“The first thing to remember is that a $1,000 CPM is just every viewer paying an average of $1 per piece of content. That’s not crazy; it’s iTunes.”
Hank Green has some interesting ideas on rethinking the cost-per-impression ad model:
Imagine that you would like to consume a piece of content, but in between you and that content is a paywall. They’re asking $15 for one person to view the content one time. While a YouTube video might net you $2 per thousand viewers, this fantasy world I’ve just described will net you $15,000 per thousand impressions…A $15,000 CPM!
With a $15,000 CPM, every two thousand views is a full-time, living-wage human per year!
Of course, this model would never work…except that it works every day at every movie theater in America.
As he admits, some of the numbers sound crazy, but if you read the whole post and actually sit with his ideas, it’s not crazy at all.