CPV, CPM or flat fee: how to buy in-stream advertising

There are three common ways to pay for advertising in streams. In each one, the risk sits on a different side of the deal. The model you choose decides what you know before the campaign starts, what you can prove afterward and who pays when the audience doesn't show up.

Flat fee: paying the creator for an integration

The classic deal: a brand agrees a fixed sum with a streamer for a mention or a segment. The price is known upfront; the number of viewers who will see the ad is not. Every creator is a separate negotiation with its own price, script and report. With dozens of streamers, that is weeks of work for a whole team.

With the right creator this is a strong way to tell a story, because the streamer presents the product in their own words. The weak points are scale and proof: the report is usually a screenshot and figures supplied by the creator, and nobody guarantees how many people were watching at the moment of the mention.

CPM: paying for impressions

Platform ads are usually bought per thousand impressions at auction. This scales well, but the ad runs before the stream or next to it, interrupts viewing, and many viewers tune out or block it.

Twitch ads are bought through Amazon Ads or through a Twitch account executive. According to Amazon Ads' own guide, video ads in live streams can't be skipped, and some high-impact packages require a minimum spend. It is a strong format, but an impression is not a view: it tells you the ad was served, not that someone was watching.

CPV: paying for verified views

With pay-per-view pricing, you pay a fixed price for each view of an ad inside the stream, the same for every streamer in the campaign. The key word is “verified”: a view counts only if the creative was actually on screen and fully visible.

• The rate is fixed in the media plan and is the same for every streamer in the format.
• View volume is guaranteed: the delivery risk is on the platform's side.
• Every view comes with a screenshot, and suspicious traffic never reaches the invoice.

What counts as a verified view

A view is verified when the creative was shown correctly, was fully visible to the viewer and met the campaign requirements. Only those views count toward delivery and appear on the invoice. That is why APIQ works on CPV and not CPM: you pay only for views where the creative was shown in full.

How a view is checked

• Screenshots and computer vision. During the campaign the system takes screenshots of the stream and analyzes the placement: whether the creative is there, where it sits and whether the clickable elements work.
• Audience count. The number of viewers is recorded at the moment of display.
• Chat link. On Twitch and Kick, the system also checks whether the link in chat has been posted and pinned.
• Anti-fraud. The audience is assessed on 15 parameters: chat activity, audience dynamics and stability, sudden spikes in viewers, user behavior, clicks and conversions. Suspicious traffic is excluded from the report and the invoice. The full list of parameters is available on request.

Where the rate comes from

The CPV rate depends on the format: a banner costs less than full-screen video. Within one format the rate is the same for every streamer in the campaign, and the exact figure is shown in the media plan for your brief. The plan arrives within 24 hours of the brief, and the campaign launches one to two days after you approve the list of streamers and the creatives. For the formats themselves, see formats.

The three models side by side

What the report should show

A report that proves delivery has to show more than a total. In APIQ's online dashboard you see verified views, CTR, QR scans, clicks on the chat link, results by creative, analytics by streamer, poll answers and a screenshot for every view. The data is online, so the plan can change while the campaign is running.

Attribution works with AppsFlyer and Adjust, other attribution systems, tracking links, UTM tags and pixels. By default every channel gets its own link, so you can see how each streamer performs. On Twitch, impression pixels are accepted: conversions are counted after a view as well as after a click.

On average, about 80% of clicks come from the link in chat, 10% from the QR code and 10% from a click on the screen. CTR is tracked on every clickable element, and a streamer whose CTR falls below the agreed threshold is switched off automatically. Creatives are embedded in the content, so they stay in the recording of the stream. You get those views for free, but they add only a few percent to the volume of a campaign.

What this looks like in practice

The figures come from client reports on campaigns run in Turkey. The L'Oréal Paris campaign for Elseve ran on 367 streamers and produced 800,127 verified views, 11,762 clicks and a CTR of 1.47%. Migros Hemen used full-screen video on 203 channels: 300,334 views and a CTR of 2.01%, the highest among Turkish campaigns. All the numbers are on the case studies page.

How to choose

If you need a deep story from one specific creator, a direct integration is the right fit. If you need reach across many streams with predictable cost and transparent reporting, buy verified views. The approaches do not exclude each other: you can run a large integration with one or two top streamers and add reach through CPV. We compare all three routes for Twitch in Advertising on Twitch.

Whichever model you pick, put five questions to the seller:

1. What exactly do you charge for: a mention, an impression or a verified view?
2. What counts as a view, and who decides?
3. What proof do I get for each view?
4. Who carries the risk if the promised volume isn't delivered?
5. Can I exclude channels I don't want, and can I start with a pilot?

A pilot is possible: many clients start with a test campaign to get their own numbers for the channel.