Base AVE is your article's share of the page multiplied by the full-page ad rate. The multiplier defaults to 1, meaning no adjustment is applied.
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An Advertising Value Equivalency calculator estimates what a piece of earned media coverage would have cost if you had bought that same space as a paid advertisement instead. It is one of the oldest ways PR teams have tried to put a dollar figure on coverage, and also one of the most debated, since it borrows an ad-buying formula to describe something readers experience very differently from an ad.
The calculation starts with a proportion: how much of a page, or how much of a broadcast segment, did the coverage occupy. Divide the article's word count by the total word capacity of a full page to get that share, then multiply the share by the publication's standard full-page ad rate. A 600-word feature on a page that holds 1,200 words takes up half the page, so its base AVE is half of what a full-page ad on that same page would cost.
Some PR teams multiply base AVE by a factor, commonly cited between 2 and 4, on the theory that readers trust editorial content more than an obvious advertisement. That multiplier has no independent, standardized backing and varies wildly depending on who is presenting the number, which is exactly why industry bodies like AMEC have pushed back on AVE as a primary metric. This calculator defaults the multiplier to 1 so the base number stays honest, and lets you apply your own factor only if your organization has already agreed on one.
AVE says nothing about whether the coverage was positive or negative, whether it reached the right audience, or whether it drove any measurable action. Referral traffic and conversions from the placement, backlinks it generated, share of voice against competitors, and sentiment of the coverage all say more about real impact. Many PR-driven brands track these alongside share of voice and use earned coverage as one input into a broader SEO and digital PR strategy rather than a standalone number.
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