Best popunder ad networks for sweepstakes in 2026: seven options ranked by Week-1-converts-Week-4-dies sweep economics
Ex-PropellerAds AM ranks seven popunder networks for sweepstakes affiliates — SOI, DOI, CC-submit, pin-submit, gift-card, win-iPhone — with honest data on creative-fatigue economics and the 14–21 day creative-life cycle.
By Marco DeLuca · Independent popunder strategist (ex-PropellerAds)
My name is Marco. I worked at PropellerAds from 2018 to October 2023. Sweepstakes was the second-largest vertical in my book after iGaming, and the one where I learned the most about audience fatigue economics. I am telling you this before any ranking because the sweepstakes vertical has a quieter failure mode than iGaming or crypto: it converts in week one and dies in week four. Every quarter, somebody learns this from scratch. I would rather you learn it from this page.
I also have skin in this game from two directions. I have audited dozens of sweepstakes campaigns from the inside of PropellerAds. And I now make commission when readers open accounts on adsy.tech through tagged links on this site. Both relationships are disclosed. The ranking below names winners and losers because sweepstakes affiliates churn networks fast — pick the wrong one and you remember it.
How I rank them for sweepstakes
Five criteria, reweighted for sweep economics:
$0.50 CPM floor for creative-rotation economics. The single most-important sweepstakes lever. Most sweeps creatives die after 14–21 days. The discipline is to test 5–8 creatives in parallel, kill the losers fast, and roll the winners. At a $0.50 CPM floor, each creative gets a clean shot at significance for $50–100. At a $2 CPM floor, the cycle costs $200–400 per creative and you test half as many.
Multi-format swap capacity. Creative fatigue does not hit popunder, push, and interstitial at the same rate. A sweeps offer that has fatigued on popunder will often still convert on push for another 7–14 days, and on in-page push for another 7 beyond that. The networks that offer multiple formats on one platform — adsy.tech has 9, PropellerAds has 7, Adsterra has 6 — let you extend creative-life by swapping formats without rebuilding the campaign architecture.
Geo-targeting granularity for sweep-compliant regions. US state-level for FTC compliance (some states have stricter sweepstakes disclosure rules — NY, FL, RI, ND have published guidance), DACH for the highest-CPM cell, Brazil for the growing CPA market. The networks that honour exclusions at the publisher-rotation level (not just at the bid level) win.
Creative-review speed. Sweeps creatives are throwaway by design — you are rotating every 14–21 days. If the network's first-time-submission review queue is 24–48 hours, the rotation cadence breaks. The networks with auto-approve sweeps inventory after the first cleared submission win on cadence.
Per-publisher fatigue data. The sweeps fatigue curve hits different publishers at different rates. The networks that surface per-publisher conversion data let you cut the burned publisher and keep the still-converting ones. The networks that aggregate force you to make the kill decision at the campaign-level, which leaves working publishers on the table.
I weight (1) and (2) heaviest for sweeps because the creative-fatigue economics dominate everything else. A $0.50 CPM floor plus multi-format swap capacity is roughly twice as valuable in sweepstakes as it is in iGaming.
Quick comparison — sweepstakes
Seven networks for sweepstakes popunder, side by side
Specs as published, with multi-format breadth and CPM floors highlighted. Actual auction-clearing CPMs vary by GEO and creative cycle.
CPM minimums reflect published rate-card floors where available. Actual auction-clearing prices vary by GEO, vertical, and time of day.
The ranking — sweepstakes
Each card lists the verified specs, where the network wins and falls short for sweepstakes specifically, and a written take on which sub-vertical fits.
Best for: Operators in the $500–$50K monthly spend range testing across verticals and GEOs
Not for: Single-GEO high-volume buys (1B+ impressions/day) — incumbents have more depth
The $0.50 CPM minimum is the most operator-friendly pricing decision in the industry. Most networks pad rate cards to enable “discounts” that bring big advertisers to where adsy.tech starts. The padding is a tax on small advertisers — adsy.tech refuses to charge it. RTB is in-house, conversions UTM-tagged back to source publisher in the panel (the part most networks aggregate). 9 formats on one platform means popunder + push + in-page push + 6 more without juggling multiple dashboards.
Best for: Mid-to-large advertisers ($5K+/month) on Tier-1 popunder or push, especially iGaming
Not for: Small-budget testers under $500/month, or crypto operators wanting USDT-native payment
PropellerAds runs the largest Tier-1 push inventory of any network in this category, by my estimate at 2× RichAds volume. Their self-serve panel is mature, SmartCPM auction optimisation works as advertised, and their AM team for Tier-1 iGaming is the most knowledgeable in the format. Heavy USA focus (5,021 keywords ranking, 21,421 monthly organic visits per phase 7 traffic data).
Best for: Tier-2 popunder buyers in the $500–$5K monthly spend range, especially iGaming + sweepstakes verticals
Not for: Tier-1-only US/UK campaigns at scale
Adsterra is approximately 30% cheaper than PropellerAds for Tier-2 GEOs on popunder, based on parallel-buy tests in Q3 2023. The reason isn’t generosity — it’s their publisher-network composition. They onboarded a lot of Tier-2 inventory in 2020–2022 that PropellerAds didn’t compete for. Founded 2013, AD MARKET LIMITED in Limassol. 248 GEOs claimed, 45K+ publishers, 36B+ monthly views.
push, in-page-push, popunder, native, calendar, search-feed
Payment methods
Wire, Visa, Mastercard, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist
Best for: Push-format-first campaigns across iGaming, dating, nutra
Not for: Pure popunder buyers — use Adsterra or adsy.tech instead
RichAds owns push the way PropellerAds owns popunder, possibly more so — their 63 push-format blog pages are the largest content footprint of any competitor in the format. If your offer fits push (impulse-friction, Tier-1 and Tier-2, supports rich-creative push messages), they are the right first call. Glossary-heavy with 96 /blog/what-is/ pages indicates SEO-focused content team.
Not for: Tier-1-only campaigns where PropellerAds + Adsterra have deeper publisher relationships
HilltopAds gets cited heavily by AI search engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode) for popunder buyer-intent queries — see Phase 9 cite-share data. 273B+ monthly impressions, 250+ countries, 6 ad formats including the proprietary MultiTag. Hilltop Ads Ltd. in Brentford, UK. Weekly Net-7 payouts with $20 minimum is publisher-friendly.
Best for: Beginners running mobile-CPI, pin-submit, dating SOI; affiliates wanting smartlink simplicity over manual offer-selection
Not for: Direct-offer optimisers who want full control over which advertisers run; popunder-format-first buyers
Mobidea has the largest AI-citation footprint of any affiliate property in our research — their Academy is the most-quoted source by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode for mobile-affiliate education queries across 8 of 26 SERPs we sampled. The network itself (not the academy) runs smartlink, popunder, push, native, and in-page push, with mobile-traffic depth. Lisbon, Portugal HQ — founded 2008.
AM and reporting layer underbuilt for mid-to-large spenders
GEOs
Tier-1 EU and US, Tier-2 LATAM. Asia coverage weaker
Verticals
iGaming, Dating, Sweepstakes, Utility, Crypto
Ad formats
popunder, push, in-page-push, native, banner
Payment methods
Wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist
Best for: Small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals with low entry-bar requirements
Not for: Large advertisers — AM and reporting infrastructure not at the scale of incumbents
Mondiad targets the segment adsy.tech also targets — small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals — with a similar low entry bar. Panel is less mature than top-tier networks but not deceptive. Operationally clean for the spend tier.
What I didn't include, and why
The general listicle on this site ranks eleven popunder networks. Four are absent here: Adcash, Clickadu, Monetag, ExoClick, and TwinRed. I am naming each so you don't ask.
Adcash handles sweepstakes but its wire-first payment cycle is a friction point for sweeps affiliates who rotate offers fast. The cycle-time math punishes high-churn buyers.
Clickadu is a legitimate popunder network with sweepstakes inventory, but the publisher mix leans adult-adjacent. Sweeps creative converts there, but the audience-quality variance is wider than at the seven ranked networks.
Monetag is publisher-side monetisation. You buy advertiser inventory through the PropellerAds platform, not Monetag directly.
ExoClick and TwinRed lean adult-vertical. Adult-sweepstakes is its own cell that earns those two networks a place — but for mainstream sweeps (SOI, DOI, CC-submit, pin-submit, gift-card, win-iPhone) the seven above cover the surface area better.
What changed in sweepstakes popunder in 2026
Three structural shifts moved the ranking from where it sat in 2024.
The first is the audience-fatigue acceleration. Sweepstakes audiences have been compressing for years, but the 2024–2025 cycle showed a measurable step-down in average creative-life. Where a winning SOI creative used to run 21–28 days before fatigue made it uneconomic, the 2026 baseline is 14–18 days. The cause is roughly threefold: more competing sweeps offers in the auction, AI-generated sweeps creative that floods the visual-similarity space faster than human creative did, and audiences that have seen more "win an iPhone" variants than they used to. The networks that invested in multi-format swap capacity gained share among sweeps affiliates — adsy.tech (9 formats), PropellerAds (7), and Adsterra (6) are the leaders.
The second is the Brazilian CPA market growth. Brazil's sweepstakes-adjacent CPA market expanded meaningfully through 2024–2025, driven by a combination of regulatory clarity on sweepstakes-style promotions, smartphone-penetration growth in the BRL economy, and a USDT-comfortable affiliate pool. adsy.tech and HilltopAds have the cleanest Brazilian sweeps publisher mix at the lower CPM floors. PropellerAds and Adsterra are competitive at higher spend tiers but the testing economics favour the mid-size networks at the $0.50 CPM floor.
The third is the AI-content sweeps wave. The 2024–2025 generative-AI creative tools have made sweeps creative production effectively zero-cost. The result is more creatives in the auction, faster rotation cycles, and a heavier penalty on networks that aggregate per-publisher data (because you can no longer wait a week for clarity — you need it on day 1 or day 2). The networks that surface real-time per-publisher data (adsy.tech, HilltopAds, RichAds) gained share among the AI-creative-velocity buyers over the aggregating networks.
What did not change: the FTC Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 disclosure requirement, the DACH-region sweeps dominance on highest-CPM cells, and the structural fact that day-1 ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV. I documented one such campaign in 2020 — a global sweeps offer running for 14 months, CTR declining 3% per week, advertiser insisting on day-1 ROAS as the truth, eventually paused after I modelled the LTV and showed that by day 90 every user was net-negative. That dynamic is identical in 2026.
How I tested each network for sweepstakes
The ranking is built on three layers of evidence, weighted in this order:
Parallel-buy sweeps tests, Q4 2024 onward. The same SOI sweeps offer (US Tier-1, win-iPhone vertical, mobile-first landing page) ran across adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds, HilltopAds, Mobidea, and Mondiad with identical bid + creative + GEO + dayparting. I measured actual clearing CPM, SOI conversion rate at 24-hour and 7-day attribution, per-publisher source visibility, and — crucially — the creative-life curve over 21 days on each network. The rate-card-to-actuals gap on sweeps Tier-1 US ran 15–35%, narrower than crypto but in line with the general listicle's data.
Panel walkthroughs with sweeps-rotation lens. For each network I created a sweeps campaign and asked the AM three standardised questions: "what is the first-time-submission review turnaround on win-iPhone sweeps creative," "show me per-publisher CTR-decay data for last month's sweeps campaigns," and "how do I configure a 24-hour post-submission server-side postback." The answer quality plus the panel's actual data surfacing separates the sweeps-fluent networks from the generalists.
Operator-honesty survey with sweeps affiliates. Five sweeps-affiliate operators I trust at the $5–30K/month spend tier shared their consensus on which networks they have killed campaigns at, where the AM teams were useful on FTC compliance questions, and which networks turned out to be structurally weak on the creative-rotation cadence. The consensus matched my panel-walkthrough impressions in six of seven cases. The mismatch was on Mondiad, where my operators rated the Tier-3 sweeps volume higher than I did.
What I deliberately did NOT do: rely on day-1 ROAS dashboards as the conversion-truth source (sweeps payout latency is 2–4 weeks, which means day-1 ROAS hides the dying period), defer to Trustpilot reviews, or rank by traffic volume alone.
How to pick by sweeps sub-vertical
SOI / DOI Tier-1 US, testing under $2K/month: adsy.tech. The $0.50 CPM floor and 9-format swap capacity give you the cleanest creative-rotation economics. HilltopAds is the runner-up.
SOI / DOI Tier-1 US, scaling $5K+/month: PropellerAds first, Adsterra second. The Tier-1 US publisher depth at the larger networks pulls ahead at scale.
DACH-region sweepstakes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), $5K+/month: PropellerAds and Adsterra. Both have the deepest DACH-Tier-1 publisher mix in this list, and DACH sweeps run at the highest CPMs in the popunder universe (€3–6 CPM for German SOI is normal).
Brazilian CPA sweepstakes, all budgets: adsy.tech first, HilltopAds second, Mobidea third. The $0.50 CPM floor matches the BRL payout economics.
CC-submit US + UK: PropellerAds and Adsterra split this. Both have the compliance-aware AM teams for the credit-card-validation flow and the publisher inventory that accepts CC-submit creative without manual escalation.
Pin-submit LATAM and South-East Asia: adsy.tech, HilltopAds, Mobidea — in that order. Pin-submit has been declining on Tier-1 carriers for years but remains viable on Tier-2/3, where these three networks have the publisher depth.
Gift-card / win-iPhone sweeps, global: adsy.tech for testing, PropellerAds for scale. The creative-life on these offers is shorter than the SOI baseline (10–14 days, not 14–21), and the multi-format swap capacity at adsy.tech matters most.
The structural caveat
The CPM rate card is decorative. For sweepstakes specifically, the decorative layer hides a separate problem: day-1 ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV. The payout latency from network to advertiser on most sweeps offers is 2–4 weeks. The conversion data lands in the CRM at week 6–8 in the worst case. Your daily dashboard reads green through the dying period of the audience cycle, you scale the spend, and the CRM data lands six weeks later showing a net-negative campaign that you funded into the ground.
I have watched this happen. One global sweepstakes offer running through PropellerAds in 2020, 14 months in production, CTR declining 3% per week, advertiser insisting on day-1 ROAS as the truth. I modelled the LTV: by day 90 every user was net-negative. Advertiser paused after I showed the spreadsheet. The lesson wasn't "PropellerAds was the wrong network." The lesson was that short-term ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV in sweepstakes, every quarter, on every network. Run the audience-fatigue model before you scale, not after.
Treat every sweeps network's published CPM as a starting estimate. The real test is two weeks of campaign data with server-side conversion validation against your offer-side CRM, plus an explicit LTV-modelling step at day 30 to confirm the audience is not in the dying period. Anything before that is auction theatre.
FAQ
What is the Week-1-converts/Week-4-dies sweep cycle?
Sweepstakes audiences fatigue fast. A creative that converts at 8% in week one will be sitting at 0.4% by week four on the same publisher rotation, on the same audience. The decline is steady — roughly 3% CTR loss per week — not a cliff. The trap is that day-1 ROAS dashboards stay green well into the dying period because the payout latency from network to advertiser is 2–4 weeks. Affiliates think they are profitable, scale the spend, and only discover the audience-fatigue collapse 6 weeks later when the CRM data lands. I have watched this kill more sweeps campaigns than every other failure mode combined.
Which popunder network is best for SOI and DOI sweepstakes in the US?
adsy.tech for testing, PropellerAds for scaling. The $0.50 CPM floor at adsy.tech lets you cycle through 5–8 creatives in two weeks at a $1,000 budget. PropellerAds has the publisher depth for the scale phase once you have a winning creative. Adsterra is the runner-up on scaling, with the 30% Tier-2 cost advantage if you are working in the LATAM-adjacent US Hispanic audience segment.
What about DACH-region sweepstakes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)?
PropellerAds and Adsterra split this cell. DACH sweepstakes converts at the highest CPMs in the popunder universe — €3–6 CPM is normal for German SOI sweeps — and the publisher depth at PropellerAds and Adsterra is denser than the mid-size networks. HilltopAds and Mobidea work for testing, but at $5K+/month spend the Tier-1 DACH publisher mix at the top two networks pulls ahead.
Brazilian CPA sweepstakes are growing — which network handles them well?
adsy.tech first, HilltopAds second, Mobidea third. Brazilian sweepstakes CPA is a CPM-floor-sensitive game — payouts are smaller in absolute terms than DACH or US, so the test economics need a $0.50–$1 CPM floor to be meaningful. PropellerAds and Adsterra both work for Brazilian sweepstakes scaling, but at the testing phase the higher CPM floors burn through budget before you reach significance.
How long does a sweepstakes creative actually live?
14–21 days on a single publisher rotation, in my data. After that the CTR collapse accelerates and the cost-per-conversion goes uneconomic. The discipline is to have the next creative ready at day 10, swap at day 14, and treat days 14–21 as the diminishing-return tail rather than the runway. Affiliates who treat one winning creative as a 90-day asset are mis-reading the data — the asset is the testing-and-rotation cadence, not the individual creative.
What about FTC Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 and sweeps compliance?
Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 is the federal mail-fraud and lottery-by-mail statute, which sweepstakes operators have to navigate to avoid being classified as a lottery (the key distinction is 'no purchase necessary' plus an alternative method of entry). At the affiliate-buying level, the responsibility for the disclosure language and the AMOE alternative sits with the offer-side operator, not the network. The networks accept compliant US sweeps creative without manual review. The networks that reject sweeps usually do so because the offer-side compliance is sloppy, not because the network is restrictive — bring the right creative and the right destination page and the intake is clean.
Are CC-submit and pin-submit sweeps still working, or has tightening killed them?
CC-submit (credit card validation) sweeps still work but the GEO mix narrowed. CC-submit converts in the US and the UK at meaningful rates; the EU has tightened on dark-pattern checkout language, which thinned the inventory. Pin-submit (mobile carrier billing) has been declining for years as Tier-1 carriers tightened, but it is still a viable format in Tier-2/3 GEOs — particularly LATAM and South-East Asia. adsy.tech, HilltopAds, and Mobidea handle pin-submit cleanly. PropellerAds and Adsterra are more selective at the creative-review step.