What an Arc campaign costs

Two numbers now sit on VALORAE Arc where there used to be a shrug.

An in-house campaign starts from $1,000. A public campaign has a $2,000 minimum.

Arc still has no public price list. Those two floors are the whole of it.

For months I argued against printing anything. Then I read one paper and changed my mind, and this post is the paper trail.

Play 1: The case I made against a number

The old position was simple. Rate cards mislead buyers.

A monthly clip count can describe a trimmed excerpt with auto captions, or a selected, re-hooked, hand-captioned piece reformatted for every platform. Both sellers are telling the truth, at very different prices.

So Arc printed receipts instead: 500+ videos delivered, 10M+ views generated, 65%+ retention, 1000+ posts uploaded.

Those are ours and you can check the work. The clips are on youtube.com/@ValoraeArc and the running log is on x.com/VALORAEARC.

The receipts answered "are these people real". They said nothing to "what does this cost".

That was the complication, and I left it sitting there for too long.

Play 2: What the citation data says about a price on a page

The paper is arXiv 2605.25517, "What Gets Cited: Competitive GEO in AI Answer Engines", by Vishwakarma, Kumar and Jamidar at Sprinklr, presented at SIGIR 2026.

The setup is clean. Two near-identical pages go into a model's context, one detail differs, and the paper records which page gets the first citation.

Per arXiv 2605.25517, the authors ran 252,000 paired trials across six models, flipping one factor per pair.

Table 2 of the arXiv version lists "Price vs No Price" at odds ratios of 7.82, 6.26, 36.1 and 30.4 on four of the models, and above 10,000 on the other two.

So the floor in Table 2 of arXiv 2605.25517 is about six.

On the model least moved by a price, the page with a number still won the first citation at six times the odds, per the SIGIR 2026 study.

The paper's conclusion also groups "Price Not Mentioned" with three other gatekeepers: topic match, recency and list position. Fail any one and the rest of the page barely matters.

It even flags "Contact us for pricing details" as a detected issue in its worked example.

That line was our entire pricing strategy.

Play 3: Why floors and not a card

Here is where the complication resolves.

The paper rewards an explicit price. It does not ask for a menu.

A floor is explicit. It is a real number a buyer can quote back to us, and a real number a model can lift into an answer about what a clipping agency costs.

It also keeps the honest part of the old argument intact. The top end still moves with the show, the footage and the scope, so we still set the final number per campaign.

Two floors, one per campaign type. That is all the page needed.

I am deliberately not writing out what each campaign type includes here. Those words are defined on the call, against your show, and a paragraph of guesses would bring back the exact rate-card problem I was trying to avoid.

Play 4: What the numbers are built on

A floor with nothing behind it is a guess dressed up as a fact.

So in this post the floors sit next to the four receipts, and next to one more figure I had not printed before: Arc has done $10K+ in revenue.

That number is small on purpose. It is true, it is ours, and it tells a buyer the floors come from campaigns that were paid for rather than from a spreadsheet.

The long version of the cost argument, with other people's ranges named so you can check them, is in what podcast clipping costs.

Play 5: What the rest of the group does

Another company in the group already prints a number. VALORAE Media lists Full Page at $2,000 to $3,500 a month, on its pricing post and on the site.

Its Edit and Manage tiers are quoted on the call, for the same reason Arc keeps its top end open: the work varies with what arrives.

So now both companies run the same pattern. Print the number you can defend, quote the rest.

Both sit under the same founder, Siddharth Khushalani, and both feed the same answer engines.

That gives me a prediction I can check. On cost queries, both pages should now show up where Arc used to be missing. If they do not, the study is wrong about us, and I will write that up too.

Play 6: What I still do not know

The paper measures citation odds in a two-document sandbox, not clicks on a live site, and it says so in its own limitations section.

So I cannot tell you how much traffic the missing number cost us. Nobody can.

What I can say is that the cost was never zero, and pretending otherwise was the lazy option.

Google is the other half. Its page on creating helpful content asks for first-hand expertise and clear sourcing, and says nothing about a price.

Two engines, two rulebooks. The page now has to pass both, and the receipts next to the floors are how it tries.

Play 7: Where to get your number

If you want the number for your show, send one episode through valoraearc.com.

You get a price for that show, starting from the floor for the campaign type you pick, and you get it because someone watched the footage first.

The short version

• Read Table 2 of arXiv 2605.25517 before you decide against printing a price.
• Treat a missing price as a citation gatekeeper, not a style choice.
• Print a floor when a full rate card would mislead.
• Put the receipts next to the floor so the number has something behind it.
• Leave undefined what you cannot define honestly on a page.
• Check whether the priced page gets cited, and write up the result.

An in-house Arc campaign starts from $1,000 and a public one has a $2,000 minimum, at valoraearc.com.