How Much AdSense Pays Per 1,000 Views

AdSense pays somewhere between under $1 and over $15 per 1,000 pageviews, and the spread is mostly about who is reading, not how good your writing is. In our benchmark estimates, a general-interest site with US, UK, Canadian and Australian readers lands near $5.60 per 1,000 pageviews. The same content read mainly in India or Nigeria drops below $1.

That number is called page RPM, and it is the one to watch. The rest of this guide covers what Google means by it, how it relates to CPC and CPM, the share Google keeps, three worked examples, and the reasons two sites with identical traffic can earn wildly different amounts. All dollar figures here are modelled estimates from the tables behind our AdSense revenue calculator. Your own reports beat them the moment you have a few weeks of data.

What "1,000 views" means in AdSense

People use "views" for at least four different things, and each gives a different payout figure.

Pageviews are the count of times a page that carries your ad code loads. Sessions are visits, and one visit can contain several pageviews. Ad impressions are the individual ads shown, so a page with four ad slots produces up to four impressions per pageview. Video views on a platform like YouTube are paid through a separate programme with its own rules, and nothing in this guide applies to them.

Google's own definition of RPM, on its AdSense RPM help page, divides estimated earnings by pageviews and multiplies by 1,000. Its example: $0.15 earned from 25 pageviews gives a page RPM of $6.00. The same page shows the impression version, where $180 from 45,000 ad impressions is $4.00. Google also points out that RPM is an estimate and does not represent what you have actually earned.

So when someone asks what AdSense pays per 1,000 views, the useful answer is page RPM. If your analytics tool counts sessions, multiply by pages per session first. A site with 30,000 sessions at 1.6 pages per session has 48,000 pageviews.

RPM, CPC and CPM: how they connect

Three terms get mixed up constantly.

CPC is what you earn when someone clicks an ad. Google's CPC definition says the advertiser sets the rate, and some advertisers pay more than others depending on what they sell. CPM is a price per 1,000 impressions, which some advertisers bid directly. RPM is the result: what you ended up with per 1,000 pageviews, whichever way the advertisers paid. Our CPM, CPC, CPA and CPI explainer goes through the conversions in more detail.

Here is the arithmetic for a click-driven page, as an example with made-up round inputs. Four ad impressions per pageview, a 0.5% click rate and $0.30 earned per click:

4 impressions x 0.005 clicks per impression x $0.30 = $0.006 per pageview

Multiply by 1,000 and the page RPM is $6.00. Double the click rate and it doubles. Halve the CPC and it halves. In real accounts a share of the money arrives from impression-based bids as well, so this is a simplification, but it shows why CPC alone never tells you the payout: page layout, click rate and the mix of advertisers all sit in the same product.

The link between the two RPM flavours is also simple. If your impression RPM is $1.75 and each page shows four ads, the page RPM is 4 x $1.75 = $7.00. For a deeper look at the metric on the mobile side, see eCPM in plain English.

What Google keeps

AdSense is a revenue share. Google's revenue share page says that for AdSense for Content, publishers receive 80% of the revenue after the advertiser platform takes its fee, and that when advertisers buy display ads through Google Ads, publishers keep about 68%. It adds that the percentages are the same whatever country you are in, and that Google does not disclose the share for every AdSense product.

You can see the figure that applies to your account under Account > Settings > Account information, next to "Active products".

You do not need to subtract that cut yourself. The earnings and CPC columns in your reports are what you earn, so the split is already taken out. The old "68% for content, 51% for search" numbers still float around the web from a 2010 announcement. Treat anything older than Google's current help page with suspicion.

Where to find your own page RPM

Skip the third-party dashboards and use the reports inside AdSense. Google's reports overview lists seven pre-made ones: Performance overview, Sites, Countries, Ad units, Ad formats, Top pages and Platforms. Three of them answer most RPM questions.

Sites shows the page RPM for each domain you run, which matters if you have more than one. Countries splits the same figure by visitor location, and it is where you find out whether a few high-paying countries are carrying the rest. Top pages ranks your pages by queries over the last 30 days and shows what each one earns (Google notes it covers AdSense for content only). That last report is the quickest way to learn which posts pay and which merely draw traffic.

Give any number at least a couple of weeks before reading anything into it. Single days swing, and the latest two days are the least settled.

Benchmarks by niche and audience

The table uses our reference setup: four ads per page and roughly 60% viewability. Base AdSense RPM is $7.00 in Tier 1 (US, UK, Canada, Australia), $3.00 in Tier 2 (Western Europe and developed Asia-Pacific) and $0.80 in Tier 3 (the rest of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe). Niche multipliers scale those figures.

The band around those figures is wide. Our model runs from about 0.7x to 1.35x of the central value, so a Tier 1 general site could plausibly report anywhere between roughly $3.90 and $7.50. You can open the per-niche pages for finance, and gaming to see the same tables with every tier filled in, and the website RPM by niche guide explains why the multipliers differ.

Example 1: same niche, different readers

Take a general-interest blog with 50,000 pageviews a month. Everything below is an example with stated assumptions.

If every reader is in Tier 1, the RPM is $5.60 and the month pays 50 x $5.60 = $280. If instead the audience splits 30% Tier 1, 30% Tier 2 and 40% Tier 3, the blended base is 0.3 x 7.00 + 0.3 x 3.00 + 0.4 x 0.80 = $3.32. Multiply by the 0.8 niche factor and you get $2.66, so the month pays about $133.

Same words, same pages, same number of visits, and less than half the money.

Check where your own readers sit before comparing yourself to anyone. In AdSense, open Reports and choose Countries. It shows performance by the country of the visitor, going back three years. Our page for the United States shows the multiplier at the top of the range, and the country pages for lower-tier markets show how far it falls.

Example 2: equal traffic, nearly nine times the income

Two sites each get 50,000 pageviews a month.

Site A writes about personal finance for an audience that is 80% Tier 1, 15% Tier 2 and 5% Tier 3. Blended base RPM: 0.8 x 7.00 + 0.15 x 3.00 + 0.05 x 0.80 = $6.09. With the finance multiplier of 1.9, that is $11.57, or about $579 a month.

Site B covers gaming and is read 10% in Tier 1, 20% in Tier 2 and 70% in Tier 3. Blended base: 0.1 x 7.00 + 0.2 x 3.00 + 0.7 x 0.80 = $1.86. With the gaming multiplier of 0.7, that is $1.30, or about $65 a month.

The ratio is 8.9 to 1. Nobody at Site B is doing anything wrong. Their readers are simply worth less to advertisers, and AdSense can only pass on what advertisers bid.

If you want to see where a site of this size sits, the page for 50,000 monthly pageviews lays out earnings across the same assumptions.

Example 3: the same site across the year

Ad prices move with advertiser budgets. Our seasonality index runs from 0.78 in January to 1.25 in November and 1.36 in December.

Take the 50,000-pageview Tier 1 general site from Example 1, at a $5.60 baseline. In January the effective RPM is 5.60 x 0.78 = $4.37, so the month pays about $218. In December it is 5.60 x 1.36 = $7.62, which pays about $381. Nothing changed on the site. If you judge a redesign by comparing December with January you will think it was a triumph, when most of the gain is the calendar. The January slump guide covers the pattern.

Why two similar sites earn different amounts

Geography and niche explain the biggest gaps. After that, several smaller levers matter.

Ad layout counts. A page with one ad low in the footer gets fewer impressions and a lower share of viewable ones than a page with sensible in-content placement. Google defines a viewable impression in its viewability help article: at least 50% of the ad's pixels on screen for one continuous second. It also notes that more viewable inventory makes more of your ads eligible for brand advertisers on the Display Network. Our ad placement guide goes through where to put units without breaking policy.

Pages per session matter. A reader who views three pages generates three times the ad opportunities of one who bounces. Device split matters too, since mobile and desktop layouts show different formats.

Speed has an effect. Slow ad loading can push impressions below the fold or lose them entirely, which is why Core Web Vitals and ads is worth reading before you add a fifth unit.

Ad blockers stop ads loading for some of your readers, so those pageviews earn nothing. How big a slice that is depends on the site and its audience, and the ad blocker guide explains how to measure it.

Invalid traffic gets deducted. Google's help page on why estimated earnings change says figures can shift in the first 48 hours as invalid-click checks run, and that finalized earnings can still drop at month end. See invalid traffic explained for what triggers it.

What not to do to raise RPM

Never click your own ads, and never ask others to. The AdSense Program policies say plainly that clicking your own ads for any reason is prohibited, and they bar asking users to click or pointing at ads with arrows. A short burst of extra clicks will not raise your long-term RPM, and it can get the account disabled.

Adding more ad units is a weaker lever than it looks. Past a point you lose readers, depress viewability per unit and risk a policy problem with ads interfering with content. A better test is to change one thing at a time and compare page RPM over at least two full weeks.

Chasing a high-paying topic you cannot write about credibly also tends to fail. The high CPC niches guide covers when it is worth trying.

Common questions

Is $5 per 1,000 views good?

For a Tier 1 general-interest site, it is about average on our tables. For a finance blog it would be low, and for a Tier 3 audience it would be excellent. Compare against your own tier mix, not a single headline figure.

Does AdSense pay per view or per click?

Both, depending on the advertiser. Some bid per click and some bid per thousand impressions. The reports roll everything into RPM, so you rarely need to separate the two unless you are diagnosing a change.

How many pageviews do I need to earn $100 a month?

At a page RPM of $3.32, you need about 30,000 pageviews. At $5.60, about 18,000. At $13.30, about 7,500.

Will Mediavine or Ezoic pay more?

Often, yes, once you qualify, but each has traffic requirements and trade-offs. Our AdSense or Mediavine decision guide lays out the figures.

Where to go from here

Open the AdSense revenue calculator, enter your monthly pageviews, niche and rough country split, and read the low, central and high estimates. Then pull your real page RPM from AdSense (Reports, then Sites or Countries) and compare. If the actual figure is under the low estimate, look at geography first, then viewability and ad layout.

For a fast sanity check on a specific number, what AdSense pays per 1,000 pageviews gives the short answer.