What is the average CPM for ads on a travel site like TripAdvisor?
As a premium travel site their first preference will be to sell their most desirable inventory to clients who are looking for specific targeting in associated travel content. I would guess that the top of their rate card would be around a $35 Net CPM for standard large format ad units, such as Big Box (300×250) or Leaderboard (728×90). Then they would have a secondary strategy to sell a less targeted product that would be run-of-site that they would sell between $15 and $20. The inventory that is left would be spliced up between a number of ad networks who would use that inventory for low CPM buys or CPA programs. Odds are that Tripadvisor would sell that inventory to the networks at $.5 to $1 and the networks would mark up from there.
