Editorial Standards
How We Get the Numbers, and Who Pays Us.
This site publishes 180 advertising prices that are normally quoted only on a sales call. That is only worth anything if you know where the figures come from and what our commercial interest is. Both are set out here in full.
On this page:The Source HierarchyWhat We UseHow We Make MoneyCorrections
The Principle
Publish only what someone else could check.
Advertising pricing is deliberately opaque, which is what makes it worth publishing. It is also what makes it easy to publish badly: a confident number with nothing behind it looks identical to a researched one until somebody spends money on it.
So every figure here carries its source and the month it was last verified, and the whole library is downloadable so anyone can audit it. If we cannot point at where a number came from, it does not go on the site.
180 priced line items, each carrying its source and verification date, free to download and check.
The Source Hierarchy
Six Rules, Applied Every Time.
In order of authority. A lower source never overrides a higher one.
Government filings before anything else
Broadcast rates are checked against the FCC political files, which every station in the country must publish and which show what real advertisers paid in recent weeks. Traffic counts come from the Connecticut Department of Transportation, demographics from the U.S. Census Bureau, and market definitions from Nielsen. Where a primary source exists, it outranks anything a seller tells us.
Published rate cards second
Media kits, published rate cards and platform documentation, cited by name on the page that uses them. We link to the seller's own site so anyone can check what we have written against what they publish.
Reported spending last, and labelled
Where no primary source exists, figures are built from reported advertiser spending in the same market and described as such on the page. Nothing here is a national average applied to Connecticut and presented as local.
Every price is a floor, never a quote
All pricing is written as a starting cost, because media owners set the real number and it moves with availability, season, placement and negotiation. We say this on every page carrying a price, because a figure presented as a quote would be misleading.
Dated, and re-checked
Each page shows the month its figures were last verified. Rates move, markets get redefined, and anything we change is logged publicly with the date and the reason on our updates page, corrections included.
Corrections are welcome and credited
If a number is wrong, we would rather hear it than defend it. Send the figure and a source through the contact form and we will check it against the source and update the page, logging the change publicly.
What We Use
The Actual Sources.
Named, so you can go and read them yourself.
The Commercial Part
How We Make Money, Stated Plainly.
Every guide that publishes prices has a business model. Here is ours, and the line it does not cross.
We do not sell media
We are not an advertising agency, we own no inventory, and we are not authorised to sell on behalf of any station, publication, board operator, team or platform named on this site.
How we make money
When a business asks us for options, we may share that request with advertising agencies, media owners and marketing partners who can serve it, and we may be compensated when a referral leads to business. That is set out in full in our privacy policy.
What that never changes
Compensation plays no part in which sellers appear here, what order they appear in, or what we say about them. The rates are researched from the sources above and would read identically with no commercial relationship in place.
No paid placement
Nobody can buy a listing, a ranking or a better write-up on this site. Media owners are welcome to send us current rate cards, and we will publish what we can verify, on the same terms as everyone else.
The full detail of what happens to information you submit is in our privacy policy.
Corrections
We would rather be corrected than defended.
Rates move, stations change hands, and markets get redefined. When we get something wrong, the correction is published on the updates page with the date and the reason rather than quietly absorbed. Nielsen’s merger of the Bridgeport and Stamford-Norwalk radio markets is logged there for exactly that reason.
If you sell media and we have your rates wrong, that is worth telling us: it is your revenue being misrepresented, and we will check a current rate card against what we published.
1 business day is how long a correction takes to reach a person, and every change is logged publicly.
Now Go and Check It. Everything Is Published.
The whole rate library is free to download, with sources and verification dates attached to every line.
See the Price Index