Flat fee
Also called Sponsorship, Flat rate, Fixed placement.
One price for one placement — a newsletter send, a sponsored post, a podcast read — regardless of how it performs.
Most creator and publisher advertising is sold this way, and for good reason: the publisher can price the work and the audience they know they have, and the buyer knows the cost before anything runs. It is the only model where neither side is exposed to the other's conversion rate.
The risk moves to placement quality instead. A flat fee buys a slot, not an outcome, so the questions worth asking are about the slot: where on the page, how long it stays, whether it is the only ad in the issue, and what happens if the send is delayed.
Flat pricing is also the only model where you can compare two publishers directly without modelling anything. Divide the fee by the audience the publisher can prove and you have a working CPM to compare against everything else.
How LinkBourse handles it
A flat placement still gets checked. Our prover confirms the ad actually appeared at the agreed URL, and a placement pulled before the agreed retention period is clawed back from the seller balance.
What a budget buys at flat ratesTerms it depends on
- CPM
- The price of one thousand ad impressions — the standard unit for buying reach rather than outcomes.
- Rate card
- A publisher's published prices by format — the starting point of a negotiation, not the end of one.
- Retention period
- How long the publisher commits to keep a placement live after the paid window ends.
- Make-good
- Replacement inventory a publisher gives when a campaign underdelivers against what was promised.