"Finance blogger makes $60 RPM, my recipe site makes $20, same network"

"Finance blogger makes $60 RPM, my recipe site makes $20, same network"

The claim: the network treats finance better than food.

The asterisk: the network treats nobody better — the auction does. Personal-finance keywords pull bids from credit cards, brokerages, and insurance, verticals that pay $30+ CPMs because a conversion is worth hundreds. Recipe pageviews sell cookware and grocery coupons.

🚩 Hidden variable: advertiser demand per vertical, set entirely outside the network. The same code serves both; the bids that fill it differ by an order of magnitude.

Move the finance blog to a different network and it stays at $60. Move the recipe site and it stays at $20.

Not saying recipes are bad inventory — saying RPM is downstream of what advertisers will pay for your topic, and the network is just the pipe.