About
An open benchmark, kept honest.
International Media Buying is an independent publication of what advertising costs, anywhere in the world. It exists to be a neutral, sourced reference — CPM and CPC ranges, media-landscape guides, and quarterly reports across 20 tier-1 markets — built to be checked, cited, and trusted rather than taken on faith.
Why this exists
Ask what a CPM costs in Brazil, or what a 30-second TV spot runs in Indonesia, and the honest answer is scattered across paywalled reports, platform-specific dashboards, and blog posts that were accurate the day they were written and stale ever since. Media buyers end up guessing, or paying for benchmarks that can't be checked against a named source.
The mission here is narrow and deliberately unglamorous: one open, sourced, dated benchmark for what advertising costs worldwide — free to read, free to cite, and refreshed on a public schedule instead of published once and left to rot. If a figure can't meet that bar, we don't publish it.
How we stay neutral
Neutrality is the product, not a disclaimer bolted onto one. It's enforced by a small set of policies we hold ourselves to on every page:
- Every number is sourced and dated Each benchmark row carries a source type, a link where one exists, and the date it was last verified. No figure ships without them.
- Editorial pages carry no hard sell Benchmark, guide, and report pages exist to answer a data question, not to pitch an agency. Any invitation to talk to a media buyer is soft, optional, and confined to a footer or a report's end.
- The dataset is free to cite There's no paywall between a journalist, planner, or fellow researcher and the number they need. Attribution and a link back are all we ask.
- Corrections are public When a figure is wrong, we fix it, update its verification date, and note the change in the quarterly changelog — the errors are visible, not quietly edited away.
The full detail — source hierarchy, what low/mid/high mean, the update cadence — is on the methodology page.
Independence & funding
This publication is editorially independent. The benchmark, cost, and guide pages carry no advertising and sell nothing — their only job is to be accurate and citable. The dataset is built from anonymised, aggregated campaign data contributed by working media buyers and agencies, alongside platform-published figures and attributed third-party studies; exactly how each figure is sourced and verified is documented on our methodology page.
The site is supported by partners in the media-buying industry. That support never buys a place in the data: what keeps the numbers neutral is the policy above — named sources, dated verification, no hard sell on editorial pages, and a public correction record. Where a buyer's guide recommends a specific agency, we disclose any relationship on that page, so you can weigh the recommendation for what it is. If any of this ever slips, tell us at the address below.
Contact
Corrections, source suggestions, and data questions are welcome — we review every credible report and would rather be corrected than be wrong.
Get in touch
Corrections, source suggestions, and data questions:
data@internationalmediabuying.com
For the sourcing rules and update cadence behind every figure, see our methodology.