What a Click Costs in Iran, From the Networks’ Own Price Lists

YektaNet published its own price list in its first annual report, for the year to 22 September 2019, and nobody appears to have read it in English. A native ad click cost 132 toman on mobile, a banner click 542, a retargeting click 1,020: a spread of 7.95 times. Price the same lines against the thousand impressions they were sold out of, using the click rates printed on the next page, and the four website display formats collapse into a band of 132 to 277 toman, 2.10 times apart. The advertiser was buying a probability, and the probability was priced almost flat. Retargeting is the exception, at 24 to 27 times the rest.

Iran’s online advertising market has a published price list, and it has been sitting in a Persian slide deck for seven years. In an annual report covering 23 September 2018 to 22 September 2019, YektaNet printed what advertisers on its network actually paid: a click on a native ad cost 132 toman on mobile and 308 on desktop; a banner click cost 542 on mobile and 551 on desktop; a retargeting click cost 1,020 and 1,050. The report says on its own opening page that it was compiled to make the online advertising industry transparent. As far as this desk can establish, no part of it has been read in English.

Those six prices look like six different markets. The dearest click on the list costs 7.95 times the cheapest one. That is the figure an advertiser sees, and it is the figure that makes an outsider assume Iranian digital advertising is a disorderly market where the same thing sells at wildly different prices. Turn the page in the same report and the assumption falls apart.

The spread is in the click, not in the attention

The page after the price list prints the click-through rate for each of the same formats: how often an ad that was shown got clicked. Native ads on mobile were clicked 0.1 per cent of the time, native on desktop 0.09, banner on mobile 0.03, banner on desktop 0.04. Put the two pages together and you can price what the advertiser is really buying, which is not a click but a thousand chances at one.

The four website display lines, which looked 4.17 times apart on the click, are 2.10 times apart per thousand impressions: 132, 163, 220 and 277 toman. A banner click cost 4.1 times a native click on mobile and reached the same thousand people for 1.23 times the money. The price difference was almost entirely a difference in how likely the format was to be clicked, and the market had already priced that in. For a market whose networks measure their own traffic and publish no audited revenue, that is a more orderly result than an outsider would expect.

Retargeting is the exception, and it is the interesting one. At 3,570 toman a thousand impressions on mobile it cost 27.0 times the cheapest display line, and 23.9 times on desktop. On the reading this desk takes, the advertiser paying it is not paying for attention. It is paying to know who is on the other side of the screen.

The fourth block on the price page proves the mechanism from the other direction. YektaNet sold push notification advertising the opposite way round, quoting 2,030 toman for a thousand notifications delivered on mobile and 2,400 on desktop rather than a price per click. Its click rates for that format, 1.07 per cent on mobile and 0.52 on desktop, are far above anything on a web page. Convert the quote back into a click and it lands at 190 toman on mobile and 462 on desktop, inside the 132 to 551 band of every display click on the same page. Two billing units, and the same order of magnitude for reaching a person.

A second network, in the next year, lands in the same band

MediaAd ran the same kind of business and published the same kind of report. For the year to 19 March 2020 it printed a single blended click price for its whole network, 220 toman, with 368 on desktop and 167 on mobile, under a line saying that knowing the average click price helps advertisers plan and run their campaigns on real information. Its mobile figure sits between YektaNet’s native mobile 132 and banner mobile 542; its desktop figure sits between 308 and 551. Two networks, two reports, overlapping windows, one band.

Two cautions on that. MediaAd does not say which formats its average covers, so it is a blend of an unstated mix, and the two windows are not the same: YektaNet’s runs to 22 September 2019 and MediaAd’s to 19 March 2020. Nor are the two companies cleanly independent. Our registry records MediaAd as merged into Tapsell in 2023 and no longer trading as a separate brand, while another fact on our own Tapsell record, from a 2019 interview, already lists a MediaAd head among Tapsell’s executives. Both are on our record and we have not reconciled them. Until we do, these are two price lists from two networks, not two independent observations of one market.

The one price published twice went down

YektaNet published a click price again in its report for the year to 20 March 2021, and only one line is directly comparable: a banner click on mobile, 520 toman against 542 about eighteen months earlier. That is a fall of 4.1 per cent in nominal toman, and we hold no deflator to turn it into a real one; the one thing it is not is a rise. Over roughly the same span the supply side grew hard. The network carried more than 820 publisher websites in the year to 22 September 2019 and more than 2,300 by the year to 20 March 2022, and by that year it could show 40 billion ads a month. The number of businesses that had ever advertised through it reached 55,000 cumulatively, against more than 10,000 advertising in the earlier window; those two counts are on different bases and should not be read as a growth rate.

The published price is also a price net of something. All three networks took clicks out before billing. YektaNet says it identified and did not charge for more than 200 million clicks in the year to 20 March 2022. Tapsell puts clicks identified as fraud at 4 per cent of all clicks in the year to 20 March 2023. MediaAd put a money figure on it, 2.1 billion toman in its first reported year and 2.8 billion in the year to 19 March 2020. A click price in this market is the price of a click the network was willing to stand behind.

Then the prices stop

Tapsell publishes no price in any report this desk holds. It publishes scale instead: 520 billion ad impressions in the year to 20 March 2023 and 617 billion in the year to 19 March 2024, with advertiser sector rankings, campaign counts and video display hours around them, and no price anywhere in any of it. Of its 47 public facts on our record, not one is a price. The same company bought Cafe Bazaar in January 2025, a store that had itself published the money for five years and then stopped.

After the year to 20 March 2021 the record carries no absolute advertising price at all. What it carries instead is direction. YektaNet’s report on the twelve days of 13 to 24 June 2025 says the cost per click on websites fell by up to 46 per cent during that period and stood 27 per cent above the pre-war level in the fortnight to 8 August 2025. Those are movements against windows, not prices, and they are the only pricing information on our record from this sector since then. We used them in Six Iranian Companies Measured the Same Twelve Days and they cannot be joined to the toman figures above.

What we do not know

We do not know what any of these networks earn. None of the three publishes revenue and we have found no Iranian advertising network that does, and the registered capital figures our registry holds for YektaNet and for Tapsell’s parent are nominal legal figures, not valuations and not turnover. Without revenue there is no market size here: a price list is not a market, and nothing above should be read as sizing Iranian digital advertising.

We print no dollar figure and no rate. These prices sit in periods ending between September 2019 and March 2021, the rial moved a great deal across them, and no dated period rate for those windows sits on our record. Converting them would manufacture a trend out of the currency rather than the market, so the figures stand in toman as the companies published them. For the same reason the 4.1 per cent fall in the banner mobile click is a nominal fall and nothing more; in real terms it is almost certainly a much larger one, and we are not in a position to say how much larger.

Three further limits. Each network measures its own traffic with its own tools and no third party audits them, so the click rates are the sellers’ own. The windows differ: one report runs September to September, the others on the Iranian year ending in March, and we have not aligned them. And we have no price at all for the in-app side of this market, nor any price for search advertising inside the app stores. The six lines above are a website price list from one network, checked against a blended figure from another, and that is the whole of what this desk has found in English.

Cite as: Tehran Index, “What a Click Costs in Iran, From the Networks’ Own Price Lists”, 13 October 2026. Prices and click rates from YektaNet’s own annual online advertising report for 23 September 2018 to 22 September 2019, pages 18 and 19 of the file, and its annual report for the year to 20 March 2022; MediaAd’s annual report for the year to 19 March 2020, page 24; Tapsell’s annual reports for the years to 20 March 2023 and 19 March 2024. Price per thousand impressions, spreads and fact counts computed by Tehran Index from those figures and from its own registry and facts layer on 13 October 2026. Toman as published, no conversion. tehranindex.com