<b>What actually drives the 10x RPM spread between niches</b>

<b>What actually drives the 10x RPM spread between niches</b>

Thesis: the large RPM gap between, say, personal finance and gaming is driven less by 'audience value' as a vague concept and more by two measurable factors: advertiser competition and buyer intent.

Context. RPM differences across niches are routinely reported but rarely decomposed. The intuition 'finance pays more' is correct but under-explained.

Findings. Cross-niche RPM data consistently ranks finance, insurance, B2B software, and legal at the top, with gaming, entertainment, and broad lifestyle near the bottom — spreads of roughly 5–10x. The driver is auction density: niches where a converted viewer is worth a large lifetime value attract many advertisers bidding against each other, lifting CPMs. Commercial-intent content within a niche outperforms purely entertaining content in the same niche.

Caveats. Reported niche RPMs come from creator aggregations with inconsistent niche definitions and seasonality baked in (Q4 inflates everything). 'Intent' is inferred, not measured directly.

Implications. RPM is partly a content-strategy choice, not just a niche lottery. Shifting toward decision-stage topics within a niche can lift RPM without changing audience.

What we still don't know: how much of the spread is advertiser bidding versus platform-side optimization we can't observe.