Choosing between Programmatic Ad Networks, what to look out for

A comparison of Google Adsense and the main full-service ad providers for publishers looking to monetize with ads

Disclaimer: the opinions in this article are gathered both through first-hand experience and the experience of publishers as related to Alphamorr. Ad networks, of course, retain the right to amend their terms of service or offering at their discretion. While we believe our information to be accurate, it is always worth getting the answer directly from their reps. If you prefer some help cutting through the sales jargon for your own site or project from an impartial third-party, feel free to contact us.

Over the years working with thousands of different publishers I’ve heard a regular question when it comes to earning money from programmatic ads – what ad network is ‘good’, and which one is right for my site?

There are a lot of ways to make money from ads. Most start out with basic Google Adsense because it’s easy and pays decently well, especially after Adsense moved from a CPC (paid based on ad clicks) to a CPM (paid for ads displaying) model. Beyond that, there’s the deluge of Google Partners who promise access to Google’s Ad Exchange and a supposed uplift in revenue, typically claiming +20%-+30% performance compared to Adsense, even accounting for their revenue share.

As publishers grow and expand their ad-ops capabilities, building your own ad demand stack becomes possible. Usually that’s done by setting up Google Ad Manager, or Ad Manager 360, and piping your own advertiser relationships through Google’s SSP trafficking software.

Here, I’ll give a quick rundown of the main players in the ad network space for moving beyond Adsense; how they operate, what they offer, and the pros & cons of each depending on your website focus and where your audience is located.

Important to note, as most of these ad networks are certified Google Partners, they will largely only partner with publishers that follow Google Publisher Guidelines, i.e. have authentic traffic, original content, and write on acceptable topics.

A breakdown of the different ad networks available to publishers

» Google Adsense

Good for: Publishers taking their first steps into programmatic advertising. Non-technical publishers without in-house adops expertise.

Requirements: At least 1,000 visitors per month.

What to expect: Getting access to Google Adsense is fairly trivial. Create an account via Google.com/Adsense, add your site and receive the header code. After you’ve added the code in between your <head></head> tags, wait a few days (sometimes up to two weeks) for Google to approve.

Google Adsense is an entry-level solution to programmatic advertising. You can roll with Adsense AutoAds, which allows Google to dynamically inject ad placements across your page via that header script, or opt for specific ad units set up via HTML and javascript. You can expect to earn around $6-$8 per 1000 visitors, given US or western geo traffic.

One important point to mention with Google Adsense is that – if you’re setting up manual ad placements via ad unit tags in the body of your page – you are wholly responsible for abiding by Google Ad Placement policy. Avoid doing anything to artificially inflate performance, such as iframing ad units, or inserting ads on pages without sufficient content.

I’ve even known their automatic solution, AutoAds, has been known to violate Google ad density policies (having a certain amount of content to ads ratio) in the past, but that is a rare occurence. To maintain your Google Adsense account on the up and up, keep an eye on CTR (the click-through rate of users engaging with ad creatives). Anything over 10% CTR is likely to trigger some flags on your account and risk the dreaded double-click penalty.

» Freestar

Good for: Established publishers with a brand-related site.

Requirements: $10,000 monthly ad earnings or more. Traffic predominantly from English-speaking countries.

What to expect: Full service, end-to-end managed adops. Good customer service. Typically one year contracts.

Freestar are one of the fastest-growing adops companies out there. They have a good foothold among large, established enterprise-level publishers like Reuters, and thus claim they are able to negotiate lots of direct deals and unique inventory to sell on your site.

Sites using Freestar for monetization, in my experience, tend to outperform all others. Their technology, similar to a lot of adtech on this list, is deployed through a header script. That gives you access to Google’s Ad Exchange (a premium version of Adsense, typically only available via a Google Partner or if you’re a large site), plus their server-side bidding technology.

Freestar, as with a lot of these managed service partners, will give you access to a wider array of advertiser demand to bid for space on your website. In brief, all of these different ad networks are pitted against each other in a bidding process, with the highest bidder for a specific ad unit on a specific page to a specific visitor served up in real-time. With Freestar you can expect to earn $30-$40 per 1000 visitors to your site. Their reps claim revenue share is 15%.

» Raptive / AdThrive

Good for: Niche sites in lifestyle, cooking, and family topics. Small teams or solo owner/operators who don’t want to manage ad placements directly. English-language sites.

Requirements: 100,000 pageviews per month from English-speaking audiences.

What to expect: Display ads, video ads and organic growth advice. Fairly decent customer service and all-round support for small & medium publishers.

Raptive, formerly known as AdThrive (and before that, CafeMedia), is an adops provider that mainly plays in the space where publishers outgrow Google Adsense. They are a Google Partner, so offer the expected access to Ad Exchange with a 20%+ increase in performance compared to Adsense. You can expect to earn $15-$20 per 1000 visitors to your site when using Raptive. You will need to sign an exclusivity contract for a one year minimum, and their revenue share is 25%. Raptive have around 10,000 customers.

Their adops management is tailored and set up on their side, meaning there’s a few weeks onboarding process where a Raptive account manager will work with you to find the acceptable balance of monetization across your site, depending on the goals you set with them. Setting up doesn’t require much technical expertise on the publisher side, just the ability to add a javascript header tag.

The fine-tuning controls you have as a publisher are rather limited due to it all being managed Raptive. Reporting is updated daily in their dashboards, covering metrics like pageviews, sessions, earnings and earnings per visitor. Raptive does demand exclusivity across your site, meaning you can’t use multiple ad networks at the same time. They also seem to have a problem allowing direct deals that you’ve negotiated with advertisers directly.

» Ezoic

Good for: Smaller teams with less technically complex sites. Publishers who want tools and strategy help beyond monetization. Finance and reference sites.

Requirements: Compliance with Google Policy. Unique, original content.

What to expect: AI-optimized ad monetization. Publishing tools that cover SEO, content creation and video creation (free if you use Ezoic ads). DNS integration. $20 minimum payout paid net30 through PayPal, Wise, Bank Transfer (US customers) or postal check.

Ezoic has positioned themselves as the all-access upgrade to Google Adsense for publishers of any size, capturing a fair audience with 30,000 customers, one of the largest on this list. They have no minimum traffic requirements. Bundled in with the ad monetization tools are a wide range of additional tools that are billed as helping publishers grow their sites.

Perhaps a sticking point for some sites is that Ezoic usually* requires DNS-level integration (think Cloudflare) to serve their technology via your website infrastructure. This has some benefits in allowing the easy deployment of tools with minimal coding knowledge, but does have drawbacks in that every single traffic request will necessarily pass through Ezoic’s global AWS cloud. For publishers with complicated setups, or transacting sensitive information like payment details, I’d say this can be a big consideration.

Ezoic has branched out from the core monetization tools in recent years, leaning heavily into their AI expertise with wider range of SaaS tools that allow things like converting written content into AI videos or programmatic SEO, deploying content at scale based on keywords using generative AI. For publishers with narrow skill sets or limited budgets, these things can be useful in diversifying content and attracting new organic visitors.

Focusing back on the monetization, Ezoic’s pitch is that their platform will automatically balance user experience and revenue based on the goals you set. In practice, this means dynamic ad setups that change per user, where different ad sizes, ad locations, and ad demand will be loaded on a per-user basis. You will need to rely on Ezoic’s own analytics tools to monitor the site-wide impact of their tools on your readers. You can expect to earn $8-$15 per 1000 visitors on a typical site with Ezoic ads.

The ad demand through Ezoic is extensive, and they regularly add new partners and demand sources. By default, you can use their ads without a contract, but there is also a program called Ezoic Premium which is invite only after you’ve been live with them for a while. Ezoic Premium purports to increase your take home revenue by more than your service fees if you opt in for a contract, on either a monthly rolling basis or a yearly one. Ezoic’s revenue share is 20%-30% depending on your traffic sources.

*nb: I say usually requires DNS-level integration, because there are alternative ways to deploy Ezoic ads on request. There is a WordPress plugin for sites that run the CMS, or a method called ‘standalone’, which is more similar to a standard javascript ad setup.

» Mediavine

Good for: Lifestyle bloggers, small teams. Food and cooking sites. Fashion sites. Travel sites. WordPress publishers.

Requirements: 10,000* pageviews per month from English-speaking audiences.

What to expect: A similar experience to Raptive. Full managed ad service, minimal controls and limited manual intervention or technical expertise. Core web vitals assistance.

Mediavine recently lowered their initial entry requirements to sites with 10,000 pageviews, likely to better compete on the emerging publisher end of the market with alternatives like Ezoic. They have a customer base of around 11,000 publishers, mostly in the lifestyle niche. Lots of their tech is WordPress-focused. These products branch out from their initial adops focus into more audience growth strategies and SEO, so if you’re a publisher looking to grow your audience without employing more direct expertise, there are maybe some advantages here.

Covering these Mediavine ‘products’ quickly, the main one they push is called ‘Grow’. It’s intended to help publishers grow their subscriber lists and grow traffic in ways that compliment Google organic visibility. ‘Trellis’ is their answer to the issue of Core Web Vitals that a lot of javascript adops companies face; it’s a WordPress plugin that optimizes images, caching and site speed while still allowing dynamic ad serving and ad sizes. ‘Create’ is intended for their core customer base of recipe and food sites, helping with SEO stuff like schema markup and SERP visibility. If you don’t want to pay for Yoast or All-In-One premium plugins, or lack JSON expertise, it’s potentially a good option.

Overall, Mediavine is a mid-tier solution for a specific category of lifestyle websites. Some of their direct deals might be advantageous, and you can expect to earn around $10-$15 per 1000 visitors to your site. Their revenue share is 25%.

» Snack Media

Good for: Sport sites.

Requirements: 50,000 monthly pageviews and a sport-related website.

What to expect: Decent CPMs, video ad solution, tailored ad management.

SnackMedia is owned by Valnet, who themselves have a fair amount of owned and operated content sites. They have a particular focus on negotiating programmatic guaranteed deals with sport advertisers, offering those impressions as a unique selling point for sites in their target niche. That seems to lend itself to decent performance for sport-related publishers. With Snack Media, publishers can expect to earn $7-$13 per 1000 visitors.

They offer a few other publisher solutions beyond programmatic ads, particularly branching out into SEO, where they have a WordPress plugin that can be used for article optimization. A big focus of theirs includes getting publishers to have their content listed on sport news aggregators like NewsNow, which can be good sources of traffic to compliment organic audiences.

Throw in some potential to get help with your hosting and CDN costs, and they are a good potential solution for growing sport brand publishers. Their revenue share is claimed to be 20%, with a customer base of around 600 publishers.

» NitroPay

Good for: Tool sites, reference sites. Sites with lots of ad-blocking users.

Requirements: 100,000 pageviews per month from mainly English-speaking visitors.

What to expect: Review process taking 7-14 days. Standard setup with a header javascript tag and body elements to define ad locations. 30-day net payments with no minimum payouts.

NitroPay are a fairly standard adops provider on the monetization front, through they do bundle in an ‘ad-blocker recovery’ solution that claims to increase ad revenue for audience with a lot of adblock users. They also offer a solution for publishers who want to build their audience revenue directly via subscribers, with a tool that lets users pay to avoid seeing ads across your site.

They have a small-ish base of around 300 customers according to their sellers.json file, so you might find it easier to get one-on-one advice if you’re a decent size publisher. Their payment terms are net30 via SWIFT bank transfer, PayPal or US local bank transfer. Their revenue share is 25%.

While NitroPay by default do offer a fully managed ad service including placements and sizes, there is also a well-documented and extensive API where you can control your ad placements delivered via their service using javascript. That gives a decent amount of control for publishers who don’t want to cede their entire site to the whims of ad network optimization.

NitroPay have made some effort to build demand partnerships with DSPs that aren’t Google, so you’ll be connected with some of the alternative players there like OpenX, Xandr and PubMatic. That usually gives a marginal revenue uplift compared to simply relying on Google demand.

» MonetizeMore

Good for: Publishers concerned about invalid traffic.

Requirements: Earn at least $1,000 USD per month from your existing ad demand.

What to expect: WordPress-based ad management, decent header bidding, invalid traffic protection.

MonetizeMore has been around since 2010, steadily acquiring customers who mainly run WordPress-based sites, especially after they acquired AdvancedAds, one of the leading WordPress plugins for deploying ad codes on to a WordPress site. Their team is on the smaller side, with a lot of the sales and commercial activity directed by the CEO. They build their own demand stack with a few in-house engineers, and have recently claimed to implement ‘AI’ into their header bidding technology.

One of the ways MonetizeMore stands out is in invalid traffic protection with their proprietary tool ‘TrafficCop’, which earned a Google Innovation Award in 2022. Invalid traffic prevention (serving ads to bots or clickfarms unknowingly) can be a devastating problem to publishing businesses, and MonetizeMore seem to offer the leading solution in this space to concerned publishers. I haven’t seen many other adops providers tackle it, presumably because it would put the onus on them rather than the publisher.

MonetizeMore require a 12 month contract and exclusivity to sell your inventory. Quitting notice is 30 days. They claim to have around 1,500 customers, and while their sellers.json is much larger, it’s mostly filled with lower quality sites. Presumably the 1,500 customers are the high quality ones worth claiming. You can expect to earn a mid-range CPM with MonetizeMore, usually $8-$15 per 1000 visitors depending on your site focus.

» Playwire

Good for: Technology, entertainment and gaming websites.

Requirements: 50,000 pageviews per month from English-speaking countries. Deploy a minimum of three Playwire ads per page.

What to expect: Ad serving, video ad serving, analytics, consent management.

Playwire has a good foothold in technology and pop-culture focused sites, and seem to perform well for those categories of publishers. Their service is fully managed, though you do retain the final say if certain ad placements or densities are not to your liking, so long as you maintain their requirement of minimum three Playwire ads per page.

To their credit, Playwire are one of the few companies on this list that are fairly explicit with the revenue share terms through their terms of service. For any direct sold deal that they deliver to your site, they take a 50% revenue share. For any standard programmatic demand, their revenue share is 30%. Their technology is delivered through a header script implementation, so only minimal technical expertise is needed.

Payment terms are net60, which is slightly longer than the industry standard. With Playwire, if your site is within their niche(s) of expertise, you can expect to earn a decent level of earnings, somewhere in the region of $12-$18 per 1000 visitors.

The best of the rest

I’ve covered the main Google Publishing Partner monetization options in this article. There are, of course, a huge amount of additional players in the market. These typically come into focus when publishers fall foul of Google publishing policies and somehow get themselves banned from Google ad serving. It happens for reasons both malicious and not. I’ll be covering legitimate ways to restore your Google ad serving in another article.

All of these leading monetization partners covered so far require you’re in good standing with Google (i.e. you do not have a disabled Adsense account, nor have had one previously). If you’re not in good standing with Google, here are some options you can investigate:

Media.net

Media.net still offer link units which pay reasonably well. These types of ads (which look a lot like navigational content elements) were phased out by Google a few years ago, much to the dismay of many a publisher because link units could perform extraordinarily well if you cared only about revenue and not misleading people.

Their native ad units still also perform well enough. Worth a shot if you run a lifestyle or news-based publishing business. You can run Media.net ads in conjunction with Google ads, too. They tend to pay on the lower end, because it’s (of course) difficult to compete with the money-machine of Google.

Taboola

The undisputed provider of infinite scroll native ads on your local newspaper’s website. Taboola offer a mid tier solution for ads-that-look-like-content. They tend to perform will on long-form content sites, especially for sites with low pages per visitor.

Final thoughts

Cutting through the noise and jardon of ad networks can be a tricky business. Most of them offer largely the same demand via Google Ad Exchange with the main header bidding partners like OpenX and Pubmatic plugged on top. The whole business is largely commoditized, with the only real differences being revenue share, method of technology deployment (header script or DNS-based), and the value-add tools beyond adops, e.g. tools to help with audience growth and SEO.

The usual line you’ll hear to differentiate is in ‘direct deals’, that is, programmatic guaranteed deals these ad networks have negotiated with particular advertisers and SSPs. You might get some fancy blue-chip logos to tempt you, but, being real, with the dominance of Google and the fact most major advertisers run their campaigns via Google, the revenue differentiator is minimal.

The main advice I’d give is – read their terms of service – particularly when it comes to revenue share, payment terms, and the right for ad networks to withhold payments. It’s boring, but worth it. Despite years of initiatives like the Acceptable Ads Program, and the IAB, the industry remains a black box where (when times get tough), ad networks can dial up their revenue share without giving you a heads up. Your bottom line is hit, you’re locked in to a contract, and the only thing you can do is wait it out or increase the number of ads on your site and hope it picks up.

One of the services Alphamorr can provide is to negotiate and get a definite statement on revenue share so you won’t be subject to variable rates at certain times of year. Contact us for some advice on that.

Second disclaimer: if you are a representative of any ad network listed here and believe our information to be inaccurate, reach out and we’ll do our best to see if you’re right.

Title photo by Morgan Housel / Unsplash

Adam Morrice

With more than 20 years of publishing experience and formal study to an MA level, Adam is an expert in digital publishing strategies. Adam is the founder and lead consultant at Alphamorr, where he helps digital publishers and media groups to set and achieve their goals. Adam’s experience includes leading sales team in fast-growing organizations covering Adtech for some of the largest websites in the world & enterprise software deployed with world-leading organizations, both public and private.