Methodology

How a number earns its way onto the comparison — and what happens to the ones that can't.

Last reviewed 30 July 2026

Four tiers of evidence

Not every figure in this category deserves equal weight, so nothing here pretends otherwise. Each one is placed in a tier before it is written down, and the tier travels with it into the copy — which is why the entry-price table reads the way it does, marking its own sourcing line by line.

1. Published by the vendor. A price on the platform's own documentation or payments page. Strongest available, because the company can be held to it.
2. Agreed across independent directories. No vendor page exists, but several unaffiliated listings state the same thing. Usable, with the absence noted in the text.
3. Told to us by a support desk. Dated, attributed to support, and never promoted to fact. A support agent can be wrong or can be superseded next quarter.
4. Market benchmark. Rate ranges nobody publishes contractually. Treated as an order of magnitude, never as a quotation you should expect.

Anything that will not sit in one of those four tiers does not go on the page. The same refusal to guess governs what the site collects about readers, which the privacy policy itemises rather than summarises.

Contractual versus promotional

Two species of number turn up in vendor material and they behave nothing alike.

A minimum deposit, a payout threshold, a settlement period — these are contractual. They appear on invoices, a customer can hold the company to them, and a platform cannot quietly restate one without somebody noticing. Impression counts, bid-request volumes, geo tallies and certification badges are promotional. No third party audits them, they exist to be impressive, and they are reproduced here only when the surrounding arithmetic hangs together.

Where a promotional figure is quoted, the copy attributes it to the party making the claim and says it is unaudited. That is not scepticism for its own sake. A buyer sizing a first deposit needs to know which of the two kinds of number they are budgeting against — and why the terms of use warn that any of them can move without warning.

What gets thrown out

The most common failure in this niche is a figure that has been copied between articles for years without anybody opening the original. Removing those is a large part of why this site exists at all, as the remit explains. Three tests take out most of them.

A number with no date attached is unusable, because a rate from four years ago and a rate from last month look identical in plain text. A number that traces only to another article is unusable, because that article almost certainly took it from a third. And a number that is arithmetically impossible — a conversion rate above one hundred per cent, a fill rate that would exceed the stated supply — is discarded outright rather than reproduced with a caveat.

Arithmetic is labelled arithmetic

Some of the most useful lines on the comparison are calculated rather than reported: how many impressions a given deposit buys at a given rate, how many clicks that implies at an assumed rate. Those calculations are shown with their inputs so anybody can substitute their own, and they are marked illustrative every time they appear. They exist to demonstrate the shape of a budget, not to forecast what your campaign will do.

When a page changes

Revision is triggered by the source, not the calendar. A platform moving its floor, a format being retired, a payments page being rewritten — each of those changes the page that day, and the review date at the top moves with it. There is no monthly refresh in which numbers are lightly reshuffled to look maintained.

Corrections from readers are treated exactly like corrections from vendors: checked against the tier system above, then applied or explained. The route for both is on the contact page. Who applies these rules, and the limits he works inside, is set out under the byline; the commercial arrangement that funds the work — and that reaches none of the procedures described here — gets its own page under advertising disclosure.