Late night brings home the bacon

According to this Reuters article, The Late Show with Jay Leno brings in about $13 million per week in advertising revenues. That’s $52 million per month, or well over half a billion per year, which just seems like an amazing amount of money for a nightly show to make. It made me wonder what their CPM is. Here’s my math: The show is an hour long, with 15 minutes worth of ads. That’s 30 30-second ads. $13 million a week means $2.6 million a night. Divide that by 30 ads and you get about $86,666 per ad. The Hollywood Reporter reports that The Tonight Show averages about 5.2 million viewers. If we count each ad viewed by a person as a “page view”, their ad rate works out to just over $16 CPM ($86,666 / 5200). That also means they serve a total of 156 million pageviews each night, or 3.12 billion each month. What I find amazing is that the New York Times website can command over $20 CPM and they don’t have full screen video advertisements. How can they ask for so much? Is it just that the NYT has a more affluent audience?