Dataset

What a thousand pageviews earned from ads, by subject, across 123 broker-checked businesses

What a thousand pageviews earned from display advertising, by subject, taking the middle business in each — the figure the trade calls RPM. Measured across 123 web businesses whose traffic and revenue were both checked by a broker before sale. Covers 1,334 business-months, 1.17 billion pageviews and $6.84 million of advertising revenue. Every subject shown rests on at least three businesses; subjects below that are held back rather than shown, because a middle value over one business is a single data point wearing a statistic’s clothes. No ad network publishes this by subject, and every table you can find online traces back to a blog citing another blog.

• 1.17 billion pageviews
• $6.84m of verified revenue
• 1,334 business-months
• 123 businesses

Coverage

2023-01-01 to 2026-08-30

Last updated

2026-08-30

Licence

CC BY 4.0

DOI

10.5281/zenodo.22280271

What a row is

One measured business: its niche, its RPM, and the months and traffic behind it.

Subjects

RPM, revenue per mille, display advertising, ad revenue, publisher revenue, pageviews, website monetisation, content sites

Download the public data sample123 rows · 6 columns · CSV · no account, no email

Download the expanded RPM view (9 columns)The same 123 businesses, with pooled RPM and monthly averages calculated from the original columns. These are derived measures, not extra observations. The original CSV and archived source edition remain unchanged.

Read the finding this came out ofWhat does your niche earn per 1,000 pageviews?

How to cite this

Use it commercially, change it, build on it. The only condition is credit, and a link satisfies it.

What you should know about this data

• Sales a broker checked are not a random sample of the web. A business that reached a sale is one that was worth selling, so this sample sits above the whole population.
• This is revenue per thousand PAGEVIEWS — one pageview is one page being loaded. Some networks quote per thousand SESSIONS instead, and one session usually covers several pageviews, so their figures are divided by a bigger number. The two cannot be compared.
• The subject comes from the broker’s own filing, not from reading the sites.
• Subjects with fewer than three businesses are not published at all.

How it was measured

Sold listings from a broker’s public record where the business earned from display advertising and nothing else, so the revenue the broker checked IS advertising revenue. Revenue was matched to pageviews month by month across 1,334 business-months. The businesses listed in 2014-16 are left out: their pageview figures produce an implausible $40 middle value, which is a problem with the data rather than a fact about the market.

The summary

The first 60 of 123 rows. The download has all of them. Free to use with credit, commercially included.

What each column means

niche

The subject, as the broker filed it

rpm_usd

This business’s middle month, in earnings per thousand pageviews (RPM) — USD per 1,000 pageviews

months_measured

How many months that middle value is taken from

pageviews

Pageviews across those months

ad_revenue_usd

Verified advertising revenue across those months — USD

listed_year

The year the business was listed for sale

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