Capsule summary: if you know what CPM means (cost per thousand impressions) you can derive cost per visit. Take one guess how. Yep, you were right.<p>The interesting bit: <i>I get 50 cents per thousand impressions, which could be worse. That means that I am getting 1/160th of what they are. Is my content really so much worse?</i><p>This is a fundamental misconception. Nobody cares what your content quality is. They care about the quality of the traffic that you send to them. I spend hundreds of dollars a month paying effective CPMs of $10+ on some sites which are, ahem, total garbage. Because <i>they send me people that convert</i>. (How? They rank highly for search terms that ideally I would rank highly for, but their content is such crap that people are like "Oh noes, I need to actually get this done, oh wait here is an ad which promises pain relief CLICK oh thank God a website which knows what it is doing.")<p>I don't care if you are John Paul II, Mark Twain, and JRR Tolkien all rolled into one, and if every blog post you write creates a new genre of literature: if the people who read your blog are anti-commercial poor teenagers who have no desire to buy the content from ads you put on there, then your CPM will be crappy.<p>(Incidentally, if you hide your ads in the corner under a label saying "I sold out" and you are writing to an ad-blind niche, I would not expect $20 CPMs. Hope that helps.)