lol

Meaning what?

CPM is meaningless without context. I prefer a low-$ CPM on a site with millions of visitors over an obscure site with a double digit CPM.

If I had to guess, the distribution of average RPM earned by websites is log-normally distributed. With a mode of $2 and a median and mean slightly above. A log-normal distribution is skewed bell curve that starts at zero, reaches its peak at the mode and then tapers off quickly until almost zero and the continues on to infinity. So basically what this means is that most people make around 2$, less but still many make either a little more or a little less, and few make much more $5 - 10, and then really small and select few earn even more. This applies to all AdSense websites regardless of niche.

I would further guess that this pattern repeats itself within specific niches, but where each niche as its on median and standard deviation. Meaning the niche on average earns say 10$ some earn 8$ other $12, but few earn much more than that.

Here is more info on log-normal, simply look at the image.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-normal_distribution#Mode,_median,_quantiles

Thanks, Nick. Your points are well taken. I have worked with quite a few sites, and I also found that the niche is a major factor in the cpms. For example, travel, finance, health and others do better than news, weather, sports, etc.

I went to a conference at Google a few years ago and people in the know said the average RPM was $2, which actually surprised me.

Page-RPM or ad-RPM? On many sites there is a significant difference.

But I wondered if you veterans on here would agree that the majority of sites are getting less than a $10 page cpm based on your own sites

On average, yes. The ones with an RPM over $10 unfortunately don't serve as many impressions as the others.

Which is probably also the reason the RPM is higher there.

@Lammert good point. I'm referring to page RPM in my post.

I've always laughed to those average cpm -comparisons. I've got 8 figure page views and ad impressions monthly and I do under $1 impression RPM.

I think visitors' location is a huge factor. If 99% of your visitors are from US cpm would be very high