Units and metrics
CPM
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
Why does cpm matter to a buyer?
Panels and ad platforms both quote per thousand, which invites a comparison that is instructive precisely because it fails. Real Instagram advertising runs roughly $6–$10 CPM; panel impressions clear around $0.20 per thousand (PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06). The difference is not efficiency. An advertising impression was won in an auction against other advertisers bidding for a person’s attention; a panel impression was rendered by something that will not buy anything.
The same arithmetic is worth doing per follower and per install before any purchase. A $1.90 median per thousand Instagram followers is $0.0019 each; app installs, the one app-store row found across roughly 47,600 sampled service rows, sit at $130 per thousand or $0.13 each (PanelCompare domain research, 2026-09-06). The price a market charges per unit is the clearest available statement of how hard that unit is to fake.
How does cpm show up in a price list?
No panel prints a CPM. You compute it: the per-1,000 rate is already a CPM in everything but name, once you have confirmed the row is priced per 1,000 of the thing it says rather than per 1,000 order quantity.
The comparison is only honest after unit normalisation. Watch hours, live-viewer slots, packages and reviews all break the per-1,000 assumption, and running a CPM comparison across them without normalising produces numbers that are confidently wrong.
Think this definition is wrong?
Terminology in this market is set by the panels that use it, and it moves. If a panel uses cpm to mean something other than what is written here, send us the listing and we will either correct the definition or record the variant. The process is on the about page.