Small sites (less than 1M page views/month) earn 3x better on their remnant ad inventory than medium (>1M page views/month) and large Web sites (>100M page views/month). Interesting data from the PubMatic AdPrice Index which shows average eCPM ad rates for Web site publishers in Jan-Mar 2008:
| Month/eCPM | Large |
Medium |
Small | ||||
| Jan-08 | $.31 | $.34 | $1.00 | ||||
| Feb-08 | $.33 | $.33 | $1.15 | ||||
| Mar-08 | $.38 | $.34 | $1.18 |
This pricing data reflects text and banner inventory sold to ad networks (remnant), not any inventory sold directly, and is net to publisher (excluding the ad network commission). Nothing was said on whether the eCPM calculation (which is net revenues per thousand impressions, regardless of pricing model - CPM, CPC, CPA, etc.) included or excluded the display of unpaid (unsold) "default ads". I would expect it does include defaults in the calculations.
In my opinion, the reason for the large delta between "small" sites and medium/large is that small sites are often much more focused in their content and incur fewer page views per user visit. Large sites have more challenges segmenting/optimizing their inventory, because their content is frequently more generalized and broad in nature.
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