Types of Ad Networks
Advertising networks are often categorized by their strategy, method of traffic delivery, and volume of inventory.
Below are a few examples of the most popular types of ad networks:
1. Premium Ad Networks
A premium ad network is an advertising platform that offers high-quality, exclusive ad inventory to advertisers. Premium ad networks typically work with a select group of publishers and websites that offer premium content and have a large and engaged audience.
These networks provide advertisers with access to premium ad placements, such as homepage takeovers, high-impact display ads, and video ads, that are designed to capture users' attention and drive engagement.
Premium ad networks typically offer higher CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) and provide a more personalized experience for advertisers. They often have higher standards for ad quality and ensure that ads are relevant and contextually appropriate for the audience.
Premium ad networks may also offer additional targeting options, such as demographic, geographic, or behavioral targeting, to help advertisers reach their desired audience more effectively.
Some examples of these advertising platforms include:
- Publift
- Yahoo Gemini
- One by AOL
- Mediavine
- AdCash
2. Vertical Ad Networks
Vertical ad networks are topic-specific and represent publications that fall within a particular portfolio. They can include a technology ad network, a business ad network, a fashion ad network, and an automotive ad network, among others.
This type of ad network gives an advertiser full transparency about where their ads will run and is most frequently used by brand marketers to promote high-quality traffic.
Although volume can sometimes be low, the quality of the traffic tends to be better due to more precise targeting that reaches a specific audience.
For instance, Healthyads is an ad network focusing on the healthcare niche.
3. Horizontal Ad Networks
Horizontal ad networks are higher volume networks that offer a wider base of inventory for advertisers to tap into. Targeting is more generalized which means the quality of the traffic could be lower, but horizontal ad networks offer the ability to potentially serve billions of ad impressions per day.
While horizontal ad networks offer reach, scale, and some targeting capabilities, they're often referred to as blind networks as advertisers don't always know where exactly the impressions will serve.
This means that while the scale of reach could be higher than a vertical ad network, the value of impressions delivered will likely be lower.
Google AdSense is a good example of a horizontal ad network.
4. Specialized or Inventory-Specific Ad Networks
Specialized networks focus on a certain type of inventory and could be device-specific—for example, mobile ad networks or video ad networks.
Mobile ad networks are marketplaces where publishers can sell ad units to advertisers on apps. Developers use a mobile ad network to monetize their app with ads and advertisers use mobile marketing to reach their audience through a different medium.
Google AdMob is a mobile ad network.
Best Ad Networks for Publishers in 2024
1. Publift
2. Adcash
3. Epom Market
4. Clickadu
5. Ad Maven
6. HilltopAds
7. PopAds
8. BidVertiser
9. Traffic Force
10. Adblade
11. Undertone
12. Vibrant Media
13. Adsterra
1. Publift
Publift is an award-winning, Google-certified publishing partner that helps digital publishers and app developers access premium ad partners that may have been beyond their reach otherwise.
Publift has been named among the top 10 of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 and has won the best sell-side technology category in The Drum's Digital Advertising Awards APAC 2019.
It has also been acknowledged by The Australian Financial Review and Statista as one of Australia's Fast Starters in 2020.
Publift's niche is catering to small and medium-sized publishers who may not always have the resources to navigate the complex world of digital advertising.
It does this through its award-winning programmatic advertising solution—Fuse—which integrates easily with a publisher's website. All it takes is replacing the existing ad tag with a single line of code and publishers are ready to optimize their website for maximum revenue.
Publift is known for its expertise in optimizing ad revenue for publishers by using innovative technologies and strategies, providing personalized support, and ensuring transparency and trust with its clients. At the time of publication, the advertising network received ratings of 4.7 stars on Trustpilot.
Publishers can improve their ad performance with Publift by implementing header bidding to increase competition among advertisers, optimizing ad placements for better visibility and engagement, and using ad refresh to serve fresh ads to users and increase revenue.
Publishers need to have a minimum of 500,000 monthly pageviews or a minimum monthly earning of $2,000 and comply with Publift's content and quality guidelines. Publishers must also have an active Google Ad Manager account and be willing to work with Publift's team to optimize ad performance.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA
Minimum Traffic: 500,000 monthly pageviews
2. Adcash
Adcash is a global ad network that runs more than 1,000 campaigns worldwide.
It offers a range of different ad formats, including popunders, native ads, push notifications, banners, and interstitial ads.
The platform also offers advertising technology that fights against digital ad fraud and is designed to bypass ad blockers.
A great Adcash feature is its Autotag capability that rotates three high-performing ad formats—popunder, interstitial, and in-page push—with just a single ad tag placement.
Publishers can select a monetization goal such as increased earnings, better user experience, etc. Autotag then adjusts the frequency and consistency of ads to maximize this goal.
Adcash is also known for its high level of technical support from experienced and multilingual account managers. The platform does not have a preference for publishers of any particular size or scale—its solutions are designed to be customized to large, small, or medium-sized publishers alike.
All publishers need to do to integrate Adcash into their websites is register on the Adcash portal, integrate its tag into their website's HTML code and they're good to go. Adcash then works by optimizing its website for advertisement, finding the right ad content, size, and format, and placing it on the publishers' website, and even deploying anti-adblock technology for greater ad viewability.
Publishers can join Adcash by registering on their platform. Publishers are responsible for making sure that they adhere to Adchash's guidelines, and for providing accurate information including their payment details.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA Target
Minimum Traffic: None
3. Epom Market
Connecting advertisers and publishers operating across 15 verticals in more than 40 countries, Epom Market is a cross-platform ad network that serves over 13 billion ad impressions per month.
It works with publishers of all sizes and helps monetize both website content and apps.
Epom Market supports a range of ad formats, including standard banner ads, in-text ads, video ads, and mobile-specific ad units, using category-targeting for higher rates.
Epom Market offers a 30-day trial through which customers can receive up to 1 billion free impressions.
Epom is especially useful for publishers trying to leverage the potential of rich media.
Rich media ads can be resource-intensive and may take longer to load, which can negatively impact ad performance. Publishers can use Epom Market's Rich Media Ad Serving feature to optimize ad load times by compressing files, minimizing code, and utilizing browser caching.
Integrating the Epom market with your content is a simple three-step process:
- Set up a publisher's account by registering on the Epom Market portal
- Insert the Epom ad tag into your website's HTML code
- Get ready to monetize your content.
Publishers must have a website or app with original content, have a clean traffic history, and comply with Epom Market's policies. This includes having original content and no illegal or adult content.
Model: CPM, CPC, CPA, Auction
Minimum Traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
4. Clickadu
Clickadu is a premium advertising network for web and mobile channels, serving a range of innovative ad formats, including video pre-roll, skim, and pop-under ads. It offers both fully managed and self-service campaigns with advanced targeting options, including geo, site, and device type, to maximize ad revenue.
Integrating Clickadu with your website is a simple four-step process:
- Sign up with the Clickadu platform
- Wait for Clickadu to approve your website. The platform will need to vet your content to make sure it meets their criteria
- Insert the Clickadu ad tag on your website
- Start earning money from your content.
Publishers can improve their ad performance by utilizing high-performing ad formats such as push notifications, pop-unders, and native ads to capture user attention and increase engagement.
Clickadu's Safe Ads feature uses advanced algorithms to analyze and categorize ads based on their content. By ensuring that ads are safe and relevant, this feature helps to reduce ad fatigue among users and leads to longer engagement with ads.
Model: CPM
Minimum Traffic: None
5. Ad Maven
While it is regarded as among the best pop-under network for advertisers, AdMaven actually supports multiple ad formats, including mainstream display ad banners, lightbox, interstitial ads, and slider ads.
Serving hundreds of millions of ads in around 200 countries, it offers advertisers the opportunity to leverage geolocation-based targeting in their online advertising campaigns.
AdMaven works with publishers of all sizes, whether large, medium, or small.
One of its strengths is its native push notifications feature that helps publishers improve their ad performance by providing a non-intrusive, highly targeted ad format. These ads have a high engagement rate and can generate additional revenue.
Integrating AdMaven on your website is as simple as registering, inserting a code into your website, and starting earning. Once integrated, AdMaven's platform also allows for easy access to analytics and viewing of reports from its dashboard.
Publishers need to apply and be approved by AdMaven before they can start displaying ads on their website or app.
Model: CPA, CPI, CPL, CPC, CPM
Minimum Traffic: None
6. HilltopAds
HillTopAds' comes with a powerful anti-ad blocker feature that saves publishers and advertisers revenue that is often lost due to ad-blocking software.
It offers a modern, simple-to-use interface that allows publishers to monetize several websites through one account.
HilltopAds works with publishers located across the globe publishing both mainstream and non-mainstream content.
With its multilingual interface, publishers can create and manage ad campaigns in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, and more. It provides publishers with the tools they need to reach a global audience and maximize their ad performance.
To integrate HilltopAds on your website, follow these steps:
- You need to first sign up on their portal. Once approved, add your site to the Manager Sites and Zones tab.
- Next, you will be given a unique verification code that needs to be added to your website.
- Once your website has been verified, click the Add Zone button and select the kind of advertisement you want to display. You will be given a code that needs to be placed at the appropriate place on your website.
- And that's it. You are now ready to monetize your website with HilltopAds.
Publishers must have a website or app with original content, high traffic quality, and comply with HilltopAds' policies.
Model: CPA, CPM, CPC
Minimum Traffic: None
7. PopAds
PopAds is a pop-under ad network that advertises itself as the highest and fastest-paying ad network in the pop-under arena.
Its ad servers are also considered to be faster and more secure than those of its competitors.
PopAds offers real-time consumer data to its clients, which can be leveraged to assist in ad layout optimization for more significant user acquisition.
PopAds' landing page prefetching feature can help improve ad performance by reducing the loading time of landing pages. When a user clicks on an ad, the feature automatically starts loading the landing page in the background, before the user is redirected to the landing page.
This prefetching allows the landing page to load faster when the user actually arrives at the page. Users are more likely to stay on a page that loads quickly and is easy to navigate, which can result in higher engagement and lower bounce rates.
To integrate PopAds on your platform, register with PopAds and insert their ad tag into your website's code.
To join PopAds as a publisher, you must have a website with substantial traffic, a good reputation, and high-quality content that complies with their terms and conditions.
Model: CPV, CPM
Minimum Traffic: None
8. BidVertiser
BidVertiser is an ad network that supports publishers across all formats, allowing them to monetize everything from websites to mobile apps to toolbars and even extensions. All ads placed on publisher inventory are scanned by BidVertiser internally, as well as by third-party apps for compliance, safety, and appropriateness.
Publishers can improve their ad performance by conducting regular A/B testing to determine the most effective ad designs and incorporating targeting options such as geography, device, and user behavior.
BidVertiser's Smartlink feature ensures that publishers get the highest possible revenue for each ad impression, by automatically optimizing the ad format and offer for each user. When a user clicks on an ad, Smartlink redirects them to the most relevant offer, based on their browsing history and other data.
BidVertiser allows minimum payouts as low as $10, allowing even small publishers to take advantage of the platform. Payment methods include wire transfers, PayPal, Wise, and even Bitcoin. In allowing payments via cryptocurrency, Bidvertiser stands among all the entries on our list.
To start using BidVertiser, all publishers need to do is sign up on their portal and integrate their ad tag on their web page.
Model: CPM, CPC
Minimum Traffic: None
9. Traffic Force
Traffic Force is a supply-side platform (SSP) that connects publishers with over 100 demand-side partners. This ad network sells targeted web and mobile web traffic on an impression basis.
Traffic Force offers a range of ad formats for publishers to implement, including display banners, pop-unders, IM floaters, and in-stream video ads. It employs OpenRTB technology to deal with traffic.
It also offers a high level of online security by utilizing advanced software to scan all ads that go live on its network. This ensures there is no malicious advertising. It also offers SSL-secure ads.
Traffic Force works with publishers of all sizes in almost every niche.
To use Traffic Force, publishers need to create a publisher account by signing up here.
Once your account has been approved, you will need to insert the Traffic Force ad tag on your page and you are good to go.
Model: CPM
Minimum Traffic: None
10. Adblade
Targeted at premium publishers and media agencies, Adblade counts FoxNews, Hearst Corporation, Yahoo!, and ABC among the more than 1,000 publishers that make up its ad network.
Adblade supports standard IAB ad units, as well as headlineNewsBullets® units, which it claims have three to five times the engagement rate of banner ads.
To join Adblade, you need to register as a publisher on their portal.
Adblade has three categories for publishers based on the traffic they receive on their website:
- 1-499,999 unique monthly page views
- 5,00,000-49,99,999 unique monthly page views
- 50,00,000+ unique monthly page views
It provides unique services tailored to each segment.
Once you've entered your page traffic, you will be asked to fill up your contact information and payment details. Once approved, you can insert Adbalde's ad tag on your page and start monetizing your content.
An important performance-enhancing feature of Adblade is OptiServe, a proprietary technology developed by Adblade. It is a real-time optimization engine that helps improve ad performance for publishers by dynamically selecting the most appropriate ad creative to display to each user.
OptiServe analyzes various data points in real-time, including the user's location, device, browsing behavior, and other contextual information, to determine which ad creative is most likely to engage that particular user.
Model: CPM, CPC, Real-time bidding
Minimum Traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
11. Undertone
Undertone prides itself on its quality video marketing, creatives, and flexible integrations.
It provides three integration options:
- Client-side header bidding via pre-bid or Index exchange
- Service-side header bidding via Amazon's TAM
- Direct-tag via GAM
By implementing inventory in non-traditional ways, Undertone ensures zero cannibalization of existing ad products, along with 100 to 1,500% higher CPMs than standard display ads.
Publishers can improve ad performance by using responsive ad units that automatically adjust to fit the size of the device being used to view the website.
To join Undertone as a publisher, you must have original content that is updated frequently and complies with Undertone's content guidelines
Model: CPM, CPA, CPV
Minimum Traffic: 500,000 monthly impressions
13. Adsterra
Adsterra allows publishers to monetize any traffic ranging from desktop/mobile website traffic to social/mobile app traffic. It also support almost every available ad format, including pop-unders, in-page push notifications, native ads, banner ads, and video ad serving template (VAST) ads.
Here's how publishers can integrate Adsterra with their websites:
- To begin with Adsterra, publishers need to fill up an online registration form.
- Once an Adsterra account has been created, publishers can open their account and add their website by entering its URL.
- Next, publishers can select the ad unit they would like to display on each page.
- Once the website has been approved, publishers are sent code snippets which they need to add to their website to start monetizing it.
Website approval is usually quick with Adsterra.
With over 12,000 advertisers on board, the network boasts a 100% fill rate.
To join Adsterra, a publisher's website or app must have good traffic quality, preferably from Tier 1 countries.
Models: CPC, CPM, CPI, CPA, CPL
Minimum traffic: None
