CPM
Also called Cost per mille, Cost per thousand impressions.
The price of one thousand ad impressions — the standard unit for buying reach rather than outcomes.
CPM is quoted per thousand, so a $20 CPM on 40,000 impressions is $800, not $800,000. The unit trips people up in exactly one direction: budgets get planned an order of magnitude wrong when someone reads it as cost per impression.
A direct-sold CPM on a niche publication is usually several times the CPM the same impression fetches programmatically. That gap is not a markup — it is the difference between buying an audience and buying inventory. A programmatic $2 CPM reaches whoever the exchange happens to serve; a $40 CPM in a specialist newsletter reaches a list the publisher spent years assembling.
CPM says nothing about whether anyone acted. Two placements with identical CPMs can differ tenfold on clicks. Compare CPM against CPM to judge price, and against clicks or conversions to judge value.
How LinkBourse handles it
Impressions on a CPM booking are counted by our tracker, not reported by the publisher, and invalid traffic is excluded before the count is used to release money.
Median CPMs asked hereTerms it depends on
- Impression
- One instance of an ad being served — not necessarily seen, and not necessarily by a person.
- CPC
- A price paid per click rather than per view, shifting delivery risk to the publisher.
- Invalid traffic
- Clicks and impressions that did not come from a real person acting on the ad — bots, prefetchers, repeat automation, and traffic from somewhere other than the booked property.
- Flat fee
- One price for one placement — a newsletter send, a sponsored post, a podcast read — regardless of how it performs.