In advance of next week’s San Francisco Ad:Tech show, PubMatic put out its AdPriceIndex which indicates that average CPMs for approximately 3,000 publishers that it helps with optimization. It naturally shows an upward trend from January to March, from $0.42 to $0.49 or about 15%.

Naturally there is a significant selection bias here in that companies that are happier with their revenue performance and monetization are probably less likely to work with a provider like PubMatic - also, we believe that since many of the revenue figures are self-reported and not directly auditable/trackable to the source, there are likely to be some data quality issues. Note also that the data is not purely for display advertising but also spans text ads, where an improvement from PubMatic’s technology approach to trying different combinations of colors seems more likely.

Our estimates for 2007 indicate the average CPM for 2007 was $1.15 and our analysis suggests an expected 11% rise to $1.29 in 2008,  which more closely tracks the “small sites” segment in the PubMatic data.