I am not sure what kind of sites you are interested in (social/media/verticals/etc.) but CPMs for online news/commentary and some online communities have been really hurt by an excess supply, and the fact that many companies have pulled back on marketing. That's one of the reasons that house ads, AdSense, and ad networks are showing up when you visit many of these sites.

Federated Media currently lists CPMs for TechCrunch between $23.40 and $26, based on three largish display types (see https://advertisers.federatedmedia.net/explore/?site=techcru...). The Mommy Blog is considerably less according to the FM rate card -- $4.55 for a square button up to $18.20 for a medium rectangle (which it says is sold out -- no inventory left).

FM takes a cut, of course, but handles the nitty gritty sales stuff that a lot of blogs don't like to deal with.

Thanks for the in-depth response. I always wonder how close the actual ad deals are to the prices mentioned on the FM rate card. If the Mommy Blog is really selling out $18 CPMs, that's fantastic.

I think the key thing to note about these two examples is they are both popular, established brands in niches that advertisers are willing to buy against. Newcomers won't command such high CPMs, and neither will sites focused on other topics. I remember someone discussing why Consumerist would be so hard for Gawker to sell -- what vendor would want to put their products next to content that's all about criticizing greedy/insensitive/clueless corporations? Gawker did end up selling it, but I wonder if it was at the price that they wanted.

We had a hard time making sense of our ads. We're only pulling in $1.50 cpm. It hurts!

We have some experimental Google Adsense running on our consumer site (www.newscred.com), and we get around 1.80 CPM. Which is better than I expected, but still pretty shitty.

We've tried making the ads look less gross so they are more inviting, and some minor tweaks have helped.

Wow your site looks great. What sort of CMS are you using to manage all that content?

That's better than us. We're currently in the sub-dime range :( Do you have any tips?

Well we have a PR5 so that might be one reason. What's your PR?

Thanks for your answer.

Our page rank is 3. Do ad networks use that to discriminate the quality and/or the payout? Or do you sell ads yourself?

I think google probably puts some emphasis on PR since its an indicator of your sites value. I don't have hard data on PR vs cpm though. Let me know if you find any data on this...