I was curious how our CPM per minute on a site we own and operate called HubPages compares to TV.  I created a formula to calculate our revenue per 1000 visitors and divided that by the number of minutes spent on the site per visitor.  The calculation yields about $5.15 CPM for each visitor per minute.

I was curious how this compares to TV.  There are about 16 minutes of commercials per hour on TV, and most commercials are thirty seconds long.   That means one person sees about 32 commercials per hour.  I used an estimated CPM of $10.25 for TV.  If a person watches sixty minutes of TV, that’s an effective CPM of $328 per viewer.  If you divide that by sixty minutes, that’s $5.47 CPM per minute for a viewer.

By this analysis, HubPages has a CPM per minute 6% lower than broadcast TV. The next thing you know TV is going to be clamoring for online ad budgets!  I was a bit surprised to see the CPM per minute be so close, given the rough industry numbers are 20% of media consumption by time is online, but only 10% of the ad spend is.

HubPages is largely monetized by AdSense, which leads me to believe that search must be a much higher effective CPM per minute than TV (a relatively passive medium for transmitting advertising messaging).  Certain content sites that are effective at selling brand ads must be better monetized per minute than TV.  But there must be segments that are way underperforming.  From the data we see, social networking sites have much lower than average CPMs and much higher average visitor sessions, so they are underperforming, but social networking is only 10-15% of total time spent online.  Other categories like instant messaging must be underperforming as well.

What’s your CPM for visitors per minute?

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