RPM. This metric has become king amongst bloggers comparing their earnings, but what exactly is RPM and what are they comparing? Short for revenue per mille, RPM is the earnings accrued for every 1000 units (mille means thousand in Latin), and is the most commonly used measurement in online advertising. It’s the publisher side of CPM, or cost per milli. Advertisements cost advertisers money, hence they use CPM. They earn us revenue. Hence we use RPM. The textbook definition sounds simple enough, but for such a key benchmarking metric, RPM can be far more complicated – and controversial – than this lets on. Why? Because RPM as a unit on its own is ambiguous. Much like an inch or a centimeter, it’s just a unit of measurement. You can measure all sorts of things with length. Same goes with RPM. You can calculate it based […]

As part of our new Go for Teal video series, we want to share not only what Mediavine is doing, but how we’re doing it by teaching you various aspects of the advertising industry. We thought we’d begin with header bidding, which is basically the crux of everything Mediavine does behind the scenes. Header bidding gets its name because it’s typically called from the head, or top of your page, before your page starts to load. Header bidding is essentially an auction of auctions, an opportunity for all the ad exchanges and networks to compete for every impression. To better understand header bidding, we need to look at the world before header bidding, a world of traditional tag-based ads and waterfalls. In the old days of this industry, a whole three years ago, a publisher worked with an ad network who provided a set of tags […]