Financial Metrics
CPM (Cost Per Mille / Thousand)
The standard monetary cost associated with delivering exactly 1,000 ad impressions to an audience.
What is CPM (Cost Per Mille / Thousand)?
CPM is the universal currency of advertising cost, used across television, radio, podcasts, streaming, digital display, and connected TV alike. A €20 CPM means the advertiser pays €20 for every 1,000 impressions delivered. The metric collapses absolute ad cost into a comparable unit across media formats with vastly different scale and pricing conventions.
CPM comparisons are how advertisers allocate budget between channels. A terrestrial radio spot at €8 CPM and a podcast mid-roll at €25 CPM aren't directly equivalent — audience attentiveness, targeting precision, and brand-safety characteristics differ — but CPM provides the baseline from which to reason about cost efficiency. Modern cross-channel planning tools normalize everything to CPM first, then layer in the qualitative adjustments.
Why it matters
The universal equalizer metric. CPM allows advertisers to objectively compare the relative cost of a terrestrial radio spot against a digital podcast mid-roll.
Related terms
- CPP (Cost Per Point)— The financial cost required to reach an audience equivalent to exactly one percent of the targeted demographic population in a market.
- RPM (Revenue Per Mille)— The total amount of revenue generated by a publisher or broadcaster for every 1,000 impressions they successfully serve.
- CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)— The total combined sales, operational, and marketing expenditure required to successfully win a new advertising client.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)— An advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays only when a specific desired action (a sale, a click, a form fill) is completed.