavine, Raptive) | 30 |
| Affiliate-heavy content (product reviews) | 100+ |
| Subscription-supported (blended across free and paid) | 80 |
| Sponsored content / direct ad sales | 60 |
These ranges illustrate a core principle: RPM rises with audience specificity and commercial intent. A personal blog about daily life might earn 80+ RPM from affiliate commissions alone, because every visitor represents a potential five- or six-figure software purchase.
Session RPM is a variant that uses sessions (visits) rather than pageviews as the denominator. This is more meaningful for sites where a single visit involves multiple pages — a recipe site where users browse several recipes per session, or a news site where readers click through multiple articles. Session RPM better reflects the actual revenue per visit, since increasing pages-per-session is one lever for growing revenue without growing traffic.
Related terms
- Pageview — the base unit of web traffic that RPM normalizes against
- Web monetization — the broader practice that RPM measures the efficiency of
- Programmatic advertising — the revenue model most commonly measured by RPM
- Conversion rate — an adjacent metric that captures revenue-generating actions per visit