Metric wiki
What is RPM?
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith · updated July 2026
The short answer
RPM is revenue per mille: what the seller of attention keeps per 1,000 views. CPM is paid by the buyer before the platform's cut; RPM is received by the creator after it, divided across all views, monetized or not. Same impression, two metrics, and the platform's margin plus unmonetized traffic live in the gap.
RPM = total revenue ÷ total views × 1,000
$850 monthly revenue ÷ 400,000 views × 1,000 = $2.13 RPM
Same arithmetic as CPM with revenue substituted for spend; the solver on this site computes both.
One acronym, three platform definitions
- YouTube RPM:total revenue (ads, Premium, memberships and more) per 1,000 total views, after YouTube's share, per Google's published definition. Sits alongside a CPM figure that covers only monetized playbacks, hence the endless confusion (unpicked here).
- AdSense page RPM:estimated earnings per 1,000 page views, per Google's AdSense documentation. One page with three ad units multiplies impressions but not page views.
- Impression RPM: earnings per 1,000 individual ad impressions; the closest structural mirror of buyer CPM. Comparing page RPM against impression RPM flatters the page number by the ads-per-page factor (worked with numbers).
How CPM and RPM relate on one impression
Advertiser CPM, times the platform's revenue share, times the fraction of views that carried ads, is approximately creator RPM. Each factor is a real quantity you can look up or measure: YouTube's share is published (55% to creators on watch-page ads), your monetized fraction is in your dashboard. The two-direction conversion table lives at CPM vs RPM, and the fully worked waterfall at the YouTube flip side.