Buying and commercials
What is a take rate in media buying?
Free, with no card. We read your homepage, draft who buys from you and show your monthly price before you join the waitlist. Nothing is bought until you've approved the plan and the ads.
what it means here
Here is what the term means for a UK buyer
The definition above holds anywhere. Buying media in the UK adds the detail below, including where AdBuyMCP does something different.
It is the single most useful number to ask any media platform for, and the one most often deflected. The Trade Desk's 2024 filing with the SEC works out at about 20%, by our arithmetic, and Google publishes no fee for DV360. UK agencies charge 10% to 30% of monthly ad spend, on desk research checked 20 October 2026. MNTN's own documentation states it keeps an undisclosed percentage inside the CPM. AdBuyMCP prices an awareness plan all-in: one monthly price, set by the size of your market and how often it should see you, from one published rate (£100 a month for every 1,000 people in your market, for each time a week), covering the media and AdBuyMCP's margin together, so its take sits inside the price rather than on a separate line, and the weekly report shows what each channel delivered for it.
How do you compare take rates?
Compare on working media: the share of the budget that buys advertising once every layer has taken its cut. The platform fee is one layer. Data costs, supply-side and exchange fees, agency fees and production are the others. ISBA's 2020 study with PwC found about half of advertiser spend reaching publishers, which is why the working-media share matters more than any single rate.
Two questions settle most comparisons. Is the fee disclosed as its own line, or embedded in the price? And can you see what the media itself cost, separately from what you were charged?
How does an all-in price compare with a take rate?
An all-in price puts the platform's take inside the price instead of on a line of its own. AdBuyMCP prices awareness plans that way: one monthly price, set by the size of your market and how often it should see you, from one published rate (£100 a month for every 1,000 people in your market, for each time a week). It covers the media, the planning and buying, and the weekly report.
So the two questions above change shape. You cannot see what each impression cost separately from what you paid, so ask instead what each channel delivered against the plan, which the weekly report shows, and compare the monthly price with the cost of running the same channels yourself or through an agency. Each channel's cost page shows what the sellers charge.
Type your company website or work email to see who we think buys from you and what reaching them 3, 5 or 12 times a week would cost.
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related terms
These terms sit next to this one
Most confusion in media buying comes from two adjacent terms being used interchangeably, so these are the neighbours worth reading next.
Ad tech tax
The cumulative share of an advertiser's budget taken by the intermediaries between advertiser and publisher, none of which individually looks large. Those are the demand platform, exchange, supply platform, data vendors and verification.
Working media
The portion of an advertising budget that actually buys advertising, as opposed to the portion consumed by platform fees, data costs, agency fees, ad serving and production. Usually expressed as a percentage of total spend.
Arbitrage
Buying media at one price and reselling it to the advertiser at a higher one, keeping the difference undisclosed. Distinct from a disclosed fee in that the advertiser cannot see what the media actually cost.
Rate card
A seller's published list prices for its advertising inventory, before any negotiation, discount or volume agreement is applied to them. In practice most large media is bought below rate card, which makes the card a starting position rather than a price.
same group
These terms are also in Buying and commercials
How media is transacted and where the money goes. The terms in this group are the ones a price conversation turns on.