Understanding Pricing Models
How pricing determines what the system optimizes for
Understanding pricing models is fundamental because how you pay determines what the system optimizes for.
Learn how different pricing models affect your campaign outcomes
Understanding pricing models is fundamental to performance marketing because how you pay determines what the system optimizes for. Pricing is not a neutral choice — it encodes assumptions about value, intent, and causality, and those assumptions directly affect ROI.
In digital advertising, different pricing models reward different behaviors. Some optimize for attention, others for interaction, and a smaller subset attempt to optimize for outcomes. The challenge in web3 is not the absence of options, but the mismatch between how campaigns are priced and what teams actually care about.
This chapter breaks down the main pricing models used in digital advertising and examines how their incentives play out under web3 conditions — where identity is fragmented, attribution is imperfect, and outcomes often happen off the click path.