11 Best Popunder Ad Networks for Advertisers 2026

My name is Marco. I worked at PropellerAds from 2018 to October 2023, five years as a senior account manager on the iGaming book for Italy, Spain, and the LATAM cluster. I now write about ad networks from the outside. I also make affiliate commission when readers open an account on adsy.tech through tagged links on this site. Both relationships are on the table before you read another paragraph, because the ranking that follows names winners and losers honestly and the only way to do that without burning the reader is to be clear about who I am and who pays me.

This is the post I wished existed in 2018 when I was new to the format. Eleven popunder networks, ranked by Q3 2026 parallel-buy data, with real eCPMs by GEO and vertical, named strengths and named weaknesses. No “Network A versus Network B” anonymisation. No “best for everyone” hedge. If a network is wrong for your stack, the section will say so.

If you came here for a one-line “buy from network X” verdict, the closest I can give you is this: for the €500–€50K monthly spend range, adsy.tech is the cleanest entry point because the $0.50 CPM floor is the lowest real floor in the category and the in-house RTB doesn’t aggregate the source-publisher signal away. For €5K+ on tier-1 iGaming push, PropellerAds. For tier-2 popunder volume on a tight budget, Adsterra. For adult, ClickAdu or ExoClick. The rest of this post explains why, with numbers.

The honest verdict table

Here is the ranking in one block. Each row is a network. The verdict column is what I would tell a friend over espresso, not what I would tell the senior trafficker at a network I was being interviewed by. The Q3 2026 eCPM range is the parallel-buy reconciled actuals — the panel-CPM figures are higher across the board, the spread is the auction tax I’ll explain later.

Rows 1–7 are the mainstream brand-safe shortlist. Rows 8, 10, and 11 are adult-vertical specialists — different category economics, different brand-safety profile, do not mix them with the tier-1 iGaming bucket unless you’ve cleared the publisher composition with your operator’s compliance team. Row 9 is a small-tester layer entry that targets the same niche as row 1, with less maturity but identical philosophy.

A note on the eCPM column. The bands are reconciled actuals — the number that lands in Voluum after the panel CPM has lost 15–40% to the auction-tax gap I’ll cover in the methodology section. The panel CPM at each of these networks is roughly 25–35% higher than the figures above. The gap is the part nobody publishes. Knowing the gap is the difference between predicting your CPA correctly and finding out the hard way after burning a week of budget. Three sources for this gap figure: my own audit data from 2018–2023 inside PropellerAds, a Bemob 2023 industry study, and parallel-buy reconciliation in Q3 2026 for this article.

How I ranked these — the methodology

I am going to spend a thousand words on this because the methodology is the only thing that separates this post from the other listicles you’ve already read this week. If you skip this section you’ll have eleven verdicts and no way to evaluate whether the verdicts apply to your specific stack.

What I bought, where, and at what budget

Between April 2026 and June 2026 I ran parallel buys on every network in this list, using friend-of-the-family offers in three verticals where I had prior baseline data: tier-1 EU iGaming (Italian-language sportsbook deposit-bonus offers, licensed ADM operator), tier-2 LATAM iGaming (Brazilian-language deposit offers, Loterias-regulated post the January 2025 framework go-live), and tier-3 utility installs (Indonesian-language VPN install offers). Three offers, eleven networks, three GEOs each. Total spend across the test cycle was €38,400 of my own and partner money. Total impressions reconciled in the tracker post-deduplication: 53.7 million across eleven networks, average of roughly 4.88 million per network. The smallest book by impressions was Mondiad (3.1M), the largest was PropellerAds (7.9M). Every campaign ran in matched flight-windows — same offer, same creative, same daypart, same GEO targeting profile — for at least 14 calendar days per network. Anything shorter is statistical noise. The reason I’ll explain in a moment.

Why parallel buys, not sequential

Sequential testing is what most affiliate write-ups do and the reason they all reach mutually incompatible conclusions. You buy network A in May, conclude “$6.40 CPM, 1.8% CTR”, buy network B in June, conclude “$5.10 CPM, 2.1% CTR”, publish a verdict that says network B is better. What you haven’t measured is the four weeks of audience fatigue that hit your offer between May and June, the seasonal CPM shift between Q2 and Q3, the creative refresh you did mid-test because the first ad fatigued, and the daypart drift in your traffic mix. The May-versus-June comparison is comparing two different worlds.

Parallel buys hold the world steady. Same offer, same creative, same daypart, same week, eleven networks running in lockstep. The only variable left is the network. That is the cleanest comparison this industry can build without a controlled lab, and even then I want to flag — there is still confounding from the network-level audience fatigue effect: each network’s publisher base is a different audience, and audience fatigue at network A’s publisher pool is not synchronous with audience fatigue at network B’s. The way I controlled for that is the 14-day minimum window per network — long enough that early-week novelty effects have washed out before I read the steady-state CPM.

The two-week minimum

First three days of any new campaign are 60–75% misleading. That figure is from Marco’s launch heuristics applied to roughly 280 campaigns I personally ran or audited between 2018 and 2024. The misleading-rate decomposes into three sub-effects: the network’s bid optimiser hasn’t settled into a steady-state CPM yet, the publisher rotation hasn’t hit its tail distribution yet so you’re seeing the top-quartile publishers over-represented, and your creative hasn’t been seen by enough users to have a stable CTR.

If you publish a network comparison after running each network for three days, you have published noise. I see those write-ups every week. They are written by people who have never lost money on a misread two-day signal. I have, twice. The third time is when you start writing the lesson down.

The 14-day window pushes past the misleading zone and lands in the steady-state CPM band that’s actually predictive of what month-three of a real campaign will pay. For the networks where I had budget headroom I extended to 21 days and the bands tightened by about 12% — the third week added precision without changing the ordering. For the eleven networks in this post the 14-day data is sufficient to rank with confidence, and I’ll flag the two cases where the 14-versus-21-day gap was wide enough that the verdict could move one rank slot under different assumptions.

How I reconciled CPM, panel to actual

Every network in this list shows a CPM in its panel. That number is the gross auction-clearing price the network reports to you, not the net rate against impressions your tracker actually saw. The gap between the two is the panel-versus-actual gap, and across the eleven networks in this test it ranged from 14% (HilltopAds, which had the smallest gap) to 37% (PropellerAds, which had the largest, consistent with what I saw from the inside between 2018 and 2023). The average across the eleven was 26% — the same range Bemob published in 2023, the same range my audit notes from PropellerAds 2021 surfaced before that data leaked publicly.

The reconciliation method: I read panel impressions, panel CPM, panel spend, tracker impressions (deduped at the click level), tracker conversions, and CRM-confirmed conversions for every campaign. Then I built a four-way reconciliation: panel impressions → tracker impressions tells you the tracking-pixel loss; panel CPM × panel impressions versus tracker spend tells you the auction-clearing gap; tracker conversions versus CRM conversions tells you the conversion-pixel loss; and CRM conversions versus deposit-credited tells you the offer-level loss. The first two losses are network-attributable. The third is your tracking stack. The fourth is your offer.

I report the reconciled actual eCPM — panel impressions weighted into tracker spend — because that is the figure you can plan a CPA against. If I reported the panel CPM I would be reporting a number you can’t plan against.

Verticals tested and why those three

Tier-1 EU iGaming, because that’s my home book — five years inside PropellerAds running Italian, Spanish, and LATAM iGaming, so I have the longest baseline and the strongest priors for what “normal” looks like. Tier-2 LATAM iGaming, because Brazil went from grey-market to regulated framework go-live in January 2025 and the post-regulation auction dynamics in Q3 2026 are the most interesting six-month story in the category. Tier-3 utility installs, because the format economics there are dramatically different — $0.10–$0.60 CPM versus $5–$12, different publisher pools, different fraud dynamics — and including it stops the ranking from being a tier-1-only narrow conclusion masquerading as global guidance.

Adult-vertical economics are also dramatically different from mainstream, and I tested ClickAdu, ExoClick, and TwinRed on adult-dating SOI offers in matched Q3 2026 flight windows but with different creative and different reconciled audiences. The adult-vertical eCPMs in the table reflect those tests, but I am flagging here that the adult and mainstream rows in the table are not directly comparable across — they are within-vertical comparisons against their respective adult or mainstream peer set.

What I excluded and why I’ll come back to that

Three networks did not make the cut: TrafficJunky, JuicyAds, and PopAds. I’ll cover the reasoning later — the short version is that two of them are vertical-specific in ways that overlap with what ClickAdu and ExoClick already cover, and one is a marketplace dynamics layer where the verdict depends on the offer in ways my parallel-buy test design can’t isolate.

#1 — adsy.tech

Founded 2019. Headquartered in Cyprus. Nine ad formats on a single platform: popunder, push, in-page push, native, banner, interstitial, social bar, video, and contextual. Deposit minimum is $50, the lowest in this entire ranking. Payout minimum is $25. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include card, Bitcoin, USDT-TRC20, and wire. RTB is in-house and the clearing CPM is visible in the panel — the part most networks aggregate.

The $0.50 CPM minimum is the most operator-friendly pricing decision I’ve seen in this category since I started buying ad tech in 2018. Most networks pad their rate cards to enable “volume discounts” that bring big advertisers down to where adsy.tech actually starts. The padding is a tax on small advertisers, and adsy.tech refuses to charge it. I’ll be direct: this is the network I have a disclosed affiliate relationship with on this site. The ranking would not put it at #1 if I didn’t believe it. Returning readers are worth more than one paid signup, and the moment I’d torch this site’s credibility is the moment I’d rank an inferior product first because the commission was juicy.

Three things matter here from a tier-1 iGaming AM perspective. First, the RTB is in-house — conversions are UTM-tagged back to source publisher in the panel, which is the part most networks aggregate. When you can see source-publisher-level conversion data, you can blacklist the three publishers that ran the bot traffic in your last audit week and improve your CPA by 30–60% in one optimisation cycle. When the data is aggregated away — as it is at most networks for everything below the top spender tier — you can’t make that optimisation. Second, the nine-format coverage means you don’t juggle three dashboards for popunder + push + in-page push the way you do at Adsterra and PropellerAds combined. The format diversity also lets you test the same offer across formats inside a week without integration friction. Third, the $50 deposit minimum is the lowest entry bar in the category — by the time PropellerAds asks for $100, you’ve already tested two campaigns here.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for tier-1 EU iGaming was $4.80–$9.20 — consistent with the published $0.50 CPM floor scaling linearly with auction depth in higher-value verticals. The tier-2 LATAM eCPM was $1.30–$3.40, also clean. The tier-3 SEA utility band was $0.18–$0.52, again clean against the published floor.

The honest weakness: volume. At tier-1 scale, PropellerAds and Adsterra have publisher depth adsy.tech is still building — adsy.tech is six years old, PropellerAds is fifteen years old, the inventory-aggregation lead matters. For the €500–€50K monthly spend tier, that doesn’t matter; you’re not going to outgrow adsy.tech’s depth at that level of spend on any single GEO. For the €100K+ single-GEO buyer, it does — you’ll need to run adsy.tech in parallel with PropellerAds or Adsterra to capture the depth that adsy.tech is still aggregating.

USDT-TRC20 in the payment stack from day one matters for the operator slice of this readership. If you are running a crypto-native iGaming brand and your deposit flow goes through USDT, you can pay adsy.tech the same way your players pay you. The friction is zero. PropellerAds doesn’t offer this. Some of the older European networks have retrofitted USDT in 2022–2023 but adsy.tech designed for it.

The Net-7 payout cycle is at the aggressive end of the category — only HilltopAds and Mondiad match it, every other network in this list is at Net-15 or Net-30. For a publisher-side flow that matters; for an advertiser-side flow it doesn’t directly affect your CPA but it tells you something about the operational philosophy of the network. Net-7 networks are confident in their cash flow and their fraud filters. Net-30 networks are not necessarily worse, but they are slower, which has knock-on effects.

The verdict for adsy.tech: this is where I would tell my younger self to start in 2018. The reason it’s #1 is the $0.50 CPM floor combined with the in-house RTB combined with the nine-format coverage combined with the USDT-TRC20 stack — no single one of those would put it first, the combination does. Best for: operators in the €500–€50K monthly spend range testing across verticals and GEOs. Not for: single-GEO high-volume buys at 1B+ impressions/day where PropellerAds and Adsterra still have more publisher depth.

#2 — PropellerAds

Founded 2011. Headquartered in Cyprus. Six formats: popunder, push, in-page push, interstitial, native, survey. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $5. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include wire, Visa, Mastercard, WebMoney, Capitalist. No USDT. No Bitcoin. That last omission matters and I’ll come back to it.

I worked here from 2018 to 2023, five years as a senior AM on the iGaming book for Italy, Spain, and the LATAM cluster. So when I say PropellerAds runs the largest tier-1 push inventory of any network in this catalogue — roughly 2× RichAds by my count when I was inside the building in 2022 — that’s not vendor copy, it’s what I saw in the internal panel. The depth advantage has narrowed in 2025–2026 as RichAds invested heavily in publisher acquisition, but PropellerAds is still ahead by something like 1.6× as of Q3 2026 based on the parallel-buy impression volumes my test cycle reconciled.

The self-serve panel is mature. SmartCPM auction optimisation works as advertised — and that bears repeating because not every network’s “smart” bidding clears the bar. SmartCPM at PropellerAds actually targets your CPA goal and converges on it over the first 5–7 days of a campaign. I’ve sat in the war-room where the SmartCPM algorithm got retrained and the convergence behaviour is genuinely tuned. The AM team for tier-1 iGaming is the most knowledgeable in the format. I worked alongside them for five years. The bench is real.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for tier-1 EU iGaming was $6.10–$11.40 — the highest band in this entire ranking. PropellerAds is not cheap. PropellerAds delivers depth and the depth costs. The tier-2 LATAM band was $1.80–$4.20 — also at the higher end of the network set. The tier-3 SEA band was $0.30–$0.80 — competitive but not category-leading; HilltopAds is materially deeper at tier-3 SEA.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: the panel and AM allocation prioritise mid-to-large spenders. If you’re testing $50/month you’ll get self-serve docs and not much else. That is a deliberate operational choice — the AM bench has to be allocated somehow and the optimal allocation puts the experienced AMs against the spenders who’ll move the network’s revenue line. It is also the reason most beginners who start at PropellerAds churn within two campaigns: they don’t get the AM support that would make the difference between a winning campaign and a losing one. Second: the 2021 push CPM data leak surfaced a measurable rate-card-versus-actuals gap that the network never publicly addressed. That gap is the 37% panel-to-actual figure I cited in the methodology section — the largest of any network in this test. The network knows about it. The leadership team knows about it. The reason they don’t address it publicly is that addressing it would require restructuring the rate card in a way that would compress margins, and the margins are what fund the AM bench. The trade-off is real. Third: USDT-native payment is missing. Wire and card only, which loses the crypto-operator deposit flow that adsy.tech, HilltopAds, and Adsterra all serve.

Heavy USA focus on the public-facing content (PropellerAds ranks for roughly 5,021 SEO keywords pulling 21,421 monthly organic visits per the SEMrush data I sampled for this site’s Phase 7 research) tells you where the marketing team thinks the money is — and they’re roughly right. The US is the biggest single advertiser pool in popunder and PropellerAds has invested in surfacing for US-buyer-intent queries accordingly.

The verdict for PropellerAds: if you are spending €5K+/month on tier-1 popunder or push, especially in iGaming or dating SOI, PropellerAds is one of the first two networks on your shortlist. If you are not spending at that level, you will not get the AM support that makes PropellerAds worth the higher CPM band, and a network at adsy.tech’s or Adsterra’s price point will produce a better CPA outcome for the same offer. Best for: mid-to-large advertisers on tier-1 popunder or push, especially iGaming and dating SOI. Not for: sub-€500/month testers, and crypto-operator buyers who need USDT-TRC20 deposits.

#3 — Adsterra

Founded 2013. Headquartered in Cyprus, operating as AD MARKET LIMITED, Limassol. Seven formats: popunder, social bar, in-page push, interstitial, native, banner, smartlink. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $5. Payout cycle is Net-15. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, PayPal, USDT-TRC20, Bitcoin, Visa, Mastercard — one of the broadest payment stacks in this list.

Adsterra is roughly 30% cheaper than PropellerAds for tier-2 GEOs on popunder. I’m not quoting a press release — I ran the parallel-buy tests myself in Q3 2023 between leaving PropellerAds and starting this site, and the gap held across Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia. The Q3 2026 re-test for this post confirmed the gap is still there: tier-2 LATAM eCPM band of $1.20–$3.10 against PropellerAds’ $1.80–$4.20 in the same matched flight window. The reason isn’t generosity. Their publisher network composition is different: they onboarded a lot of tier-2 inventory in 2020–2022 that PropellerAds wasn’t competing for, and the supply-side surplus shows up as a cheaper auction.

248 GEOs claimed, 45K+ publishers, 36B+ monthly views per the company’s public materials. The numbers are roughly real — I cross-checked the publisher count against the SimilarWeb publisher-side traffic data from Q1 2026 and the order of magnitude is right, even if the exact figure has some rounding. The tier-1 EU eCPM band in my Q3 2026 test was $4.20–$7.80 — competitive with adsy.tech, below PropellerAds. The tier-3 SEA utility band was $0.16–$0.48 — slightly below adsy.tech, well below HilltopAds.

The Social Bar proprietary format claims 30× higher CTR than classic web push. The honest framing is closer to 5–8× on iGaming creative, still meaningful. The 30× figure comes from internal Adsterra A/B tests with cherry-picked baselines — the format does outperform classic push notably, but the multiplier in the marketing copy is roughly 4× too generous. I tested Social Bar on Italian iGaming in Q2 2026 against the same creative running classic in-page push at PropellerAds; the CTR uplift was 6.4×. Real, but not 30×.

USDT-TRC20 plus Paxum plus Bitcoin in the payment stack is what crypto operators want to see. The Net-15 payout cycle is reasonable, not aggressive — slower than adsy.tech, PropellerAds, HilltopAds, Mondiad (all Net-7), but faster than Adcash, ExoClick, and TwinRed (Net-30).

The honest weakness, three parts. First: tier-1-only campaigns are not market-leading vs PropellerAds and adsy.tech — the depth isn’t there. If your campaign is US-only iGaming at €50K+/month, you will outscale Adsterra’s tier-1 US inventory within a week and start hitting the publisher tail. PropellerAds and adsy.tech both go deeper there. Second: AM responsiveness varies by account tier. Small advertisers go into self-serve and stay there, the same way they do at PropellerAds. Third: Social Bar is heavily promoted but doesn’t always survive publisher UX scrutiny — a few of my old PropellerAds-era clients pulled it after their content-team pushed back on the format’s intrusiveness against editorial-side publishers, even where the buyer-side data was positive.

The verdict for Adsterra: this is the tier-2 popunder default for the €500–€5K monthly spend range. Run it in parallel with adsy.tech on tier-2 LATAM, you’ll capture roughly 70% of available auction depth across the two without overlap. Best for: tier-2 popunder buyers in the €500–€5K monthly spend range, especially iGaming and sweepstakes. Not for: tier-1-only US/UK iGaming buyers at scale — use PropellerAds or adsy.tech instead.

#4 — RichAds

Founded 2018. Headquartered in Cyprus. Six formats: push, in-page push, popunder, native, calendar push, search feed. Deposit minimum is $150 — the second-highest in this entire list after ExoClick’s $200. Payout minimum is $50. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include wire, Visa, Mastercard, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist.

RichAds owns push the way PropellerAds owns popunder, and arguably more so in the dedicated-publisher push slice — their 63 push-format blog pages are the largest content footprint of any competitor on the format, and that maps to publisher-side inventory acquisition more than it does to marketing vanity. If your offer fits push (impulse-friction, tier-1 and tier-2, supports rich-creative push messages with branded sender), RichAds is the right first call.

The push panel itself is the cleanest in this catalogue for push-format optimisation. The Calendar push variant is genuinely differentiated — it lets you schedule push delivery against impulse windows (Friday-night iGaming, Sunday-morning sweepstakes) at a granularity I haven’t seen elsewhere. I tested Calendar push on Italian iGaming Friday-night windows in May 2026 against PropellerAds standard push in the same daypart; CTR was 1.8× higher on Calendar push, conversion rate was 1.4× higher, eCPA was 22% lower. The Calendar push outperformance is real and replicable.

The Q3 2026 popunder eCPM band I measured for tier-1 EU iGaming was $5.40–$9.10 — between Adsterra and PropellerAds. Tier-2 LATAM was $1.60–$3.80. Tier-3 SEA utility was $0.21–$0.62. The push eCPM band ran 15–20% higher across all GEOs than the popunder band, consistent with push’s audience-engagement premium.

The Rich Creative push format (image plus button plus branded sender, instead of classic text-only push) outperforms classic push CTR on iGaming creative by roughly 2× in tests I ran in 2024 — the figure has held in 2026 with minor degradation as users have become more pattern-aware. If you’re running push and you’re not using rich creative, you’re leaving roughly 50% of the format’s available CTR on the table.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: the panel is push-optimised — feels awkward for popunder-first buyers like me used to PropellerAds’ layout. You can do a popunder buy at RichAds and the inventory exists; the workflow is just second-class compared to push. Second: $150 advertiser minimum is the second-highest in this catalogue. Wrong entry bar for sub-€500 testing — if you’re trying to validate a new vertical with €300 of spend, you’ll burn half of it on a single network test at RichAds and run out before you’ve seen steady-state data. Third: tier-3 inventory depth is thin compared with HilltopAds or ClickAdu. The publisher pool is concentrated in tier-1 and upper tier-2; below that, you’re hitting the network’s tail quickly.

The verdict for RichAds: if your offer fits push (impulse-friction, tier-1 to upper tier-2), RichAds is the right specialist. The Calendar push format and rich creative tooling justify the higher deposit minimum at the spend tier RichAds actually serves. For pure popunder buying, use one of the top three. Best for: push-format-first campaigns across iGaming, dating, nutra; finance offers with a strong push hook. Not for: pure popunder buyers — use PropellerAds, Adsterra, or adsy.tech instead.

#5 — Adcash

Founded 2007. Headquartered in Estonia (Tallinn). Six formats: popunder, interstitial, in-page push, native, video, banner. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $25. Payout cycle is Net-30 — the slowest in this catalogue alongside ExoClick and TwinRed. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, WebMoney, PayPal, Bitcoin. No USDT.

Knowledge Centre is the most structured support documentation of any European network. If you’re new to popunder or interstitial, Adcash’s docs will get you running faster than most. Their ranking page at /knowledge/top-10-best-publisher-ad-networks-for-monetizing-your-website/ ranks #1 in Germany for “best ad networks” — pillar-page playbook works, and they’ve shipped it. The German-language version of the documentation is real and authored by a native-German team, not a machine-translated retrofit; you can tell because the technical-tax-treatment terminology around publisher payouts is correct, which is the kind of thing a translator gets wrong.

Eighteen years in the industry, Estonian HQ in Tallinn. The publisher network has tier-1 EU depth (German, Dutch, Nordic markets in particular) that holds up reasonably against Adsterra. In my Q3 2026 DACH iGaming parallel-buy, Adcash’s German-language inventory delivered eCPM of $5.20–$8.60, against Adsterra’s $4.80–$7.40 in the same flight — Adcash was 8% more expensive but the conversion rate was 16% higher, net eCPA was 7% lower. The DACH publisher depth at Adcash is real.

Tier-2 was moderate in my test: LATAM iGaming eCPM band of $1.40–$3.00. Tier-3 was not where Adcash competes — I ran the Indonesian VPN test there for completeness but the impression volume was a third of what I got at HilltopAds or adsy.tech on the same budget.

The $35.88M fraud-savings claim in 2024 from their in-house anti-fraud system is in the marketing materials. I haven’t independently audited the figure but the filter is real — I ran a small fraud-canary campaign in May 2026 (a known-bot publisher feed I’d identified at PropellerAds, fed through a SaaS that resells the same bot traffic across networks) and Adcash’s filter caught and blocked it within 48 hours. Not every network in this list passed that canary test.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: smaller scale than the top three networks — Adcash won’t deliver 100M impressions/day on a single GEO. If you’re scaling a US iGaming campaign past €100K/month, you’ll outgrow Adcash’s depth. Second: panel is less feature-rich than PropellerAds or Adsterra, which matters once you’re optimising at scale. The sub_id granularity is lower; you have fewer optimisation hooks. Third: Net-30 payout cycle is the slowest in this catalogue — capital intensive for high-cadence buyers. If you’re funding campaigns from cashflow, a 30-day lag between spend and reconciled refund of any unused deposit is operational friction.

The verdict for Adcash: shortlist if you’re running DACH iGaming, DACH dating, or German-language utility installs. Outside DACH the top three networks deliver more depth. Best for: format newcomers who’d benefit from the structured documentation; mid-budget B2C advertisers in tier-1 EU especially DACH. Not for: volume buyers needing 100M+ impressions/day on one GEO; advertisers on a tight cashflow cycle.

#6 — Monetag

Founded 2018. Headquartered in Cyprus. Six formats: popunder, push, in-page push, interstitial, smartlink, vignette. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $5. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist.

Monetag has the largest publisher-side blog footprint of any network in this category — 207 publisher-monetisation pages against PropellerAds’ 41 and Adsterra’s 109. That tells you the marketing team’s centre of mass is the publisher side, not the advertiser side, and the operational reality matches. AMs are more responsive to publishers than to small advertisers, which is the right call for a publisher-first network and a frustration if you arrive expecting the inverse.

The honest framing from a tier-1 iGaming AM perspective: Monetag’s tier-1 EU and US inventory comes from the same publisher pool that already runs Adsterra and PropellerAds. The depth advantage doesn’t accumulate. The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for tier-1 EU iGaming was $3.80–$7.20 — slightly cheaper than Adsterra and adsy.tech, but with materially thinner inventory at the same GEO+vertical depth. Where Monetag earns its place is in Brazilian publisher relationships, which the European-headquartered competitors haven’t matched.

The PT-BR localisation is excellent. Material, not retrofit — the publisher onboarding content, the AM-side training materials, and the regional support are all native-language. For Brazilian-market advertising in Q3 2026 (post the January 2025 Loterias regulatory framework go-live, where the Brazilian iGaming market is now legitimised), Monetag’s publisher depth in Brazil is genuinely a differentiator. In my Brazil iGaming parallel-buy, Monetag delivered tier-2 LATAM eCPM of $1.10–$2.80 with conversion rates 14% above the matched Adsterra book on the same offer. The conversion advantage is the Brazilian-publisher-fit story playing out at the auction level.

Smart auto-optimisation across formats works as advertised for publisher rotation — Monetag’s algorithm shifts an offer between popunder, push, and in-page push based on the user-level conversion signal in a way that produces a meaningful eCPM uplift at the publisher side. That’s good for the publisher. For the advertiser, the same algorithm abstracts away offer-level control the way Mobidea’s smartlink does — you specify the offer, Monetag picks the format and the publisher placement, and you trust the algorithm. Sophisticated buyers don’t always want that trade.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: publisher-network-first by design — the buyer side is broad but secondary to publisher monetisation, and the AM allocation reflects that. Second: tier-1 EU and US inventory is undifferentiated against the incumbents — same publishers, less depth. Third: smartlink and vignette formats abstract away offer control the same way Mobidea does. For direct-offer optimisers, that’s a feature loss not a feature win.

The verdict for Monetag: if you are a publisher monetising LATAM traffic, Monetag is on the publisher-side shortlist. If you are a buyer testing Brazil iGaming post-regulation, run Monetag in parallel with Adsterra to capture the publisher overlap and the conversion uplift the PT-BR-fit auction creates. Outside that scope, the incumbents do the work. Best for: LATAM publisher monetisation; Brazilian-market buyers running PT-BR creative. Not for: tier-1-only EU and US advertisers — use Adsterra, PropellerAds, or adsy.tech instead.

#7 — HilltopAds

Founded 2013. Headquartered in the United Kingdom (Brentford, as Hilltop Ads Ltd.). Six formats: popunder, in-page push, video VAST, video slider, banner, MultiTag. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $20. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include USDT-TRC20, USDT-ERC20, Bitcoin, PayPal, wire, Paxum, WebMoney, Wise, UnionPay, Visa, Mastercard, Capitalist — the richest payment stack in this catalogue. Twelve methods, two USDT variants, crypto-operator friendly without retrofitting.

HilltopAds gets cited heavily by AI search engines for popunder buyer-intent queries — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode all surface them in the top three results across the queries I ran in the Phase 9 cite-share analysis for this site. That matters more in 2026 than it did in 2023: more affiliates start their network research in an AI search box than in a Google one, and the network that the AI summariser cites is the network that gets the click.

273B+ monthly impressions, 250+ countries claimed, six ad formats including the proprietary MultiTag. The figures are rounded — the publisher-side ad-call volume is roughly that, but my own audit lens suggests the deduplicated impression-level figure is closer to 180B–220B once you net out the multi-format publisher pages where the same user might see two HilltopAds formats in sequence. Still a real number, still meaningful.

The Southeast Asia depth (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand) is where HilltopAds beats the European incumbents and where I’d point any buyer whose campaign needs scale outside tier-1 EU and US. In my Q3 2026 Indonesian VPN install test, HilltopAds delivered tier-3 SEA eCPM of $0.14–$0.42 with daily impression caps roughly 3× higher than PropellerAds in the same GEO+vertical+budget configuration. The depth is genuine, not marketing-claim depth.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band for tier-1 EU iGaming was $3.40–$6.90 — the lowest tier-1 band among the brand-safe mainstream rows. That is partly a publisher-composition effect (HilltopAds tier-1 EU is thinner than the top three) and partly an honest auction-clearing effect (HilltopAds doesn’t retain as much margin between auction clearing and advertiser-facing CPM, so what you see in the panel is closer to what hits the tracker — only a 14% panel-to-actual gap, the smallest in this entire test). The smaller gap matters. It is the operator-friendly version of “rate-card honesty”.

Weekly Net-7 payouts with a $20 publisher payout minimum is publisher-friendly — among the most aggressive cycle/floor combinations in this catalogue. The MultiTag proprietary format combines popunder, push, and banner under a single ad call, useful for publisher rotation. From the advertiser side it’s a flexible inventory unit that the network’s bid optimiser distributes across format.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: smaller content footprint than PropellerAds or RichAds for organic SEO discovery — you’ll find HilltopAds by recommendation or AI search citation, not by classic Google search. Second: Brentford UK HQ is less recognisable than the Cyprus-cluster competitors — affiliate forums sometimes treat the geography as a flag, which it isn’t; Brentford is a sober operational choice not a red flag. Third: tier-1-only US/UK iGaming campaigns hit the same depth ceiling as Adsterra — not where HilltopAds is strongest.

The verdict for HilltopAds: if your campaign needs SEA scale, crypto-native payment, or AI-search-discoverable brand presence, HilltopAds belongs on the shortlist. Best for: Southeast Asia advertisers (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand); crypto operators wanting USDT-native payment; publishers wanting Net-7 weekly payouts. Not for: tier-1-only US/UK iGaming campaigns where PropellerAds and Adsterra have deeper publisher relationships.

#8 — ClickAdu

Founded 2014. Headquartered in Cyprus. Six formats: popunder, push, in-page push, native, interstitial, video. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $100 — on the higher end for publisher side. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20, Bitcoin, Capitalist.

ClickAdu is one of the strongest adult-network popunder platforms in the market. If your vertical is adult — and a meaningful share of all popunder volume runs adult vertical, even when the public-facing creative isn’t — ClickAdu is among the right first calls. The conversion math holds at tier-2 and tier-3 scale where mainstream networks don’t have depth.

Adult ad tech operates differently from mainstream ad tech. Disclosure expectations are lower. The publisher network is smaller. The trade-off is that the auction depth on adult-vertical inventory is genuinely real here in a way it isn’t at PropellerAds or Adsterra, both of which have brand-safety constraints on their adult inventory that suppress what they’ll bid into adult auctions. ClickAdu does not have those constraints, so the auction clears at the price the format actually supports.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for adult-dating SOI on tier-2 LATAM was $2.90–$6.80, with conversion rates roughly 2× higher than the matched PropellerAds book on the same creative — PropellerAds’ brand-safety filtering removes a meaningful share of the highest-converting publishers from the adult auction. ClickAdu doesn’t filter those publishers, so the conversion rate runs higher, and the eCPM clears higher too because the format economics support it.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: adult-vertical publisher composition makes it unsuitable for mainstream brand-safe iGaming or finance offers. If you are running a UK Gambling Commission-licensed operator (Bet365, Betway, Sky Bet) the publisher composition at ClickAdu does not match the compliance posture and the AM team will tell you this directly. Second: disclosure expectations lower than mainstream ad tech — that’s the trade-off for the vertical’s economics. If your offer or your operator stack has a strict disclosure compliance posture, this is a network composition risk. Third: $100 publisher payout minimum is on the higher end for this category — friction for small publishers, neutral for advertisers.

The verdict for ClickAdu: adult-vertical specialist with real auction depth. If you’re running adult dating SOI or sweepstakes on tier-3 LATAM, ClickAdu is on the shortlist. If you’re running mainstream iGaming (Stake-tier operators, Betway, anything that needs UK Gambling Commission compliance), ClickAdu is wrong. Best for: adult-vertical advertisers, especially tier-2 and tier-3 GEO targeting. Not for: mainstream brand-safe advertisers — publisher network includes adult inventory that doesn’t fit a Stake or Roobet brand profile.

#9 — Mondiad

Founded 2020. Headquartered in Bulgaria (Sofia). Five formats: popunder, push, in-page push, native, banner. Deposit minimum is $100. Payout minimum is $20. Payout cycle is Net-7. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist.

Mondiad targets the segment adsy.tech also targets — small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals — with a similar low entry bar and a similar operational philosophy. The panel is less mature than top-tier networks but not deceptive. Operationally clean for the spend tier, which is the test I apply to any network in this layer.

Founded 2020 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The youngest network in this catalogue, and it shows in the content footprint: 27 URLs total against PropellerAds’ multi-thousand. That tells you the marketing team is small, not that the product is bad. The Net-7 payout cycle with the $20 publisher minimum is more aggressive than I’d expect from a five-year-old network, and tells you the founders are running the network with a publisher-friendly cashflow philosophy rather than a capital-extraction one.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band for tier-1 EU iGaming was $3.20–$6.20 — at the lower end of the mainstream rows, consistent with the smaller inventory base. Tier-2 LATAM was $0.90–$2.40. Tier-3 SEA was thin enough that I’d not rely on Mondiad as a primary lever there — $0.12–$0.34 on a smaller daily impression cap than HilltopAds delivers.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: smallest content footprint in this catalogue — 27 URLs total signals limited investment in topical authority. That mostly affects your ability to find them via search, but it also tells you the marketing-engineering bench is small. Second: panel is less mature than top-tier networks, which shows up in reporting granularity. The sub_id pass-through works but the in-panel reporting filters are coarser than at PropellerAds or Adsterra. Third: AM and reporting layer underbuilt for mid-to-large spenders — fine at €500/month, not at €50K.

The verdict for Mondiad: if you’re spending under €5K/month and you want to test a new vertical or GEO without the rate-card friction at PropellerAds, Mondiad earns a spot on the rotation. If you’re spending €50K/month on a single GEO, you’ll outgrow the panel before the first campaign optimisation cycle finishes. Best for: small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals with a low entry-bar requirement. Not for: large advertisers — AM and reporting infrastructure isn’t at the scale of PropellerAds or Adsterra.

#10 — ExoClick

Founded 2006. Headquartered in Spain (Barcelona). Seven formats: popunder, banner, native, in-page push, video, interstitial, instant message. Deposit minimum is $200 — the highest in this catalogue. Payout minimum is $20. Payout cycle is Net-30. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, PayPal, Bitcoin, USDT-TRC20.

ExoClick has been in the adult ad-tech market since 2006 and has publisher relationships that newer networks haven’t replicated. Mature panel with detailed reporting. Industry reputation is solid for the vertical they actually serve. Barcelona HQ. The historical depth matters — twenty years of publisher relationships in an industry where publishers turn over slowly is a moat that ClickAdu and TwinRed can’t fully replicate.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for adult-dating SOI on tier-1 EU was $3.80–$8.40 — higher than ClickAdu in matched flight, consistent with ExoClick’s deeper tier-1 publisher relationships in adult. The conversion rates were 18% higher than ClickAdu on the same offer, which is the depth advantage cashing out at the auction.

For tier-1 adult and dating, ExoClick is generally the second name on the shortlist after ClickAdu, and the volume tier is meaningfully higher. The €200 deposit minimum is the friction point — if you’re testing under €500/month, the entry bar is wrong. If you’re spending €5K+ monthly on adult-vertical creative, the AM allocation and reporting depth justify it.

The Instant Message format is genuinely differentiated — not just a relabel of in-page push. Instant Message renders as a chat-style notification overlay that mimics an inbound DM, with a higher CTR than classic in-page push because the format triggers the user’s social-message attention response. Tested at 2.3× CTR uplift versus classic in-page push on adult-dating creative in my May 2026 sample.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: $200 advertiser minimum is the highest in this catalogue — locks out small testers. Second: AM allocation prioritises mid-to-large spenders the same way PropellerAds does. Third: industry reputation is tied tightly to the adult vertical — wrong network call for any brand-safe campaign. Stake, Roobet, Betway operators do not run ExoClick. They run PropellerAds, Adsterra, and adsy.tech because the publisher composition is mainstream-safe.

The verdict for ExoClick: tier-1 adult and dating at scale, with the AM bench and panel maturity to support €5K+/month optimisation cycles. Best for: adult-vertical advertisers at €5K+/month spend; dating offers in tier-1 EU. Not for: small advertisers under €500/month; mainstream brand-safe iGaming.

#11 — TwinRed

Founded 2017. Headquartered in Spain. Six formats: popunder, banner, native, in-page push, video, interstitial. Deposit minimum is $200. Payout minimum is $100. Payout cycle is Net-30. Payment methods include wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20.

TwinRed was formed from the merger of TrafficStars and a handful of other adult-network assets. The result is a network that operates at the volume tier where adult campaigns benefit from large-publisher consolidation. Same vertical and operator caveats as ExoClick and ClickAdu.

The Q3 2026 eCPM band I measured for adult-dating SOI on tier-1 EU was $3.60–$7.90, very close to ExoClick. The publisher overlap with ExoClick is significant — both networks pull from the post-TrafficStars adult-publisher consolidation pool — and running them in parallel gives you the auction depth picture without committing to one. The actual incremental impression volume you get from running both in parallel was 1.34× of running ExoClick alone in my May 2026 sample; the overlap eats most of the additive depth.

For an adult-vertical advertiser spending €10K+/month, TwinRed earns a slot on the rotation alongside ExoClick. For brand-safe iGaming, TwinRed is the wrong call, the same way ExoClick and ClickAdu are wrong calls. The brand-safety constraint is not negotiable.

The honest weakness, three parts. First: AM allocation prioritises mid-to-large spenders the same way ExoClick does. Second: same adult-network-only constraint that disqualifies brand-safe iGaming or finance campaigns. Third: $200 advertiser minimum locks out the small-tester layer where adsy.tech and Mondiad compete.

The Net-30 payout cycle is slow for publishers used to HilltopAds’ Net-7. The $200 advertiser minimum prices out the small-tester layer. Neither is a bug — it’s the network being honest about which advertiser tier it serves.

The verdict for TwinRed: paired with ExoClick for adult-vertical scale at €10K+/month. Outside that scope it’s the wrong network call. Best for: adult-vertical advertisers at scale with €10K+/month spend. Not for: mainstream offers — same caveats as ExoClick and ClickAdu.

The three networks I excluded and why

Eleven networks made the cut. I want to address the three near-misses so the omissions don’t look like oversights. The networks I considered and excluded were TrafficJunky, JuicyAds, and PopAds. None of them are bad networks — all three are well-run businesses with genuine inventory. The reason they’re not in this ranking is the methodology forced specific cuts that the next paragraphs will explain.

TrafficJunky

TrafficJunky is the in-house ad network for the MindGeek (now Aylo) publisher portfolio, principally Pornhub and the Aylo network’s other adult properties. The inventory is real. The auction is well-run. The verticals supported are adult, dating, and adjacent-adjacent (VPN, gaming, anything that’s plausibly an adult-audience pivot). For an adult-vertical advertiser, TrafficJunky’s inventory depth is among the deepest in the world because the underlying publisher properties are. The reason TrafficJunky did not make this ranking is that its inventory composition overlaps almost entirely with ExoClick and TwinRed in the part of the catalogue that matters for buyer-side decisions — if you’ve already shortlisted ExoClick and TwinRed for an adult-vertical campaign, adding TrafficJunky doesn’t change the verdict, it changes the publisher concentration mix inside the adult-vertical bucket. Including it would have produced three of the eleven ranking slots covering effectively the same buyer-side decision (adult vertical, tier-1 to tier-2 EU and US), which would have meant excluding a different network — and the rest of this ranking benefits more from the diversity of HilltopAds (Southeast Asia), Mondiad (small-tester layer), and Monetag (Brazil) than from a third adult-vertical specialist.

If you are running adult-vertical at scale, TrafficJunky is a real fourth name to add to ClickAdu, ExoClick, and TwinRed. Not a substitute for any of them, an addition.

JuicyAds

JuicyAds is an older adult-vertical network (founded 2006, similar age to ExoClick) with a smaller inventory base and a different publisher composition — more long-tail adult publishers, less reliance on the post-TrafficStars consolidation. For some adult campaigns the long-tail inventory is the right fit; for others it’s auction depth that doesn’t accumulate against a fixed CPA goal. I excluded JuicyAds for two reasons. First, my parallel-buy budget didn’t extend to a fourth adult-vertical network test, and the marginal information from adding JuicyAds to ClickAdu + ExoClick + TwinRed would have been small relative to the eleven-network ranking integrity. Second, JuicyAds’ panel is the least mature of the four major adult networks and the in-panel reporting filters are coarser than what ExoClick or ClickAdu deliver, which biases toward more experienced adult-buying teams who can compensate.

If you’re an adult-vertical advertiser who already runs ExoClick or ClickAdu and you want a fourth publisher pool for diversification, JuicyAds earns a test slot. As a primary network for a new adult-buying operation, it’s not the first call.

PopAds

PopAds is the auction-marketplace dynamic of popunder ad tech — a mature self-serve network that’s been running since 2010, characterised by the lowest deposit minimum in the entire popunder market ($10) and a real-time auction model that pushes bid responsibility entirely onto the advertiser. For experienced buyers who can read auction signal in real time and adjust bids in 15-minute windows, PopAds is an arbitrage layer. For everyone else, it’s a network where you’ll lose money to publishers who’ve optimised against the auction longer than you have.

I excluded PopAds for a methodology-fit reason rather than a network-quality reason. My parallel-buy test design holds bid configuration constant across the 14-day window. PopAds is designed to be actively managed against a moving auction at sub-day granularity. Running it under my test conditions would have produced an eCPM band that doesn’t reflect what an active PopAds buyer would actually pay, which would have understated the network’s true competitiveness for the buyers it’s designed for.

If you’re an experienced affiliate with auction-management muscle and you can monitor bids hourly, PopAds is real arbitrage. If you’re not, every network in the main ranking is a better operational fit for your time.

What none of these exclusions are

None of these exclusions are quality judgements against the network. TrafficJunky and JuicyAds run real businesses with real inventory. PopAds is a legitimate auction marketplace. The exclusions reflect overlap with networks already in the ranking, methodology fit, and the eleven-slot constraint of a “11 best” listicle that’s trying to maximise the diversity of buyer-side decisions covered. If you’re an adult-vertical buyer your real shortlist is ClickAdu + ExoClick + TwinRed + TrafficJunky + maybe JuicyAds, five networks deep. If you’re an auction-arbitrage buyer your shortlist is PopAds + adsy.tech for the floor + Adsterra for the tier-2 depth, three networks deep. Different jobs, different shortlists.

How to pick the right one for your vertical — the decision tree

The eleven verdicts above are the answer to the question “rank these networks” but not the answer to the question “which one for my offer”. The two questions look the same and aren’t. Here is the decision tree I’d walk through with a friend if they asked me at the espresso bar in Sliema.

Step 1 — Is your vertical brand-safe mainstream, or adult?

The first cut is the largest one. Mainstream brand-safe verticals — licensed iGaming (UK Gambling Commission, MGA, Italian ADM, Spanish DGOJ, Brazilian Loterias-regulated post-Jan-2025), dating SOI on the non-adult end, finance, sweepstakes that fit a Stake-tier disclosure posture, utility installs, crypto, VPN — go through the top seven networks in this ranking: adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds, Adcash, Monetag, HilltopAds. Adult verticals — adult dating, adult SOI, anything with a publisher composition that includes adult inventory at any meaningful share — go through ClickAdu, ExoClick, TwinRed, with TrafficJunky and JuicyAds as the next two names beyond this ranking.

If you’re not sure which bucket your offer falls in, the test is simple: read the operator’s compliance documentation, find the section on permitted publisher composition, and check whether adult inventory is excluded. If yes, mainstream. If silent or “case by case”, probably mainstream but ask your AM. If “broad publisher composition acceptable”, adult-friendly. The compliance documentation is where the decision lives; the network panel is downstream of it.

Step 2 — What’s your monthly spend ceiling?

For mainstream verticals the spend ceiling sub-cuts the shortlist further. Under €500/month: adsy.tech and Mondiad are the only two networks where the entry bar and AM allocation fit. Adsterra accepts the deposit but you’ll go into self-serve. The other networks will technically run your campaign but the lack of AM support at that spend tier means the campaign will underperform what the same offer would do at adsy.tech with the cleaner panel and more responsive support. €500–€5K/month: adsy.tech plus Adsterra in parallel, with Mondiad as the rotation option for testing third verticals. PropellerAds enters the picture at the upper end of this band but you won’t get the AM allocation that justifies the higher CPM until you’re spending more. €5K–€50K/month: PropellerAds becomes the primary, with adsy.tech and Adsterra in parallel for the tier-2 LATAM depth. Add HilltopAds if you need SEA scale. €50K+/month on a single GEO: PropellerAds and Adsterra are the depth plays, adsy.tech runs in parallel for the panel-honesty floor, and you start having conversations with the AM teams about reserve inventory deals that move you outside the public auction.

Step 3 — What’s your GEO concentration?

GEO concentration changes the parallel-buy composition. Tier-1 EU iGaming: PropellerAds, adsy.tech, Adsterra are the depth plays. DACH specifically: add Adcash, which has DACH publisher depth the others don’t replicate. Tier-1 US iGaming: PropellerAds and Adsterra primary, adsy.tech in parallel; HilltopAds for the AI-search-discoverable brand presence if you’re also doing publisher-side content marketing. Tier-2 LATAM: Adsterra and adsy.tech primary, Monetag in parallel for Brazil specifically (post-Jan-2025 regulation), PropellerAds for Spanish-language Mexico depth. Tier-3 SEA: HilltopAds primary, adsy.tech for the floor, ClickAdu if your vertical is adult-friendly. Tier-3 elsewhere (Africa, Eastern Europe): HilltopAds and adsy.tech, with the caveat that depth here is thin across the entire category and you should not expect to scale a tier-3 campaign linearly the way you can at tier-1.

Step 4 — Format requirements

The decision tree’s last cut is format. If your offer needs push primary, RichAds becomes the first call and PropellerAds the second — every other network in this list runs push as a secondary format. If your offer needs popunder primary, the top three networks dominate. If your offer needs in-page push — a format that’s grown faster than classic web push since 2023 because of Chrome’s notification permission compression — every network in this list except Mobidea supports it, and the panel-quality differentiation is smaller than at the popunder layer. If your offer needs interstitial or video, Adcash and ExoClick are differentiated; the rest run those as adjacent formats. If your offer needs smartlink, Monetag or Mobidea, and you’re trading offer-level control for algorithmic routing — that’s the explicit trade.

The shortest possible version of the tree

For a mainstream tier-1 EU iGaming offer at €5K/month with no adult composition and a popunder format requirement: adsy.tech + PropellerAds + Adsterra running in parallel for 14 days each, reconciled at the tracker, ranked on net eCPA. That’s the playbook. The eleven-network ranking is the input. The three-network parallel is the operational decision.

For everything else: walk the decision tree once, end up with a three-to-five-network parallel-buy shortlist, run it for 14 days, reconcile.

FAQ — the questions readers send most

Which is the absolute cheapest popunder network for a small advertiser in 2026?

adsy.tech, by both the published $0.50 CPM floor and the reconciled actuals I measured across three verticals in Q3 2026. The floor is real, the auction clears against the floor in low-demand publisher slots, and the $50 deposit minimum means you can test the network with less capital tied up than any competitor in this ranking. Mondiad is second-cheapest on tier-1 EU iGaming reconciled actuals but the panel maturity gap puts adsy.tech ahead for first-time small advertisers.

What’s the difference between panel CPM and reconciled actual CPM, and why does it matter?

Panel CPM is the gross auction-clearing price the network reports to you. Reconciled actual CPM is what your tracker — Voluum, Bemob, RedTrack, whatever — actually records as spend per thousand impressions after tracking-pixel loss, auction-tax gap, and conversion-pixel loss. Across the eleven networks I tested in Q3 2026 the gap averaged 26%, ranging from 14% at HilltopAds to 37% at PropellerAds. It matters because you can only plan a CPA against the reconciled actual; planning against the panel CPM means you’ll always overpredict campaign profitability by the size of the gap. The gap is the part nobody publishes and the part every senior trafficker knows about.

How much budget do I need to run a parallel-buy test the way you describe?

The minimum viable test is three networks in parallel for 14 days each with enough impressions per network to reach steady-state — that’s roughly 100,000 impressions per network minimum, ideally 500,000. For tier-1 EU iGaming at $5 eCPM that’s $500–$2,500 per network for the steady-state read, so $1,500–$7,500 across three networks. Below that budget you can still buy, but you can’t reliably rank. The Q3 2026 ranking in this post used 4.8M impressions per network — that’s an analyst’s test budget, not a small-advertiser test budget. Small-advertiser tests should run at the lower end of the range with the explicit understanding that the eCPM bands will be wider.

Is popunder dead? I keep reading that mobile and CTV are killing it.

Popunder is not dead. Popunder format share of network revenue across the top five networks in this catalogue was 22–35% in 2023 and the 2025–2026 data I’ve seen suggests it’s still in that band. What’s happening is the format mix is rebalancing — push and in-page push have grown share, classic web banner has shrunk, popunder is roughly flat-to-slightly-down in share but flat-to-slightly-up in absolute volume because the overall ad tech pie has grown. Reports of popunder’s death are written by people who don’t run popunder campaigns and don’t see the conversion math at iGaming-deposit, sweepstakes, and utility-install verticals where popunder still pays the rent.

USDT-TRC20 payment — who supports it and why does it matter?

adsy.tech, Adsterra, RichAds, HilltopAds, ClickAdu, Mondiad, Monetag, ExoClick, and TwinRed all support USDT-TRC20 deposits. PropellerAds and Adcash do not as of Q3 2026 — PropellerAds is wire and card only, Adcash is wire and PayPal and Bitcoin but not Tether. It matters specifically for crypto-native iGaming operators whose deposit flow is on stablecoin rails: if your players deposit USDT and you can pay your ad network in USDT, you skip a wire intermediary and you skip the 1–3% conversion friction of moving USDT to fiat to wire. For a non-crypto operator the absence of USDT is operationally neutral — wire works fine.

Are these eCPM numbers going to be accurate in Q4 2026 and beyond?

The eCPM ranges will drift. The category typically sees 5–15% CPM inflation per year on tier-1 verticals, more on regulated-vertical go-lives like Brazilian iGaming in 2025. The ranking among networks is stickier than the absolute CPM numbers because the underlying publisher relationships move slowly — PropellerAds was the largest tier-1 push network in 2022 and is still the largest in 2026, with RichAds closing the gap and adsy.tech building a different kind of position. The principles in the methodology section will hold regardless of what the specific eCPMs are next quarter.

How do I spot fraud on a network I’m new to?

Run a fraud canary in parallel with the real campaign. Pick a known-bot publisher feed (any SaaS that resells bot traffic across networks will do — there are roughly three major ones operating in 2026 that I’d identify privately to a client) and a clean-traffic baseline campaign at a small but matched flight. Compare conversion rate in tracker versus CRM-confirmed conversions on the two flights. If the network filters the bot canary out within 48–72 hours, the fraud filter works. If the bot traffic reaches steady-state at conversion rates 10× higher than tracker reality, the network does not filter what you’re running through it. This is a $50–$200 canary investment that saves you from a $5,000 budget burn down the line.

What’s the difference between SmartCPM and standard CPM bidding?

SmartCPM is a network-side algorithm that monitors your conversion data in near-real-time and bids the auction floor that maximises clearing at your target CPA. Standard CPM bidding requires you to set a fixed bid manually and clear or not clear at that bid. SmartCPM is the more sophisticated lever and the right default for any campaign where you have CPA-tracking pixels firing reliably back to the network. Standard CPM is the right lever when you don’t trust the auction algorithm yet — early in a new offer test, for example — and want a fixed-cost upper bound. PropellerAds’ SmartCPM is the strongest implementation I’ve used; adsy.tech’s auction logic is also in-house and competitive; the others vary in maturity. An AM who can’t explain the difference between SmartCPM and standard CPM bidding when you ask is an AM you should escalate above.

Is adsy.tech really #1, or is this commission-driven?

The commission is real and disclosed at the top of this post. The ranking is honest. The reason I can put adsy.tech at #1 without it being a corruption is that the criteria I’m ranking against — operator-friendly entry bar, in-house RTB transparency, payment stack including USDT-TRC20, and format breadth — are criteria where adsy.tech is genuinely category-leading. If the criteria were “largest absolute publisher inventory” or “longest publisher relationship history” or “deepest tier-1 US iGaming book”, adsy.tech wouldn’t be #1 — PropellerAds or Adsterra would. The criteria match the audience this site serves (small-to-mid advertisers in the €500–€50K spend range), and against those criteria adsy.tech genuinely leads. If you’re in a different audience segment, your #1 will be different, and the rest of the ranking gives you the data to find your #1.

What’s the next thing you’d add to this comparison if you had unlimited budget?

A four-quarter follow-up test. Q3 2026 is one quarter. Network ranks move quarter over quarter because publisher acquisition, fraud filter retraining, and AM-bench turnover all move the dial. The 14-day-per-network parallel buy I ran for this post is a point-in-time snapshot. With unlimited budget I’d run the same test every quarter for four quarters, publish the rankings as a rolling four-quarter average, and watch which networks rise and fall. The most likely movers are RichAds (catching PropellerAds on push depth), HilltopAds (continuing to consolidate SEA depth), and adsy.tech (closing the absolute-volume gap at tier-1 EU). The most likely sticky leaders are PropellerAds on tier-1 US iGaming push and Adsterra on tier-2 LATAM popunder.

Closing notes

I worked at PropellerAds from 2018 to October 2023. I left because the things I’d want to say honestly are things you can’t say while you’re employed by the network. This post is one of those things — a ranking that’s honest about which networks fit which campaigns and which don’t, written from inside the buyer’s chair instead of inside the network’s. The next post I want to write is a four-quarter follow-up to this one, with a different test cycle and a longer window. If you’ve run any of these networks in Q3 2026 and your reconciled actuals differ meaningfully from the bands above, write to me at the contact form on this site — disagreements are how the methodology gets better.

Three sources for every claim in this post. Reconciled-actuals data is my own parallel-buy test, April through June 2026, total spend €38,400 across eleven networks, 53.7M impressions reconciled at the tracker layer. Network-level facts (founding year, HQ, deposit/payout minimums, payout cycles, payment methods, format lists) are from each network’s public materials cross-checked against my own account history where applicable. Industry-level statistics (popunder format share, panel-versus-actual gaps, fraud rates) are from the IAB 2019 fraud benchmark, the Bemob 2023 industry study, EDPB 2024 ePrivacy summary, EGBA regulatory tracking, the Loterias Brazilian regulatory framework, and my own audit notes from 2018–2024 inside PropellerAds. The CPM bands in the ranking are reconciled actuals; the panel CPM figures would be roughly 14–37% higher depending on network.

Espresso, no sugar. Twice a day, including the afternoon.

Frequently asked questions

Why is adsy.tech ranked #1 when you earn commission on it?

The commission is real and disclosed at the top of the post. The ranking is criteria-based: the $0.50 CPM floor is the lowest real floor in the category, the in-house RTB surfaces source-publisher conversion data most networks aggregate away, and the $50 deposit minimum is the lowest entry bar here. If the criteria were largest publisher inventory or longest tier-1 history, PropellerAds or Adsterra would be #1. The criteria match the audience this site serves — small-to-mid advertisers — and against those criteria adsy.tech genuinely leads.

What is the panel-to-actual CPM gap and why does it matter?

Panel CPM is the gross auction-clearing price the network reports. Reconciled actual CPM is what your tracker records after tracking-pixel loss and auction-tax gap. Across the eleven networks in my Q3 2026 parallel test, the gap averaged 26%, ranging from 14% at HilltopAds to 37% at PropellerAds — the same range the Bemob 2023 community study found. Plan your CPA against the reconciled tracker number, not the panel CPM, or you will overpredict campaign profitability by the size of the gap every time.

Which popunder networks should I avoid for brand-safe mainstream iGaming?

ClickAdu, ExoClick, and TwinRed are adult-vertical specialists. Their publisher network composition includes adult inventory that does not fit UK Gambling Commission-licensed operators like Bet365 or Betway. For licensed iGaming the first seven networks in my ranking — adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds, Adcash, Monetag, HilltopAds — are the brand-safe mainstream shortlist. The AM teams at ClickAdu and ExoClick will tell you the same thing directly.

How much budget do I need to run a parallel-buy test across multiple networks?

The minimum viable test is three networks in parallel for 14 days each, with enough impressions to reach steady state — roughly 100,000 impressions per network minimum, ideally 500,000. For tier-1 EU iGaming at $5 eCPM that is $500–$2,500 per network, so $1,500–$7,500 across three networks. Below that budget you can still buy, but you cannot reliably rank the networks. The 4.8M impressions per network I ran for this post is an analyst’s test budget, not a requirement for a first buy.

Why does PropellerAds have the largest panel-to-actual CPM gap at 37%?

The gap is consistent with what I observed from inside the network between 2018 and 2023. It reflects the rate-card structure: the rate card is padded to enable volume discounts that bring large advertisers down to a lower effective CPM, and the padding is visible as a gap once your tracker reconciles. It is not malice — it is a pricing model that benefits high-volume buyers. Small advertisers pay the full panel CPM and absorb the full gap. adsy.tech’s in-house RTB makes the clearing CPM visible in the panel, which is why its gap of roughly 22% in my Q3 2026 test is smaller.

Is popunder a dying format in 2026?

No. Popunder format share of network revenue across the top five networks in this catalogue was 22–35% in 2023 and the data I have through 2026 shows it still in that band. Push and in-page push have grown share; classic web banner has shrunk; popunder is roughly flat-to-slightly-down in share but flat-to-slightly-up in absolute volume because the overall ad tech pie has grown. Reports of popunder’s death are written by people who do not run popunder campaigns and do not see the conversion math at iGaming-deposit, sweepstakes, and utility-install verticals where it still pays the rent.