Seeding appears in every sixth PR case, while placements in MAX have risen in price by 40–50%

Client expectations regarding promotion effectiveness are changing more slowly than the cost of the tools. Marina Runovich, head of Piarhub's news direction in new media, "Zakupochnaya," says that for a number of projects the CPV benchmark is still 1–2 rubles.

For mass campaigns, such a figure is achievable in certain cases. When working with a narrow audience or in-demand authors, it is significantly harder to meet.

"If a client requests seeding in a narrow niche or wants to reach good, well-read authors with their own special project, these figures immediately become unrealistic. You have to get even more creative, build relationships with admins and journalists more productively, and do a lot of free pitching," the study quotes Marina Runovich as saying.

The gap between budget and reality

Rising prices compound the gap between client expectations and the actual cost of PR work. According to Piarhub's observations, some clients today consider 300–500 thousand rubles an acceptable budget for a PR project.

For comparison: agency work with Telegram seeding starts at around 500 thousand rubles. A project with relatively simple production costs 700–900 thousand rubles. A full-scale turnkey special project — development, production, team work, and promotion through bloggers — can cost 3 million rubles or more.

Silver Mercury emphasizes that the expectation of getting results comparable to paid promotion for a significantly smaller budget is increasingly at odds with the actual cost of communications tools.

"The market still holds the notion that PR should be inexpensive, and ideally free altogether. Hence the expectation of getting the same reach that paid seeding delivers while spending five times less. In reality, quality PR requires resources and investment. Treating it as a cheap alternative to procurement marketing with a guarantee of comparable reach means misjudging the tool's capabilities from the start," says Silver Mercury Communications Director Natalie Anisimova.

Forecast

Experts expect that in 2027 the cost of placements with authors will continue to rise, and the share of spending on promotion on Russian platforms — including MAX, VK, and Dzen — will keep growing.

Amid rising prices, PR teams have to choose channels more precisely, make more active use of earned tactics and partnerships, and offset the rising cost of paid promotion through creativity and organic reach.

Silver Mercury's analytics are based on an anonymized set of festival cases, while expert assessments of tool costs are based on the Piarhub team's practice.