The rate is the least important number in any promotion quote. What you are being billed *for* decides whether the rate means anything at all.
Advertising on other podcasts. You buy a host-read or produced spot inside someone else's show, billed on a CPM — cost per thousand impressions. Host-read rates in the US commonly run in the tens of dollars per thousand depending on the show's size, the ad position, and how targeted the audience is. You are buying exposure to an audience that already listens to podcasts, which is the highest-intent audience there is, at the highest price.
Buying traffic to your episode. You run display, search, or social ads that send people to a page where your episode plays. Billed on a cost per click or CPM, so what you pay is decoupled from what you get — a click is not a download.
Buying verified downloads. You pay per download that meets the IAB standard and appears in your own host's analytics. The vendor absorbs the conversion risk instead of you.
A cheap CPM on a poorly targeted network is worse than an expensive one on a relevant show, because half of a bad impression is still nothing. A cheap cost per click is worse than an expensive one if those clicks never buffer any audio.
When you are billed per impression or per click, you carry the conversion risk. You pay the same whether 40% of clicks become downloads or 4%. When you are billed per verified download, the vendor carries it, and their incentive is to make the funnel work rather than to buy the cheapest possible clicks.
This is the single most useful question to ask any promotion service: *if these clicks produce no downloads, do I still pay?*
To compare a CPM offer with a per-download offer, you need one number from the CPM vendor: the share of impressions or clicks that become verified downloads. If they cannot tell you, they are not measuring downloads at all, and the two quotes are not comparable in principle.
Work it through end to end. A $2 CPM that converts at 0.1% costs $20 per download. A $30 CPM converting at 5% costs $0.60. The cheap-looking rate was thirty times more expensive.
Podbooster is $0.80 per IAB-verified download, from $100 (about 125 downloads), no contract or subscription, and campaigns typically complete in two to five days.
It is the wrong choice in two situations, and it is worth being direct about both. If your show does not yet hold listeners past the first couple of minutes, promotion buys downloads that never become an audience — fix retention first, because it is free and it multiplies everything after it. And if you have no deadline, cross-promotion with a comparable show costs nothing but a conversation and reaches people already in the podcast habit. Paid promotion earns its price when you need downloads on a schedule — a launch, a sponsor guarantee, a chart window — which is the one thing organic growth cannot do.
No reconciliation. If a vendor cannot tell you how to verify their number against your own host, you have no way to know what you bought.
Downloads that exceed clicks. A physical impossibility. Every download has to come from someone who arrived. If the report shows more downloads than clicks, the measurement is broken or invented.
Guaranteed chart placement. Charts move on new followers in a short recency window, and nobody can guarantee a position without manufacturing accounts. That is account fraud, and it puts your show at risk of removal rather than promotion.
A subscription for downloads. Downloads are a unit; you should be able to buy a specific quantity once and stop.
It depends entirely on how targeted the download is, but the useful comparison is against your own economics rather than a market average. If a listener is worth more to you than the download costs — through sponsorship rates, a product, or lifetime listening — the campaign pays for itself. Podbooster is $0.80 per verified download. Judge any quote by what it delivers into your host's analytics, not by the headline rate.
Usually not per download, but the audience quality is higher because everyone hearing the ad is already a podcast listener. Host-read spots on relevant shows convert well and build genuine affinity. The tradeoffs are that inventory on good shows is limited and often booked out, pricing is negotiated per show, and you generally cannot buy a specific number of downloads on a specific date.
Ideally nothing at first. Spend the early months on retention, cover art, titles, and cross-promotion, all of which are free and all of which raise the return on every dollar you eventually spend. Paid promotion multiplies whatever the show already does, so it is worth starting once the show reliably holds the listeners it already has.
With Podbooster you pay a fixed amount up front and it converts to a download goal at $0.80 each — $100 is about 125 downloads — and the campaign runs until that goal is delivered. There is no subscription and no ongoing commitment.
Podbooster runs targeted ads that bring real listeners to a specific episode, and counts a download only when it meets the IAB v2.1 standard — so the number matches what your host shows. $0.80 per verified download, from $100, no contract. Most campaigns finish in two to five days.
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