Technology RPM
Technology has the widest spread of any major vertical, because two very different businesses share the label. B2B software content attracts advertisers with real acquisition budgets; consumer gadget and how-to content attracts retailers with thin margins and readers who block ads at the highest rate online.
Measured RPM: not enough data yet
Monetific publishes the median RPM for a niche once at least 5 monitored sites contribute to it. Technology currently has none.
Connect a technology siteWhen this niche earns
| Period | Direction | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Q4 | Peak | Consumer electronics advertising concentrates into the holiday buying season more sharply than almost any other category. |
| January | Trough | Retail budgets reset after the holiday push, and consumer tech rates fall hard before recovering. |
| Enterprise budget cycles | Peak | B2B software advertising follows corporate purchasing periods rather than consumer seasons, which makes it a useful counterweight. |
| Major hardware launches | Peak | Rates and traffic move together around launch windows, though the effect is short and heavily contested. |
One label, two businesses
No vertical is described more loosely than technology, and the looseness hides
the single most important fact about monetising it: B2B software and consumer
gadgets are not the same market, and their rates are not close.
B2B software content — comparisons of business tools, integration guides,
category explainers — is read by someone spending an employer's money on a
product with a recurring contract. Vendors bid on that accordingly, and the
rates sit near the top of the internet.
Consumer gadget and how-to content — reviews, setup guides, troubleshooting
— is read by someone solving a problem for free. The advertisers are retailers
on thin margins, and the auction shows it.
A publisher who reads a headline RPM figure for "technology" and plans a
troubleshooting site has taken a number from one business and applied it to
another.
Ad blocking is the niche's structural problem
Technology audiences install ad blockers at a higher rate than any other
mainstream vertical. That is not a placement problem or an optimisation problem;
it is a property of who reads the content.
The practical consequence is that a technology site's effective RPM — revenue
divided by all pageviews, including the ones that never produced an impression
— can sit well below its reported RPM. Both numbers are correct; they are
measuring different denominators, and the gap is the blocked share.
Two things follow. First, judge performance on revenue per session rather than
on reported RPM, or the picture flatters itself. Second, the verticals within
technology that skew less technical — small-business software, productivity,
consumer services — lose less to blocking than developer and enthusiast content.
How-to content is infrastructure, not revenue
Troubleshooting and how-to guides bring the traffic. They rarely bring
proportionate revenue, because nobody arriving at "how to fix X" is about to buy
anything.
They are still usually worth writing — they build the topical authority and
internal linking that make the commercially valuable pages rank at all. The
honest framing is that they are infrastructure. Sites that treat them as the
revenue engine end up with high traffic and disappointing earnings, and cannot
work out why.
Seasonality cuts both ways
Consumer tech is one of the most seasonal categories online: Q4 electronics
advertising is intense, and the January collapse afterwards is correspondingly
steep. B2B follows corporate budget cycles instead, which are almost unrelated.
A site covering both is therefore more stable than one covering either — one of
the few cases where breadth genuinely reduces risk rather than diluting focus.
What Monetific will publish here
The measured median across monitored technology sites, with sample size. Given
how wide the spread is between B2B and consumer content, a single median for
"technology" will be less informative than for most niches, and this page will
say so when it publishes one.
Frequently asked
- Why do technology sites report such different RPMs?
- Because the label covers two unrelated businesses. A page about choosing CRM software is read by someone spending company money, and the advertisers bid accordingly. A page about fixing a phone setting is read by someone solving a free problem, and the auction reflects that. Both are called tech.
- Is ad blocking really worse in technology?
- Yes, and it is the niche's defining monetisation problem. Technically literate audiences install blockers at a far higher rate than general readers, so a meaningful share of pageviews never produce an impression at all. Nothing about ad placement fixes this; it is a property of the audience.
- Does B2B or consumer tech earn better?
- B2B, usually by a wide margin. Software vendors are bidding for a customer with a recurring contract, which supports higher bids than a retailer selling one accessory. The trade-off is that B2B traffic is much smaller and takes far longer to build authority in.
- Are tech how-to guides worth writing for revenue?
- They earn well below their traffic, and they are still often worth it — they build the topical authority and internal links that make the commercially valuable pages rank. Treating them as infrastructure rather than as revenue is the honest framing.
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