We performed an extensive data analysis on over 400 creators who’ve joined Raptive since the beginning of 2020, looking at their RPM before Raptive, their RPM after we installed Raptive ads, and the RPM changes of their peers (similar sites) in the rest of our community of creators.

Our analysis takes into account seasonality trends across similar creators, to ensure that each creator truly earned more, in addition to any expected seasonal lift.

The results confirmed that the sites that joined Raptive saw RPM increases ON TOP of the typical trends the rest of our community experienced. 

And it didn’t matter which ad management firm they had worked with previously — they earned more money (in most cases a lot more!) with Raptive.

Background methodology

We’ve developed a rigorous approach to make the process smooth and easy and make sure creators make more money running a similar amount of (and in many cases, fewer) ads. 

We work to understand a creator’s recent ad performance with their ad network before Raptive so we can compare it to the ad performance after we install Raptive ads, carefully tracking these data points. We also measure and track the “lift” we deliver — how much RPM increases by running Raptive ads.

In every case, creators make significantly more money running Raptive ads.

Raptive ads are an “on-ramp” to higher earnings

One way to picture this is as a highway on-ramp.

You’re driving on the service road that runs parallel to a high-speed highway. Perhaps it also has a pretty good speed limit, and you’re already traveling at a fairly good speed.

But the highway has a higher speed limit, and you see cars zipping past, so you take the on-ramp and accelerate rapidly to catch up to the traveling speed of the cars around you. 

Once you’ve fully merged onto the highway, you can now continue at that faster pace. 

Some cars are going faster or slower, but every driver who takes the on-ramp onto the highway can now go much faster than they were going before. That’s what happens to creators who join Raptive.

Line graph of two lines in parallel and then one line jumping up and then running parallel again

But what about seasonality?

If you’ve been running ads on your site for a little while, you’ve likely experienced a lot of fluctuation — you know that at certain times of the year, RPMs go up, and at certain times they go down. In the final week of a month, RPMs will typically be higher than at the beginning of the month because advertiser spending rises and falls seasonally. 

This makes it tough to compare apples to apples because there are times of the year where of course RPMs will rise over several weeks. Just like there are times where RPMs will naturally fall.

We wanted to make sure creators can have complete confidence that RPM increases are MORE than seasonal variations — they’re truly due to the advantages you get at Raptive!

So we dove deep into data analysis.

Methodology

We looked at 566 creators who joined Raptive from other ad companies from December 2019 through February 2021. 

These creators represent a wide variety of monthly pageviews, verticals and niches, ad layout preferences, RPMs before Raptive, and revenue share (the percentage of net revenue paid to the creator).

Not only did we compare the creator’s RPM before Raptive and after Raptive to ensure that it grew, but we also compared it to seasonality trends across similar creators.

Here’s how our analysis works:

  • For each creator, we identified a group of similar creators — based on pageviews, vertical, etc. to establish a “similar creator cohort”
  • For each creator, we consulted the RPM data each creator provided when joining Raptive — the “creator pre-period RPM”
  • For the similar creator cohort, we identified the average RPM of those sites from the same dates as the creator pre-period — the “benchmark pre-period RPM”
  • Then, we tracked each new creator’s weekly RPM for the first several months working with Raptive, compared to their pre-period RPM
  • We also tracked the RPM group in the similar creator cohort for the same time periods.

This true apples-to-apples comparison lets us see how much of a lift creators see when they join Raptive just by running Raptive ads, as opposed to seasonal trends or the optimizations all Raptive creators see throughout the year. 

Here’s an example:

Chart comparing anonymous publisher joining AdThrive compared to similar publisher cohort

Before joining Raptive, Creator A was earning a $17.26 RPM (Row 1) with their ad management company. 

When they were accepted to join Raptive, we identified a similar group of creators within the Raptive community to serve as the site’s Similar Creator Cohort. In this example, that group happened to have an average RPM of $20 (Row 2).

The first week that Creator A started with Raptive, their RPM growth closely matched their Similar Creator Cohort’s RPM growth. This makes sense — it takes a little bit of time for advertisers to start fully participating on a new site and our team spends the first few weeks dialing-in the custom approach that works best for each site. 

But by the second through fourth weeks, Creator A’s RPM jumped dramatically compared to their Similar Creator Cohort. This time period is where we really see RPMs grow rapidly, compared to the seasonal trend. Weeks two through four are the golden weeks when a creator sees significant growth compared to what they would have seen with their previous ad manager. 

By week five, we see the creator’s lift start to stabilize — they’ve caught up to the great performance the rest of Raptive creators are seeing — and more normal seasonal trends start taking over. 

Row 7 shows the truly incremental RPM that the creator is seeing from joining Raptive.

In conclusion

Every creator is different and will experience a unique “on-ramp” for their ad earnings. But every creator who joins Raptive truly takes home more money:

  • without adding more ads than they were running before
  • accounting for typical seasonal RPM growth
  • by the second week of running Raptive ads

Truthfully, we did this analysis for our own knowledge as much as for yours — it’s critical to operate on data-driven decisions and we want to ensure we are always doing the best thing to serve creators!