Capsule summary: if you know what CPM means (cost per thousand impressions) you can derive cost per visit. Take one guess how. Yep, you were right.
The interesting bit: I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content really so much worse?
This is a fundamental misconception. Nobody cares what your content quality is. They care about the quality of the traffic that you send to them. I spend hundreds of dollars a month paying effective CPMs of $10+ on some sites which are, ahem, total garbage. Because they send me people that convert. (How? They rank highly for search terms that ideally I would rank highly for, but their content is such crap that people are like "Oh noes, I need to actually get this done, oh wait here is an ad which promises pain relief CLICK oh thank God a website which knows what it is doing.")
I don't care if you are John Paul II, Mark Twain, and JRR Tolkien all rolled into one, and if every blog post you write creates a new genre of literature: if the people who read your blog are anti-commercial poor teenagers who have no desire to buy the content from ads you put on there, then your CPM will be crappy.
(Incidentally, if you hide your ads in the corner under a label saying "I sold out" and you are writing to an ad-blind niche, I would not expect $20 CPMs. Hope that helps.)
Capsule summary: if you know what CPM means (cost per thousand impressions) you can derive cost per visit. Take one guess how. Yep, you were right.
The interesting bit: I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content really so much worse?
This is a fundamental misconception. Nobody cares what your content quality is. They care about the quality of the traffic that you send to them. I spend hundreds of dollars a month paying effective CPMs of $10+ on some sites which are, ahem, total garbage. Because they send me people that convert. (How? They rank highly for search terms that ideally I would rank highly for, but their content is such crap that people are like "Oh noes, I need to actually get this done, oh wait here is an ad which promises pain relief CLICK oh thank God a website which knows what it is doing.")
I don't care if you are John Paul II, Mark Twain, and JRR Tolkien all rolled into one, and if every blog post you write creates a new genre of literature: if the people who read your blog are anti-commercial poor teenagers who have no desire to buy the content from ads you put on there, then your CPM will be crappy.
(Incidentally, if you hide your ads in the corner under a label saying "I sold out" and you are writing to an ad-blind niche, I would not expect $20 CPMs. Hope that helps.)