Yahoo's CPM, in fact, is three times greater than Microsoft's MSN ($4.42), and 50% greater than News Corp.'s Myspace.com ($8.31). It's also about four times greater than AOL ($3.14), suggesting the Time Warner unit might indeed have a strategic imperative in hooking up with AOL.
While relative costs are obviously important from an advertiser's or an agency's perspective, the OMMA magazine analysis went a step further to look at the actual advertising yield each top publisher drew from every online page view they delivered. Those results are equally revealing: When divided by its massive 33.4 billion monthly average page views, Yahoo yields a revenue-per-thousand views (RPM) of just four cents, one-fourteenth the value of a targeted, high-end site like forbes.com (56 cents per thousand page views).
You'll find some surprising comparisons, like the fact that scurrilous online publisher The Drudge Report commands a CPM ($10.36) that is a third greater than nytimes.com's ($7.81). Whatever fits is now more valuable than what's fit. Go figure. Please keep in mind that the estimates we've compiled aren't gospel, but from a directional point-of-view, they're a pretty good indicator of how Madison Avenue truly values the inventory of the industry's leading publishers.
Site | Advertising Revenues | Unique Users (000) | CPM | Page Views (000) | RPM |
Yahoo | $1,375.90 | 108,734 | $12.65 | 33,425,115 | $0.04 |
MSN | $422.80 | 95,594 | $4.42 | 14,764,863 | $0.03 |
AOL Media Network | $286.60 | 91,303 | $3.14 | 7,836,853 | $0.04 |
Myspace.com | $480.10 | 57,784 | $8.31 | 30,900,015 | $0.02 |
Weather Channel | $78.80 | 36,844 | $2.14 | 900,176 | $0.09 |
About.com | $35.80 | 35,948 | $1.00 | 304,741 | $0.12 |
MSNBC | $250.80 | 29,230 | $8.50 | 727,221 | $0.34 |
CNN | $71.70 | 29,144 | $2.46 | 1,204,612 | $0.06 |
IMDb | $78.80 | 20,653 | $3.82 | 700,601 | $0.11 |
ESPN | $136.20 | 17,371 | $7.84 | 901,889 | $0.15 |