u/playwire_adops — reddlx

Playwire here. We pulled a year of aggregated ecosystem data (sessions, RPS, CPM, fill rate, viewability, ad density across 1,200+ publisher sites) and wrote up what we found. Full report is free at the link below.

The findings that I think are most worth arguing about in this community:

Impressions per pageview (r = 0.59) is the single strongest RPS predictor. Not CPM. Not fill rate. Not viewability. The number of ads that actually load on each page is more predictive than anything else we measured, by a wide margin.
Session duration correlates with RPS at r = −0.03. Pageviews per session (r = 0.27) is nearly 10x stronger. If you're optimizing for time-on-site, you should be shifting to optimizing for pages per session.
The floor price trap is real and quantifiable. Within the same demand tier, publishers with right-sized floors fill 2x more inventory and earn 19% more RPS despite a 2.5x lower CPM. Aggressive floors almost never pencil out.

All RPS figures are indexed, no absolute revenue numbers disclosed.

Full report: https://www.playwire.com/2026-state-of-publisher-ad-revenue-report

We're also hosting a webinar on June 11 to walk through the methodology and take questions. If you want to ask questions about how we ran the analysis, that's the place for it: https://www.playwire.com/state-of-ad-revenue-report-2026-webinar

Happy to answer questions here in the meantime.