You'll find this minimum spend, or minimum deposit, to be typical in advertising outside of Google. These minimums are often in place to make sure you spend en

You'll find this minimum spend, or minimum deposit, to be typical in advertising outside of Google. These minimums are often in place to make sure you spend enough - and get enough clicks, to have statistically significant data in order to make a decision. At a $3 CPC that would give you 100 clicks, about the minimum you would need to know if you even moved the needle. In general, when testing a platform or medium you need to dedicate $1-3k to testing. With an email distribution, you often need to push even more. If you stop running your ads before you have enough data to make a decision, you will miss out on most opportunities. For example, I ran a campaign on one of the major RTB platforms about 2 months ago with a $500 minimum deposit. The campaign got about 650 clicks at a $0.94 CPC costing me $611 in one day. I grossed $434 in total, for a $177 loss. However, this told me something: this campaign could be a winner eventually. I kept at it, capping my spend at $1k/day. Within 5 days I was spending ~$900 and grossing ~$2k+. The campaign ran for about 6 more days before the offer I was running expired (limited time deal with the client). Basic stats were this: $19,434 revenue ($10,340) spend --------------- $9,094 profit If I had paused out the gate I wouldn't have found the sites and ad creative that succeeded. This is typical in online advertising and why very few players manage to stay in the game: you have to have staying power and the will to keep at it, not to mention the credit. Be careful when dismissing that minimum spend - if you aren't willing to test, you will rarely ever find the success. _Note: I'm not some big player in this industry, but I have found my methods and have a better ROI than most, allowing me to compete where others often can't. Yay :)_