CPM is the page rate divided by circulation in thousands. It is the only honest way to compare a magazine page with anything else, and the denominator is where sellers cheat: always divide by the audited circulation on the AAM statement, not the total-audience multiple in the kit.
Enter the rate on the card and the circulation on the AAM statement. Pull your digital CPM from your own ad account; your account beats any benchmark blog.
The published cells the tool compares against: Reader's Digest full page at $44,331 over a 1,400,000 rate base is $31.67 CPM; the half page runs $19.79; RD Large Print's half page at $11,700 over 175,000 copies is a steep $66.86.[1] For scale outside magazines, USPS publishes EDDM Retail at $0.26 per piece, which is $260 per thousand households delivered.[2]
Kits quote total audience: circulation times a readers-per-copy multiplier from MRI-Simmons.[4] The multiplier is real research but it flatters the CPM by design. The desk's rule: negotiate on audited circulation[3], treat pass-along readers as upside. If a seller will only talk total audience, ask what the multiplier is and who measured it. The pause tells you plenty.
A page priced at $44,331 on its 1,400,000 rate base: $31.67 CPM.[1] The same page pitched on a hypothetical 3x readers-per-copy audience of 4,200,000: $10.56 CPM. Nothing about the buy changed except the story. Decide your denominator before the call, not during it.
Compare channels with sourced numbers on the spread pages: print vs digital, print vs podcasts. Working CAC math sits with our sister desk averagecac.com; CPM fundamentals live at whatiscpm.com.