Publishers may have seen a holiday traffic surge, but it wasn’t the whole story. Here’s why CPM isn’t the best metric anymore, and why LTV and RPS could offer a better path into 2026.
The reports are in. It’s been a stellar year for retailers. Kudos.
Black Friday sales jumped 9% over last year to $11.8 billion. And, Cyber Monday ratcheted up 7% year over year to $14 billion. The bulk of those conversions were driven by mobile, AI-powered discovery, and programmatic still played a central role.
But for publishers staring at their dashboards, the story hasn’t been as straightforward. You may have noticed your traffic coming in waves. Yours was a story of fragmentation.
Search is becoming a nearly extinct pathway, social algorithms are changing daily, and AI overviews are answering questions without sending audiences your way. Guess what? In this environment, CPMs won’t always be the most reliable metric.
They can look successful on the impressions you do serve, but they won’t tell you what you make when someone lands on your pages. It won’t tell you how they got there, whether they’ll come back, or what they’re worth over time. This holiday season proved those parts of the business are now in flux.
It’s time to start thinking differently. CPMs alone aren’t enough. It’s time to start thinking about Lifetime Value (LTV).
What LTV Offers the CPM Doesn’t
“The number one problem I see is that publishers still optimize for impressions instead of relationships. And the scale game doesn’t work the way it used to,” said Stephanie Layser, Sub-Industry Leader, Publishers and Advertising at Amazon Web Services.
That was the message she delivered at Sell Side Summit Nashville. Maintaining attention and building affinity has become incredibly difficult for publishers as consumer behavior fractures across phones, streaming, gaming, and AI assistants, she said.
CPM can no longer anchor your strategy.
LTV isn’t new, but today it maps more cleanly to publishers’ reality than CPM does. LTV measures how much revenue a user generates over time across ad impressions, commerce, newsletters, subscriptions, events, and community.
It reframes the core question, “What did this pageview earn today?” to “What is this user worth over months or years, and how do we increase that value?”
Layser frames audience movement along a ladder.
- Attention — someone finds you through search, social, or AI.
- Engagement — they stay for more than one story.
- Seeking — they come back intentionally, via direct visits or newsletters.
- Loyalty — they subscribe, participate, or purchase.
You can monetize attention, but you can build your business on loyalty.
If this holiday season’s volatility made anything clear, it’s that publishers who rely only on moment-based monetization will find themselves floundering.
Publishers who measure and nurture user-level value (logged-in or known users) can weather fragmentation more effectively.
Optimizing for Relationships Vs. Impressions
Layser’s challenge to publishers is both operational and strategic.
Most publishers still manage ad tech, martech, and product data separately, making it nearly impossible to measure true revenue per user. If a publisher can’t stitch together the user journey, they can’t quantify LTV.
Then there’s the problem of most publishers’ monetization strategies — like trafficking, pacing, deal setup, sales support, and reporting — being tied to manual workflows.
Automating those processes can free up ops teams to shift from execution to strategy. That’s when they can start focusing on improving user value rather than maintaining systems.
If publishers want better outcomes in fragmented traffic conditions like this current holiday season, they need metrics and workflows that optimize for relationships, not just impressions.
RPS: The God Metric for Today’s Consumer Behaviors
So what does that look like in practice?
Well, before you even get to LTV, you need to understand the value of each visit. That’s where Revenue Per Session (RPS) comes in. RPS measures user behavior today and is the bridge between moment-based CPM and long-term LTV.
I can’t stop thinking about what Stephanie Mazzamaro, Head of Programmatic, Addressability & Ops at The Arena Group, said at Sell Side Summit Austin.
“If it doesn’t move revenue per session, it doesn’t stick. You can lift CPM on one page, but that doesn’t tell you anything about whether a user is becoming more valuable over time,” she said.
After walking through six consecutive quarters of negative revenue, The Arena Group took steps to turn their business around. That included exiting unprofitable lines, reducing SSP partners, migrating CMS platforms, eliminating legacy code, and implementing a more flexible content cost model.
Then they built an intelligence layer (Encore) that used their first-party data and applied different audience buckets to it.
From there, they could monetize more intelligently. That meant testing content recommendations to increase pages per session for new and fly-by users, lightening ad loads, adding community features, and adding login prompts for loyal and superfans.
The turning point was adopting RPS. Instead of maximizing CPM on individual pages, they maximize the value of every visit.
That one decision changed the questions her team asked every day. Instead of “How do we squeeze a little more CPM out of this inventory?” they now ask, “Did this layout, partner, or experience make each session more valuable, and did it move more users toward becoming known, repeat visitors?”
RPS became the filter for tech partnerships, UX tests, and AI tools.
How Can Publishers Make the Shift Now
RPS is where the shift to LTV becomes real. When you understand the value of each visit, you can finally understand — and grow — the value of each user over time.
Most publishers won’t rebuild their stack exactly like The Arena Group did, but they can borrow the same logic. Center RPS, make audience movement visible, and let that guide where to invest and what to cut.
Here are some steps publishers can take immediately for Q4 and heading into 2026.
- Add new metrics to your daily view
Keep CPM, but add:
- Revenue per session (RPS)
- Revenue per new user
- Known vs. unknown user mix
These tell you whether holiday traffic created durable value.
- Reduce segmentation complexity
Start with four buckets:
- New
- Casual
- Loyal
- Superfans
Define exactly what you want this holiday wave to accomplish for each group.
- Design for movement up the ladder
Help users move from attention → engagement → loyalty with:
- Clear recirculation
- Smarter recommendations
- Well-timed newsletter or SSO prompts
- Community or commerce pathways for higher-value users
- Use automation to free up strategic time
Identify one recurring manual workflow — trafficking, PMP setup, reporting — that prevents strategic thinking and apply automation or AI to reclaim hours.
- Raise the bar for partners and tests
Borrow The Arena Group’s approach. If something doesn’t improve RPS or deepen the relationship with a defined user segment, it doesn’t stay on the site.
Happy Holidays, Monsters!
Holiday seasons used to be CPM stories. Traffic spiked, revenue spiked, and publishers moved on. In 2025, those spikes don’t predict stability.
LTV offers a more complete, more resilient way to measure publisher value. So, the real question this year isn’t whether Black Friday was successful. It’s whether publishers used this moment to start building relationships that will carry them into 2026.