How Much a Thousand Pageviews Earn, by Niche

A thousand pageviews on a mortgage comparison site and a thousand pageviews on a gaming walkthrough can differ in value by a factor of three or more. Advertisers bid for readers, and some readers are worth far more than others.

Below you will find RPM ranges by niche, the arithmetic that turns pageviews into dollars, and the ways traffic source and season shift the result. RPM here means revenue per 1,000 pageviews. All figures are estimates from the benchmarks behind our calculator, and your own reports should replace them as soon as you have data.

From pageviews to a monthly number

The formula is short. Monthly revenue equals pageviews divided by 1,000, times RPM. If your analytics tool counts sessions instead, multiply sessions by pages per session first.

Suppose a recipe site gets 30,000 sessions a month at 1.6 pages per session. That is 48,000 pageviews. In the food niche, with all readers in Tier 1 and AdSense, our baseline RPM is $7.35, so the month pays 48 times $7.35, or $352.80. Give that site a mixed audience (30 percent Tier 1, 30 percent Tier 2, 40 percent Tier 3) and the blended RPM is about $3.49, which means 48 times $3.49, or roughly $167.

Same site, same content, less than half the money. Audience geography is the first thing to check, and the niche comes second.

RPM baselines by niche

The table uses Tier 1 readers and a reference setup of four ads per page at 60 percent viewability. Multipliers apply to the network's base RPM, which is $7.00 for AdSense and $17.00 for Mediavine in our data.

Three niches are not in the table. Travel has a multiplier of 0.95, which gives $6.65 on AdSense and $16.15 on Mediavine. Education at 0.90 gives $6.30 and $15.30. A general-interest site at 0.80 gives $5.60 and $13.60.

Any single site can land outside these numbers. A realistic band runs from about 0.7 to 1.35 times the baseline. For finance on AdSense, that is roughly $9.30 to $18.00.

Why niche changes the price

Advertisers pay more when a click or a view is likely to lead to something valuable for them. A reader researching insurance, software or a medical question is closer to a purchase than someone watching a game trailer. Finance sits at the top for exactly that reason.

Competition matters too. More advertisers chasing a category means higher auction prices, and some categories also carry stricter ad policies that remove bidders. Treat the multipliers as a broad guide to demand, not a verdict on your site. A well-run lifestyle blog beats a neglected tech blog.

Geography often matters more than topic

Look at one niche across regions. General-interest content on AdSense is worth $5.60 per thousand pageviews in Tier 1, $2.40 in Tier 2 and $0.64 in Tier 3. Tier 1 is almost nine times Tier 3.

That gap is bigger than the gap between the best and worst niches. A gaming site read mostly in Tier 1 earns $4.90 on AdSense. A finance site read mostly in Tier 3 earns $1.52. The cheaper niche wins on location.

If you can write for readers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada or Australia without making the content worse, the income difference can be large. The AdSense calculator has a geography slider for this reason.

Where your readers come from

Traffic source changes what a pageview is worth, although the effect varies enough by site that we will not put a percentage on it. Search visitors arrive with a question and tend to read more. Email subscribers and direct visitors often behave well too.

Social referrals are usually less valuable. Visitors click through, skim one page and leave, so you get fewer pages per session and lower viewability on the units further down. Mobile readers often see fewer ad slots than desktop readers. Check the split in your own report before you decide a channel is worth the effort.

If one channel brings most of your traffic, compute its RPM separately. Averages can hide a source that pays well below the rest.

The Q4 effect

Advertising budgets tend to rise in the last quarter of the year, ahead of holiday shopping, and RPMs follow. Many publishers see October to December pay clearly more per pageview than January and February, which is often the softest stretch.

Here is an example with invented but plausible values. A general-interest blog has a steady 60,000 pageviews a month and a base RPM of $5.60. That month pays $336. If a Q4 lift takes the RPM to $8.00, the same pageviews pay $480. If January drops it to $4.60, the pay falls to $276.

Plan accordingly. A strong December is a reason to build a cash cushion, not a reason to raise your rent. Seasonal traffic also matters when you apply to managed networks, as AdSense or Mediavine explains.

A realistic first year

New sites grow slowly, and revenue grows only as fast as pageviews do. The table below assumes a general-interest blog with a mixed audience, which blends to an RPM of $2.66 on AdSense. Month numbers and pageviews are made-up round figures for illustration, not a forecast.

Notice that a full year of work earns a modest second paycheck at best. By month 9, 40,000 pageviews is already above Raptive's 25,000-pageview bar, if the audience and content also fit its rules. At month 12, 75,000 pageviews at 1.5 pages per session is 50,000 sessions, and AdSense earnings of $199.50 a month come to about $2,394 a year, still under the $5,000 in annual ad revenue Mediavine's main programme asks for. Journey by Mediavine asks for only 1,000 sessions from Tier 1 countries in 30 days. A blended Mediavine RPM for the same niche would be $6.40, which gives 75 times $6.40, or $480 instead of $199.50. The bars and the RPM gap are why traffic growth is worth chasing.

Checking your own RPM

Our numbers are a starting point, not a target. After 30 days of live data, divide your earnings by pageviews and multiply by 1,000. If you want to see how RPM differs from session RPM and from eCPM, eCPM in plain English walks through each with examples, and the glossary defines the rest.

AdSense reports page RPM directly in its help centre, and the Mediavine RPM calculator and Raptive RPM calculator cover the managed side. To lift the number you already have, start with website ad formats compared and read how we build the benchmarks.