One performer earned £9 million on that stage and seven others earned nothing

Two reports of opposite character emerged from the 2026 World Cup stages.

One said Lisa of BLACKPINK earned roughly £9 million (about 28.5 billion Vietnamese dong) from her appearance. The other said Madonna, all seven members of BTS, Justin Bieber, Shakira and Burna Boy performed at the same tournament for no fee whatsoever, with Global Citizen and FIFA both confirming the arrangement.

Both are accurate. The two figures measure different things. But once you know the name of that different thing, the £9 million turns out to be the far stranger number of the two.

At a glance

The top two rows and the bottom two are different species. The top ones hit a bank account; the bottom ones come out of a calculator. Yet in a headline all four appear as the same sentence: "earned X."

The test is surprisingly simple. If a research firm or publication is named next to the number, you are in the bottom half. Here the phrase is "according to a report by The Sun," and the body text says "media value."

That £9 million has a name — AVE

"Media value" sounds vague, but it is a term of art. The full name is Advertising Value Equivalency, or AVE.

The formula is one line.

AVE = the size of the exposure × the advertising rate for that slot

Say a brand appears in a news story on a front page. Buying that same space as an advertisement would cost £100,000. The story's AVE is therefore £100,000. Stages are costed the same way — you were on a screen watched by hundreds of millions for several minutes, so what would buying that time as advertising have cost?

It is intuitive, which is why it lasted. And that intuitiveness is exactly the problem.

The trouble is that the industry that invented it has told everyone to stop

AVE is now classified as a deprecated metric within communications measurement. The Barcelona Principles, published by AMEC, the international measurement body, decline to recognise AVE as valid measurement, and the UK's PRCA has opposed it publicly.

There are three reasons.

First, it has no sign. AVE measures the size of exposure and never distinguishes whether that exposure was good or bad. An article attacking a brand raises that brand's AVE. The bigger the scandal, the higher the advertising equivalent.

Second, there is no standard. Where the ad rate comes from, how the coverage is sized, what multiplier gets applied — every firm does it differently. For identical exposure, one agency's $5,000 is another agency's $50,000. A tenfold gap is not an error; it is methodology.

Third, it prices editorial and advertising identically. The basic fact that audiences receive news differently from advertising is simply absent from the calculation.

So "£9 million" is less a wrong number than a number without a range. Without knowing which firm used which rate card, you cannot tell whether the honest figure is £3 million or £30 million.

Estimates dressed as league tables are not unique to this story. The brand reputation index that appears in Korean entertainment coverage weekly belongs to the same family, and it too cannot separate volume of mention from affection.

So why perform unpaid — the payment arrives the following week

World Cup and Super Bowl halftime shows run on the same structure. Performers stand in the middle of the most expensive advertising window on earth and receive no fee.

But their compensation, unlike AVE, leaves measurements behind. The Super Bowl cases come with numbers attached.

One thing separates this table decisively from AVE. These numbers count actions that actually happened. Someone pressed play. Someone paid. No estimating, no conversion.

Which is why waiving the fee is not a loss. Taking cash for the stage is a single transaction; taking streams and album sales means the increase stays on the record as leverage. The rate for the next endorsement, the pricing of the next tour, the first-week target of the next album all get set on top of it.

This particular final's halftime show carried an additional purpose: a $100 million fundraise for education access, with one dollar from every match ticket going to the fund. That is the context in which every performer appeared unpaid.

The two reports were never about the same stage

There is one more thing making this story hard to read correctly.

Lisa performing the official anthem 〈Goals〉 alongside Anitta (Brazil) and Rema (Nigeria) happened at the opening ceremony — 12 June local time, at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, Shakira and Burna Boy appeared at the final's halftime show. Different day, different city, different event.

So the differing dates in the two reports are not a contradiction in themselves. The problem is that translation and re-citation flatten both into "the World Cup performance." The moment they flatten, a story appears in which one artist was paid 28.5 billion dong while others got nothing — and that sentence only holds if you assume a single stage.

What this means where you are

If you are in Thailand, this story carries different weight. Lisa was reported as the first female K-pop artist and the first Thai artist to perform at a World Cup opening ceremony. And the three performers of the official anthem were from Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria. That the line-up was not filled exclusively with American and European artists says something about the event itself.

For readers in Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, the practical part sits elsewhere. Performance footage from events this size usually goes up on the organiser's official channel and often opens without regional restriction. Even where broadcast rights block the match itself, the performance segment is sometimes watchable separately.

And wherever you are, there is a three-second check worth keeping for any money figure in entertainment coverage.

Separating the confirmed from the estimated is worth doing explicitly. Confirmed: Lisa performed 〈Goals〉 with Anitta and Rema; the final's halftime performers were unpaid and both Global Citizen and FIFA confirmed it; the $100 million fundraise and the one dollar per ticket. Estimated: the £9 million, and nothing else.

But making that separation raises a larger question. AVE has been deprecated in its own industry for years, and it remains the best-selling number in entertainment coverage. The reason is plain — "the exposure was large" is not a headline and "earned 28.5 billion" is. A metric survives on quotability, not accuracy.

Further reading

• What the brand reputation index actually counts — the same family of calculation, turning mentions into rankings
• The fastest run to 100 million views took 21 hours: what a view count measures — another way of counting exposure
• What a Korean box office admission actually counts — what changes when you count people instead of revenue
• Six shows, six number ones, every week: how Korean music chart wins are scored — what happens when several indexes get blended into percentages

Sources

• Advertising Value Equivalency: how it is calculated and where it fails (Prezly PR Academy)
• Why you should stop using Advertising Value Equivalency (Axia PR)
• How much do Super Bowl halftime performers get paid? (Parade)
• How Super Bowl halftime shows lead to sales (Billboard)
• Lisa's World Cup opening ceremony stage in Los Angeles (Daum News, Korean)
• BLACKPINK's Lisa at the 2026 World Cup opening ceremony (News1, Korean)