You are probably going to struggle to get much more than that. You should probably try selling ads directly yourself or consider cpa/cpc etc
However, in response to your actual question $32 cpm rate is the best I have ever seen. The glory days of the dotcom bubble when only people who were trained had a website and it wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Do you have some examples of leading networks/rates for pop ads?
I wouldn’t mind giving something like that a shot on one of my sites and see if it does better, or even in addition to another CPM ad on the actual site.
So when you say “selling yourself” do you mean reaching out to private companies and working out CPM agreements with them, or do you literally mean selling their products?
I’ve tried the latter and had very limited success with it.
I mean working out a CPM with companies directly. However, if you are going to do that, I would go ahead and use isocket. Your site gets listed on buyads.com, and they don’t take a cut from the ads that you sell (you just pay a small monthly fee). I haven’t actually used isocket to sell ads, but I’ve bought ads through them and the process is quite nice.