"We scaled to 100k sessions and our Raptive RPM tanked"

"We scaled to 100k sessions and our Raptive RPM tanked"

The claim: a creator went from $32 session RPM at 30k sessions to $19 at 100k, and blamed Raptive throttling.

The asterisk: the new 70k sessions came almost entirely from one viral Pinterest-driven recipe roundup. Pinterest traffic skews mobile, skews US-but-bouncy, and lands on listicles with low scroll depth.

🚩 Hidden variable: RPM is a weighted average. Pour in a bucket of $8 sessions and the blended number falls even if every existing page held flat.

Segment by source and the original pages still printed $33. The "collapse" was arithmetic, not a network decision.

Not saying Raptive is bad — saying a portfolio average hides which traffic actually got cheaper, and a viral spike is the usual culprit.