whatisrpm.com

Revenue wing / benchmarks

What is a good RPM?

Reviewed08·2026

It depends, and this page tells you exactly on what: your niche's advertiser demand and your geography mix. Fix your RPM basis and the season, then judge your number against your own history, not against an unsourced table.

By Oliver Wakefield-Smith. Oliver Wakefield-Smith runs a portfolio of ad-monetized publisher sites and reads these dashboards weekly.

Four dials, same site

The gauges below are worked examples of the same site read four ways, to show how much the frame moves before the site does. Each dial is arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a benchmark.

$8USD RPM
Jan, 40% US traffic
$11USD RPM
June, 40% US traffic
$19USD RPM
Q4, 40% US traffic
$27USD RPM
Q4, 80% US traffic

Same content, same layout: the swing from $8 to $27 is season and geography mix alone. That swing is the reason a bare "is $10 good" question has no honest one-number answer.

Step one: name your basis

AdSense reports page RPM Google AdSense Help2026-08, Mediavine reports session RPM, Ezoic reports EPMV Ezoic2026-08. A session usually spans more than one pageview, so the same day's earnings produce a higher session RPM than page RPM. Before judging your number, know which one it is: the basis page works the same day through all three.

Step two: the two numbers that decide "good"

  1. Your niche's advertiser demand. Advertisers bid on conversion value; finance and insurance audiences out-bid entertainment ones. The sourced ranking logic is on the niche page.
  2. Your geography mix.The share of your traffic from high-bid markets (US, CA, UK, AU, NZ) sets the ceiling. The networks price it openly: Raptive's published entry rules require 50% traffic from those five markets at the 25k tier Raptive Help2026-08.

Season then multiplies both: Q4 lifts everything and January cuts it, per the dated Ezoic index series Ezoic Ad Revenue Index (dated series)2026-08.

Step three: judge against yourself, then act

The comparison that holds everything constant is your own dashboard a year ago. If you beat last year in the same month, your RPM is good by the only test that is not confounded. If your traffic has meanwhile cleared a published network threshold, the decision math changes: check the thresholds table, then the head-to-head pages, and model the money with the what-if dial on the calculator rather than trusting any projected uplift figure, because no network publishes one.

Questions this page keeps getting

Is $10 a good RPM?

For a lifestyle site with mostly non-US traffic in January, yes. For a US-heavy finance site in Q4, no. The two numbers that decide it are your niche's advertiser demand and your share of high-bid geography traffic.

What RPM basis should I check before comparing?

Whether your dashboard reports page RPM (AdSense), session RPM (Mediavine) or EPMV (Ezoic). Session-based figures read higher than page-based ones on identical earnings, so cross-basis comparisons mislead.

How much does season change a good RPM?

Materially: ad budgets peak in Q4 and reset in January, a pattern visible in the dated Ezoic Ad Revenue Index. The same site can see its RPM swing between December and January with nothing changed on-page.

At what point does switching networks make sense?

When your traffic clears a published threshold (Raptive 25,000 pageviews, Mediavine 50,000 sessions) and the network's published share beats what your current setup nets you. Uplift beyond the share terms is not published, so test rather than trust projections.