The small-budget ad price index
Almost every advertising price you can find is a rate card or a seller's average. This is the other thing: what somebody actually paid, for a placement that actually ran, next to what it delivered — updated as the board settles, and published whether or not the numbers flatter us.
Week of 2026-09-07 · 6 settled bids
$0
median price of a twelve-hour slot
On this board
Real money only. A seeded placement is the house filling its own board and has no price, so it is not counted; neither is the part of a bid paid with house credit.
| Week | Bids | Brands | Paid | Median | Visitors sent | Per visitor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-09-07 | 6 | 6 | $0 | $0 | 8 | — |
| 2026-08-31 | 3 | 3 | $0 | — | 2 | — |
| 2026-08-24 | 1 | 1 | $0 | — | 1 | — |
| 2026-08-17 | 4 | 4 | $1 | — | 1 | — |
| 2026-08-10 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-08-03 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-07-27 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-07-20 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-07-13 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-07-06 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-06-29 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-06-22 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
Everywhere else
Published benchmarks, normalised to a cost per click where the channel's own pricing model allows it. Where it does not, the cell says why rather than carrying a number somebody invented.
Google Ads (search)
$5.42 / click
Source: WordStream / LocaliQ search advertising benchmarks (2026)
Meta (Facebook / Instagram)
$1.11 / click
derived from 10 per thousand at a 0.90% click-through rate
Source: WordStream / LocaliQ Facebook advertising benchmarks (2026)
Display / programmatic
$16 / click
derived from 8 per thousand at a 0.05% click-through rate
Source: Nielsen Norman Group on banner blindness (2007, re-confirmed since)
Newsletter sponsorship
no per-click figure
priced per placement, so a per-click figure depends on an audience size the seller does not publish
Source: Paved newsletter advertising marketplace (2026)
A twelve-hour slot on this board
no per-click figure
priced per placement, so a per-click figure depends on an audience size the seller does not publish
Source: The board's own published rules (live)
How to read this
The median, not the average. One brand paying far above the rest moves an average and does not move a median, and on a board this size that happens most weeks.
Per visitor, not per impression. A visitor here is a click-through to the brand's own site, counted once, with synthetic traffic excluded at source. It is the only figure on this page that describes something delivered rather than something bought.
A dash is not a zero. It means the week did not have enough of something to say a number honestly. Hover it and it tells you which.
The board is small and young, and these figures say so. That is the point of publishing them — see why ad platforms hide performance data for the argument, and the calculator to run these rates against your own numbers.
Generated 2026-09-09 10:08 UTC