For years, digital publishers have watched a troubling trend unfold in their analytics dashboards: revenue per thousand impressions (RPM) steadily declining despite growing traffic numbers. The culprit isn’t ad fraud, banner blindness, or even the proliferation of ad blockers. Instead, publishers are witnessing the effects of one of the most profound demographic shifts in internet history—the rapid expansion of internet access in developing nations, particularly through mobile devices.
The numbers tell a compelling story. As of October 2024, there were 5.52 billion internet users worldwide [DataReportal](https://datareportal.com/global-digital-overview) , and this growth shows no signs of slowing. What’s particularly striking is where this growth is concentrated. In low-income countries, only 27 percent of the population is online, while in high-income countries, 93 percent of the population uses the Internet [ITU](https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/) . This disparity represents billions of potential new internet users waiting to come online, and they’re predominantly accessing the web through mobile devices from regions with lower purchasing power.
The Mobile-First Revolution in Developing Markets
The explosion of mobile internet access in Africa and Asia illustrates this transformation perfectly. As of early January 2024, around 74 percent of the web traffic in Africa was via mobile phones, over 14 percentage points higher than the world average [Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124283/internet-penetration-in-africa-by-country/) . In Nigeria, one of Africa’s largest internet markets, mobile devices account for an overwhelming majority of web traffic because mobile connections require far less infrastructure investment than traditional desktop setups.
Africa’s internet user count is projected to reach 1.1 billion by 2029, representing a collective addition of 337.3 million users [Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/505883/number-of-internet-users-in-african-countries/). To put this in perspective, that’s equivalent to adding the entire population of the United States to the internet over just five years. Sub-Saharan Africa alone added approximately 30 million mobile internet users in 2022, and this growth has continued unabated.The pattern repeats across Asia. India has seen massive increases in reported internet usage, driving significant global growth numbers. These users are coming online with fundamentally different economic profiles than their Western counterparts, and advertisers know it.
The Economics Behind Falling RPMs
This is where the mathematics become unavoidable for publishers. Advertising rates vary dramatically by geography, and the data reveals a stark divide between developed and developing markets. Developing countries like India, Chile, and Mexico exhibit CPM rates ranging from $2.7 to $5.54, while the United States shows CPM rates of $20.48 [Enhencer](https://enhencer.com/blog/cpm-of-facebook-ads-2024) . In other words, advertisers pay nearly eight times more to reach an American user than an Indian user.These disparities exist across all major advertising platforms and formats. Developed countries like the US, Japan, and Australia have much higher eCPM rates than emerging markets like Brazil, India, and the Philippines, and the reason for this is strictly economic—users from more prosperous countries have a higher purchasing power, so advertisers find them more valuable [MAF](https://maf.ad/en/blog/mobile-ads-ecpm/) .
For publishers, this creates a mathematical squeeze. When your traffic was predominantly from North America and Europe, each thousand impressions might have generated twenty dollars or more in revenue. But as your audience composition shifts to include more users from India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and other developing nations, those same thousand impressions now include a growing percentage of views worth only two to five dollars to advertisers. Your overall RPM inevitably trends downward, even if your total traffic increases.
The Demographic Math That Determines Your Revenue
The challenge isn’t just about lower rates in developing countries. It’s about the sheer volume of new users coming from these regions relative to mature markets. While the annual growth rate in low-income economies averages 8.5 percent in 2024, this contrasts with high-income countries where 93 percent of the population already uses the Internet [ITU](https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/) . When you’re already at 93 percent penetration, there simply aren’t many new users left to add. The growth potential in wealthy countries is essentially exhausted.
Meanwhile, vast swaths of humanity are only now gaining internet access. 2.6 billion people, one-third of the global population, are still offline [ITU](https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/) . As these billions come online over the next decade, they’ll overwhelmingly be from lower-income countries where advertisers pay less per impression.
Consider Africa specifically. As of December 2022, just over a billion people in Africa or 72% of the region’s population were not connected [TechAfrica News](https://techafricanews.com/2024/10/31/africas-mobile-connectivity-has-the-internet-access-gap-narrowed-in-2024/) . That represents more than a quarter of all unconnected people globally. When these users do come online, they’ll be accessing the web primarily through affordable mobile devices, with limited data plans, from countries where the average CPM might be one-tenth that of the United States.## Why This Trend Is Structural, Not TemporaryPublishers hoping for a rebound in RPMs need to understand that this isn’t a cyclical downturn that will correct itself. The forces driving RPM decline are structural and demographic. The internet’s center of gravity is shifting permanently from wealthy Western nations to the developing world.
The infrastructure enabling this shift is already in place and expanding rapidly. In 2022, more than half of global 4G network expansion—101 million people—was in Sub-Saharan Africa, with 65% of the region’s population now having 4G coverage [GSMA](https://www.gsma.com/solutions-and-impact/connectivity-for-good/mobile-for-development/blog/despite-improvements-sub-saharan-africa-has-the-widest-usage-and-coverage-gaps-worldwide/) . Submarine fiber optic cables have connected Africa to the global internet backbone, dramatically reducing connectivity costs. Smartphone prices continue to fall, making devices accessible to increasingly lower-income populations.
Moreover, these new internet users represent younger demographics with different consumption patterns. They’re accessing content on smaller screens, often with limited data allowances, in markets where local purchasing power dictates lower advertising values. An impression served to a user in Lagos checking Facebook on a budget Android phone during a brief WiFi connection simply cannot command the same advertiser price as an impression served to a user in San Francisco browsing on a MacBook Pro.
The Five to Ten Year Outlook
Looking forward, every indicator suggests this trend will not only continue but potentially accelerate. Universal connectivity remains a distant prospect in the least developed countries and landlocked developing countries, where only 35 and 39 percent of the population are online, respectively [ITU](https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2024/11/10/ff24-internet-use/) . Closing these gaps means hundreds of millions of additional low-CPM users entering the global internet ecosystem.
The mobile-first nature of this expansion compounds the effect for publishers. Mobile advertising generally commands lower rates than desktop advertising, and mobile users from developing countries represent the lowest-value segment in the entire advertising ecosystem. As this segment grows from perhaps 20 percent of global internet users to 40 or 50 percent over the next decade, the mathematical impact on RPMs will be substantial.
Publishers relying on advertising revenue need to confront this reality head-on. The golden age of double-digit RPMs was, in many ways, an artifact of the internet’s early demographic composition—concentrated in wealthy countries with high purchasing power. As the internet becomes truly global, it necessarily becomes less lucrative on a per-impression basis for content creators.
This doesn’t mean digital publishing is doomed, but it does mean the business model must evolve. Publishers might need to dramatically increase traffic volumes to maintain revenue, shift to alternative monetization methods like subscriptions or memberships, focus content on high-value geographic markets, or fundamentally reconceive their approach to audience building.
The democratization of internet access is unquestionably positive for humanity. Billions of people gaining access to information, communication, and economic opportunity represents genuine progress. But for publishers, this same democratization means adapting to a new economic reality where the average internet user—and therefore the average ad impression—is worth substantially less than it was when the web was primarily a Western phenomenon. That adjustment will define digital publishing for years to come.