Every video platform that pays creators advertises a CPM — "₹140 per 1,000 views," or some number like it. It's the single easiest figure to compare platforms on, which is exactly why it's the number most worth questioning before you trust it.
What CPM actually is
CPM stands for "cost per mille" — cost per thousand. It's what an advertiser pays for a thousand ad impressions. When a platform tells you its CPM, it's telling you what it earns from advertisers for every thousand views — not, yet, what it pays you.
Two numbers stand between those:
Fill rate. Not every view gets served an ad. If an ad network only has a buyer for 70% of your traffic, the other 30% earns nothing — but the advertised CPM was probably calculated on the views that did fill, not all of them.
Your share. Whatever the platform collects from the ad, you get a fraction of it. If that fraction isn't published, there's no way to check whether a lower effective payout is coming from a weak fill rate, a low real CPM, a quiet cut of your share, or some mix of the three.
A platform can advertise an eye-catching headline CPM and still pay a modest effective rate, without lying about any single number — the gap lives in what isn't shown.
Why the gap is so easy to create
None of this requires anyone to cheat outright. A platform just needs to:
- Advertise the CPM calculated on filled impressions, not total views
- Leave the revenue split unpublished, or vague
- Decide quietly which views don't count, with no record for you to check
Each one is a normal business decision in isolation. Stacked together, they're the entire reason two platforms with similar advertised rates can leave admins with very different real money — and why "what's your CPM?" is the wrong first question to ask.
The better questions
A number alone can't be verified. A process can. Before comparing platforms on CPM, ask:
- Is the revenue split published? Not quoted in a chat — written down, the same for every creator. On Drisvani, it's 80% for the first 100 creators and 70% standard, and it's never raised once you've joined.
- Can you see which views were credited and which weren't, with a reason? If a platform can't show you the gap between "views" and "paid views," there's no way to know whether its CPM is real or just the number that survived the fewest subtractions.
- Is there a record you can export, or only a running total? A total can say anything. A per-view log — timestamp, status, reason — is checkable.
We wrote about how that counting actually works in what counts as a view — the same rules a CPM number should be judged against.
Where to look instead of a CPM
If you're weighing a move between platforms, the honest comparison isn't "whose CPM is higher" — it's "whose published terms hold up." Our comparison pages set out exactly what each platform states on its own public pages, sourced and dated, next to what Drisvani commits to. No CPM claims on either side, because the only number worth trusting is the one you can check against a record afterward.