What Mobile Ads Really Pay: eCPM Ranges by Format

Ask ten developers what a rewarded video pays and you will hear ten different numbers. Most of them are right for their own app. eCPM is revenue per thousand impressions, and it shifts with the ad format, the country your players live in, the platform they use and the kind of app you built. One headline figure hides all of that.

This guide gives ranges instead. They match the benchmark tables behind our revenue calculator, they are estimates rounded on the cautious side, and your own dashboard outranks every figure here. If eCPM itself is still fuzzy, read eCPM in plain English first.

Formats sit on a steep price ladder

Video formats that fill the whole screen earn the most per impression, because an advertiser gets the player's full attention. Rewarded video is usually at the top. Interstitials come next, then app open ads, then native units. Banners sit at the bottom by a wide margin, often earning a tenth of what a rewarded view earns or less.

The ladder is why format mix matters more than almost any other setting. Ten thousand banner impressions and ten thousand rewarded impressions are very different amounts of money. For the player-experience side of that trade, see rewarded vs interstitial.

Typical eCPM by format and region tier

The table below shows Android baselines for a typical app, as the range across the eight networks in our benchmark data. Tier 1 means the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and Canada. Tier 2 is Western Europe and developed Asia-Pacific. Tier 3 covers the rest of Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe.

App open ranges come from only two networks in our data, so treat that row as thinner evidence. Native is not offered by every network either.

Those are central estimates, not guarantees. In practice a single placement can land anywhere from about 0.7 times to 1.35 times its baseline. AdMob rewarded in Tier 1 starts at $12.00 in our data, which gives a working band of roughly $8.40 to $16.20.

One app, three very different blended numbers

Nobody has a pure Tier 1 audience, so the number you see in your report is a blend. Take AdMob on Android with a typical app and look at three audience mixes (shares of Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 players).

The first row is calculated as 0.05 times $12.00, plus 0.20 times $5.00, plus 0.75 times $1.40. That is $0.60 plus $1.00 plus $1.05, or $2.65. The same ad unit, the same code and the same network produce a figure more than three times higher when the audience moves from the first mix to the third.

Per 1,000 daily users watching three rewarded videos each, that is 3,000 impressions a day. At those blends the day brings in roughly $8, $17 and $29. Try your own mix in the AdMob revenue calculator.

iOS pays more, with caveats

Our benchmark applies a 1.3 multiplier to iOS. The same AdMob rewarded placement in Tier 1 goes from $12.00 on Android to $15.60 on iOS, and from $1.40 to $1.82 in Tier 3.

Treat 1.3 as an average, not a promise. The gap depends on how many players allow tracking, on which networks you run and on how your audience is split. Apple's privacy changes shaped much of this, and how App Tracking Transparency changed iOS ad income goes through the details. Apple documents the framework itself on its App Tracking Transparency page.

Your app category moves the baseline

Advertisers pay more to reach some audiences than others. We apply a multiplier by category: hypercasual at 0.8, education at 0.85, puzzle at 1.0, mid-core and strategy at 1.35, finance apps at 1.6.

On a $12.00 Tier 1 rewarded baseline, that works out to $9.60 for hypercasual, $12.00 for puzzle, $16.20 for mid-core and $19.20 for finance. Stack iOS on a finance app with a US audience and the same placement reaches about $25. Most apps will never see that, which is a good reason not to plan around it.

How networks compare in the same slot

Differences between networks are smaller than differences between regions. In our Tier 1 rewarded data AppLovin MAX sits at $14.50, Unity Ads at $13.00, AdMob at $12.00 and InMobi at $9.00. InMobi flips the picture in Tier 3, where it edges ahead of AdMob at $1.50 against $1.40.

Fill rate also differs. AdMob and AppLovin come out near 88 and 90 percent in our model, while smaller networks fill less often. A network with a higher eCPM that fills 78 percent of requests may still earn less in total. Running several networks side by side is what mediation does, and mediation vs a single network explains when it pays off. The AppLovin MAX calculator and Unity Ads calculator show the same ladder for those networks.

What a good number looks like

A good eCPM is one that matches your audience mix, not one that matches a blog post. Work out your own expected blend first, as in the table above, then compare.

If your reported figure falls inside the 0.7 to 1.35 band around that blend, nothing is wrong. Below the band, check floor prices, fill rate and placement before blaming the network. Above it, check that you have enough impressions for the number to mean something. A few thousand impressions in a day can swing a lot, so read seven to fourteen days at a time.

Setting targets before launch

Plan with the low end of the range, not the middle. Estimate your daily users, pick two formats you will really ship, apply your audience blend and then take 0.7 of the result as the figure you budget against. If the app only works at the high end, it probably does not work.

Then revisit the plan after the first month of live data. Our methodology page explains how the benchmark numbers are put together, and the formats section on the home page lets you switch each one on and off. Once you have real numbers, seven ways to earn more from the audience you have covers what to change next. Unfamiliar terms are defined in the glossary.