Programmatic display CPM benchmarks, 2026

Updated 1 September 2026

Most published CPM benchmarks are rate cards dressed up as data. The numbers below are clearing prices — what impressions actually transacted at — which is a different and much lower set of figures.

What publishers net

Marketplace reporting from DataBeat, distributed through MediaMint, covers more than 35 billion monthly impressions and over $55 million in monthly revenue across more than 200 tracked bidders. For June 2026 it puts the overall US average at roughly $1.81 CPM. Broken out:

Two things stand out. Device barely matters any more — mobile at $1.72 and desktop at $1.77 are close enough to be noise, which undoes a decade of planning assumptions. And AMP trails the rest of the web at $1.01, a reasonable proxy for how the market values stripped-down page environments.

What buyers pay

The same impressions cost roughly twice as much on the other side of the auction. These are average prices paid by the largest bidders:

The spread between $1.42 net and roughly $3 gross is the ad tech supply chain: exchange fees, DSP fees, data costs and whatever sits in between. It is also the single most misunderstood number in programmatic planning. A publisher quoting you their average CPM and a DSP reporting yours are describing the same impression at two different prices.

By integration path

How inventory is wired into the auction moves the price as much as what the inventory is:

Amazon’s TAM leads at $2.34 while AdX trails at $1.46 — a 60% difference on comparable inventory, driven by which demand shows up in which auction.

How to use these numbers when planning

Take the buy-side figures as your floor for broad, lightly targeted display in tier-one markets. Roughly $3 CPM is what an open-auction impression costs before anyone adds a fee or a data segment. Everything you do after that pushes the number up: third-party audiences, tight viewability floors, strict suitability tiers, small geographies, narrow dayparts. It is normal for a heavily targeted line to clear at three or four times the open-market average, and that is usually money well spent.

What benchmarks cannot tell you is whether a given price is good. A $2 CPM on made-for- advertising inventory is worse value than a $6 CPM on a real publisher, and the gap does not show up in any average. Judge a price against the delivery report, not against a table.

Three caveats worth carrying. These are US figures, and European and Nordic open web typically clears lower still. Video sits well above display but is not broken out here in absolute terms — the same reporting shows video CPMs up 17.6% month on month and 41.3% year on year, which tells you the direction without giving you a level. And benchmarks move with seasonality: Q4 pricing bears little relation to January.

Where a LowRoller sits against this

Our own campaigns are built to clear 50–80% below the matching benchmark: under $1.50 on broad open-auction display against the roughly $3 buy-side average, and $1.60 to $3.20 for in-stream video. That is a bidding position, not a discount — we choose the bottom of the price distribution deliberately and then spend the effort on keeping the junk out of it. See what that does to a plan’s blended CPM.

Sources

Figures are from DataBeat’s US Programmatic Trends reporting for June 2026, distributed through MediaMint and reported by PPC Land. We update this page when new marketplace data is published rather than on a schedule.