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 2026-09-14 · 26 settled bids
$0
median price of a twelve-hour slot
Not a missing number: every slot that settled this week went for nothing. The first brand into an empty slot pays nothing, and nobody paid the $1.00 it takes to displace one.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-19 | 1 | 1 | $0 | — | 2 | — |
| 2026-10-12 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 0 | — |
| 2026-10-05 | 1 | 1 | $0 | — | 1 | — |
| 2026-09-28 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 3 | — |
| 2026-09-21 | 2 | 2 | $0 | — | 5 | — |
| 2026-09-14 | 26 | 14 | $0 | $0 | 24 | — |
| 2026-09-07 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 11 | — |
| 2026-08-31 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 2 | — |
| 2026-08-24 | 0 | 0 | $0 | — | 1 | — |
| 2026-08-17 | 4 | 4 | $1 | — | 1 | — |
2 earlier weeks had no bids, no visitors and no slots taken, and are not shown. The board did not exist yet; a row of zeroes for it would not be history.
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
only $1.00 has settled across 12 weeks, against 50 visitors — and almost every placement so far was free, so dividing one by the other would quote a price nobody paid. Both figures are in the table above
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. It is the only figure on this page that describes something delivered rather than something bought. Visits from traffic the board paid for are included and are flagged in the data, so they can be separated later. Saying otherwise would be the exact dishonesty this page exists to argue against.
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 2026-10-22 00:31 UTC