What does CPM stand for?

Posted on November 30, 2008 by Chris Heisel

CPM is a fairly standard unit of measure in the online advertising business.

It stands for **Cost per thousand** (the M is the Roman numeral for 1,000). What it’s measuring is the **cost per thousand [ad impressions] [ad-impression]**.

Take [heisel.org](http://heisel.org) for example. For the month of November I had a little more than 1,000 [page views] [page-view]. If I sold ads, and if I sold them at a $5 CPM, then I’d have roughly $5 in revenue for the month.

A simple number that belies even more to talk about, but I’ve got a tree to decorate, so that’s all for tonight.

[ad-impression]: http://heisel.org/blog/2008/11/29/ad-impressions/
[page-view]: http://heisel.org/blog/2008/11/13/what-is-a-page-view/

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10 Responses to What does CPM stand for?

  1. Pingback: heisel.org > What is an ad impression

  2. David says:
    June 19, 2012 at 11:00 am

    Thanks for this. Found it useful.

  3. Imshakeelatk says:
    March 5, 2013 at 8:34 pm

    interesting, spcially “M” in CPM. greatfull

  4. David G Lortie says:
    April 1, 2013 at 6:51 am

    Thank you I was trying to figure this out because I wanted to advertise my website getpaidweekly.com and i had no clue what it meant and was curious to find out

  5. celeb says:
    September 12, 2013 at 2:28 pm

    Its very useful info, I dont know about cpm before reading this post. Thanks for sharing

    http://celebpix.in/

  6. Scotty says:
    September 28, 2013 at 12:29 pm

    Thank you for making it easy to understand !!

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  10. Okey Anawana says:
    October 27, 2015 at 10:20 am

    Thanks. I found this very helpful

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