What crypto ads actually cost in 2026

Here is the exercise. You are a crypto project with a landing page and a modest budget, and you want to know what advertising costs before you talk to anyone. So you open the six best-known crypto ad networks and look for a number.

I did that on 29 July 2026 and wrote down only what the public pages actually say. The result is the table below, and the striking thing about it is how empty it is.

What is on the public record

Five of the six do not publish a price. That is not an accusation of bad faith - pricing behind a conversation is a normal enterprise sales motion, and for a buyer spending six figures a quarter it is barely an inconvenience. For everyone else it is a wall, and the wall is the point of this post.

The two ends of the range that are visible

A-ADS puts an entry budget on the page - $100 - and a case study quotes a CPM starting at $0.02. Two cents per thousand impressions is not a discount on quality inventory; it is a different product. At that price the sensible assumption is that a large share of those impressions are worth nothing, and your job as a buyer is to find out how large before you scale.

Blockchain-Ads is at the other end and says so in plain words: advertisers typically spend around $100K per month, scaling toward $1M as they grow, and it is not built for small budgets. I have criticised a lot of things in this category. Telling people directly that a product is not for them is not one of them - that sentence saves more wasted calls than most pricing pages.

Between two cents and a hundred thousand dollars a month, the public record is blank.

How to budget without a price list

Work backwards from a click, not forwards from a CPM. A CPM only becomes meaningful once you know the click-through rate, and in display advertising that number is small and stubborn. At a 0.10% CTR - a reasonable planning assumption for display, and one you should replace with your own data the moment you have any - a thousand impressions buys one click.

So a $3.00 CPM is a $3.00 click, and a $0.02 CPM is a two-cent click if the traffic is real. The entire question is contained in those last five words. Cheap inventory is not a bargain and expensive inventory is not a guarantee; both are claims about traffic quality that you have to test yourself.

Which gives you a budgeting method that works regardless of what any network publishes:

1. Decide what a converted user is worth to you. Not a click - a signup, a deposit, a wallet connection.
2. Assume a 0.10% CTR and a 2% landing-page conversion until you have your own numbers. That is one converted user per 50,000 impressions.
3. Multiply out. At a $3.00 CPM, 50,000 impressions cost $150. If a converted user is worth less than $150 to you, the CPM has to come down or the conversion rate has to go up - and only one of those is under your control.
4. Buy the smallest amount that produces a readable result, then check it in your own analytics rather than the vendor dashboard.

The number that matters more than the CPM

Every impression figure you are quoted comes from somebody's counter. Publishers count page loads, ad systems count rendered and viewable impressions, and the two disagree by 10-20% as a matter of routine. Nobody in this category volunteers that up front, which means the first time a buyer compares a dashboard against their own analytics it looks like fraud rather than arithmetic.

It usually is not fraud. But you cannot tell the difference without measuring it yourself, and that is a mechanical process rather than a matter of trust. It is the subject of the next Playbook post.

Disclosure

PraxAds is one of the networks in that table, and we publish our rate card because it is the thing we are competing on. Read this post as a buyer's guide from an interested party, check the sources yourself, and treat the last row with the same suspicion as the others.