Gaming RPM
Gaming is the hardest large vertical to monetise, and for reasons that no amount of optimisation fixes: the audience skews young with limited purchasing power, blocks ads at the highest rate on the internet, and attracts advertisers who are mostly other games with small budgets.
Measured RPM: not enough data yet
Monetific publishes the median RPM for a niche once at least 5 monitored sites contribute to it. Gaming currently has none.
Connect a gaming siteWhen this niche earns
| Period | Direction | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Q4 | Peak | Holiday hardware and title launches bring the year's only sustained rate increase. |
| Major title launches | Peak | Traffic spikes enormously for days and rates lag behind it — the traffic arrives faster than the advertiser demand does. |
| Summer | Trough | A quiet release calendar and readers outdoors, though school holidays keep raw traffic up. |
| January | Trough | Post-holiday budget reset with no launch calendar to offset it. |
Three problems that compound
Gaming has enormous audiences and some of the worst publisher economics online.
That is not a failure of execution; it is what happens when three unfavourable
things overlap.
The audience skews young. Advertisers value impressions by what the viewer
is likely to spend, and a fourteen-year-old is worth less to them than a
thirty-five-year-old with a mortgage. That is reflected directly in bids.
Ad blocking is worse here than anywhere. Gaming audiences are technically
capable and culturally comfortable with blockers. A large share of pageviews
never produce an impression at all, which means the reported RPM and the actual
revenue per visitor diverge more than in any other vertical.
The advertisers are mostly other games. The parties most interested in
reaching gamers are game publishers running user-acquisition campaigns on
budgets calculated per install. That is a very different bid from an insurer
valuing a decade of premiums.
None of these are fixable by better ad placement. They are properties of the
audience and the advertiser pool.
Launch spikes are a trap
The most reliable disappointment in gaming is the launch weekend. A major title
arrives, traffic multiplies overnight, and revenue does not follow
proportionally.
The reason is that the traffic arrives faster than the demand for it. Advertiser
budgets targeting that game's audience are not sitting ready to absorb a sudden
surge in inventory, so the extra impressions clear at low rates. A million
pageviews in a weekend can earn barely more than a normal week.
Planning revenue around launch calendars is therefore planning around the wrong
variable.
Where the money actually is
Gaming sites that do well are rarely display businesses. Display is the smallest
line, and the rest comes from:
- Hardware and peripherals — components, headsets, prebuilt systems, where
the advertisers are retailers with margins and the readers are buyers - Memberships and ad-free tiers — an audience that blocks ads will sometimes
pay to remove them, which converts the problem into the product - Merchandise and community — the strongest asset most gaming sites have
- Sponsorship — brands buying the audience directly, at rates the open
auction will not pay - Video — where gaming audiences actually are, with better economics
A site treating display as the primary revenue line in this niche is optimising
the smallest number.
The honest recommendation
If display revenue is the goal, gaming is the wrong vertical to choose — not
because it cannot be done, but because the same effort in a niche with older
audiences and commercial intent returns several times as much.
If gaming is the subject you are actually going to keep writing about for years,
build the site and monetise it through community and hardware rather than
through impressions. That is a real business. Display alone is not.
What Monetific will publish here
Measured median RPM across monitored gaming sites, with sample size. Gaming is
also the niche where the gap between reported RPM and revenue per session will
be most worth publishing, because ad blocking makes the two describe genuinely
different things.
Frequently asked
- Why is gaming RPM so low?
- Three things compound. The audience skews young and has less to spend, so advertisers value the impression less. Ad blocking is more prevalent here than in any other mainstream vertical. And the advertisers most interested in gaming audiences are other games, competing on small user-acquisition budgets rather than the lifetime values that fund finance or insurance bids.
- Can a gaming site earn well on display alone?
- It is difficult. Gaming sites that do well usually derive most of their revenue elsewhere — memberships, merchandise, sponsorships, video, or affiliate on hardware and peripherals. Display tends to be the smallest line rather than the main one.
- Does hardware content earn better than game content?
- Considerably. Peripherals, components and prebuilt systems attract retail advertisers with real margins and buyers with real budgets, which is a different economic proposition from coverage of a free-to-play title.
- Why do traffic spikes not produce revenue spikes?
- Because a launch brings readers faster than it brings advertiser demand for them. A million pageviews in a weekend on a game that has no advertisers bidding on it earns close to what a hundred thousand would. This is the most common disappointment in the niche.
Know your own number
A niche median is a reference point, not a target. Import your earnings export and Monetific shows your RPM by day against a trailing median, so you find out which day it changed rather than which month.
See the RPM analyzer