Tatiana Alshevskaya

Key Account Manager

Last updated on January 19, 2023 - 11 min read

The Best Native Ad Networks You Should Be Using

Quick Navigation

Introduction
The Native Ad Spend Trend
Best Native Ad Networks for Beginner – Experienced Affiliates
Best Native Ad Networks for Advanced Affiliates
Conclusion

Introduction

Native is the crown prince – it’s the new mantra that you might often hear when it comes to online advertising (hint: a crown prince is someone who’s likely to become the next king). That’s why we decided to gather all the best native ad networks in one place.

Just recently we’ve touched upon best traffic sources for affiliate marketing and listed Native Ads as one in our top 5 list. And for good reason.

Native Ads spend has been growing consistently in the US, gaining approximately 25% in advertising spending each year, for the last three years.

The Native Ad Spend Trend

Below, you can find the native display advertising in the United States from 2016 to 2020 (in billions U.S dollars) by Statista.

Source: Statista

The spending seems to be going up steadily year-over-year, and the reason, funny enough, is because no one likes ads. Even affiliate marketers have AdBlock just in case. Native is gonna keep growing and evolving because, ironically, it looks the least like an ad, compared to all other formats.

Related Content: Mobile Ad Formats and Sizes: The Essential Guide

Native ads help to avoid banner blindness (for now), they provide additional value to the visitor, and drive engagement. Most importantly, they bring revenue.

Google utilizes native approach when showing ads on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), as well as when it comes to displaying ad websites – they both try to mimic the look and context of the placement they are showing in.

Facebook uses native approach by showing you the ads that correspond to your interests, yet are mostly served as a part of your timeline and (should) fit there naturally.

YouTube isn’t there, yet – its content is too hard to mimic for now, but they’ll figure something out.

Let’s dive in and explore them a little further!

Best Native Ad Networks for Beginner – Experienced Affiliates

1. MGID

MGID has been one of the pioneers in the native. Launched back in 2008, it has spread over millions of websites, and has subsidiaries tailored for specific regional markets.

It’s one of the friendliest platforms for affiliate marketers, requiring a deposit of just $100 to start your first campaign.

However, let’s take a brief look at MGID and see it from a larger perspective.

For one, the traffic flow is estimated at 70 million visits (at the time of writing). While this number is certainly substantial, let’s check where these visits come from:

Source: SimilarWeb

That’s quite a variance, don’t you find? Yes, while USA generates, naturally, the most traffic on the platform (yet still not too much), you can see that the other spots are occupied by Tier 2 countries, such as India and Vietnam.

That’s one of the reasons why MGID’s traffic is often called “low quality”. Quality is defined by the audience, and as an affiliate you really gotta know the audience of the platform, and not just that of your offer.

Done with the audience. So, we know that MGID is particularly friendly with affiliate marketers. What does it offer tech-wise?

First, there are quite a few targeting options for you to address the right kind of viewers:

Location (country/region/city)
Browser
Language
Device
Demographics
Interests
ISPs and connection type (WiFi/Carrier)
Context and sentiment
Phone price ranges

You might notice that there’s no WiFi/Carrier targeting option. It’s unfortunate, but common within native platforms. Keep in mind that you’ll often need to have backup campaigns on your tracker to filter out WiFi traffic and direct it to a different offer.

Next, the other options are pretty useful, too:

Retargeting – for pursuing leads that have expressed interest in your offers
Scheduling – for, well, you know, scheduling the time for displaying your ads
Frequency capping – for limiting the number of times someone sees your ads
Selective Bidding – for adjusting your bids depending on parameters that drive results

So, all of that – good functionality and low entry barrier make MGID a perfect entry point for when you wanna start your path in Native Advertising.

Just don’t forget to study their content guidelines to know which niches and angles are allowed.

If you’re ready to try it out, check our detailed guide and in-depth MGID review.

And, of course, don’t forget our MGID Exclusive 25% Bonus (Up to $5000)!

Signup on MGID

2. Adcash

The last native platform that we’ll be looking at is Adcash.

Adcash is a fully transparent self-service DSP that has been dominating the popunder market since 2007. In recent years they have started to move towards less intrusive ad formats and introduced native ads back in late 2017.

Adcash’s online advertising platform is a perfect place to start affiliate marketing as their easy-to-use platform enables you to run, manage and analyze all your campaigns in one place. Best of all, with Adcash you can unify all your media buying activities as the platform is connected to all the top SSPs and their own exclusive publishers. This means that it has never been easier to manage all your different traffic sources in one place.

Also, did you know that they’re fighting very hard against ad fraud?

Adcash’s in-house team and advanced fraud filters helped advertisers to save around $12.3M in 2019.

Well, this is very impressive indeed!

Now it’s time to look at their traffic and top GEOs.

In total Adcash receives around 10B ad requests every day for different ad formats (native, push notifications, popunder, display and interstitials) and their top GEOs are mostly Tier 1 countries.

The top GEOs for native are France, USA, and Germany. However, as they work with most of the SSPs they have nearly unlimited global reach. Low traffic volumes will never be an issue with Adcash!

However, all campaigns and ads will be validated by their in-house team to ensure that only campaigns that comply with their policies will be approved. Usually, it takes about 3-4 hours to get your campaigns approved and advertisers must be aware of their content rules for native ads.

One of the best things about this platform has is their granular targeting capabilities that enable you to tailor your ads and reach the most precise audience. You can be rest assured that you will not waste your budget on an irrelevant audience.

But let’s find out what the different targeting options are:

Location – country/region/city
SSPs – cherry pick your traffic sources from over 200+ trusted SSPs or target Adcash’s exclusive publishers or both!
ISPs and Connection Type (WiFi/Carrier) – they are the only platform out of 5 who’s offering this targeting option
Browser name/version/language targeting
Device Types & OS (name/version) targeting
User Interest – reach audiences who’re more likely to be interested in your product/service based on their interests
Website Categories – choose website verticals where you would like your ads to appear
Zones – they have 3 different levels of zones (unique ad placement using a structure 123456-123456-123456) that can be either whitelisted or blacklisted

Besides the targeting options, you can also use their dynamic macros (city, country and OS) to make your ads even more relevant to your target audience and increase your CTRs and conversion rates.

Lastly, you can use their frequency, zone, and bid capping options to keep your spending under control.

When it comes to bidding, you can choose between CPM, CPC, and their CPA Target bid types. Their CPA Target is very powerful as it helps advertisers to achieve their targeted acquisition cost without any manual optimization.

However, let the system to run at least a few days to analyze your campaign before it can start to automatically find the best-converting traffic sources for you. After that, you can sit back and relax!

It’s also important to mention that they have two different campaign wizards – Express and Advanced. If you’re new to Adcash, then their Advanced campaign can be a bit complex to set up as they have so many different options.

However, they have a great support team who’ll be able to assist you to ensure that you have set up your campaign correctly.

Adcash is a great place to unify all your media buying activities via a single platform.

Check out our detailed guide and in-depth Adcash review.

Signup on Adcash

3. TrafficStars

TrafficStars is an adult ad network and ad exchange that offers full support for native, alongside other ad formats.

Expect high-quality traffic from exclusive publishers worldwide, and bid on premium ad inventory in real-time.

TrafficStars uses a custom native ad widget and the campaign creation interface makes it easy to upload your creatives and design your ads in seconds.

You can select the CPC or CPMV (cost per 1000 views) cost model for your ads, so you only pay for impressions seen by actual users.

The ad network is predominantly geared towards adult advertisers and publishers, although certain other verticals can also perform well.

4. EvaDav

EvaDav may be a relatively new company to the native advertising space, but don’t think these guys don’t mean business.

In the few years since they’ve been established, we’ve already seen them throw down some pretty hefty ad tech, proving the experience and vision of the team to be on an equal footing with just about any other ad network you could name.

In many aspects, the innovative ad tech and ludicrously easy to use interface far exceed that of its competitors, a fact that hasn’t gone unnoticed by both publishers and advertisers.

From a high converting native push-notification ad format to a proprietary anti-fraud system and predictive behavioral algorithm, EvaDav really has pulled out all the stops.

And they’ve got the stats to back it up.

You can expect to tap into a traffic source of over 600 million daily impressions, at close to 100,000 publishers, 45,000 advertisers, and 400,000 active campaigns.

If the volume is your concern, there’s really no contest.

Here’s a sneak peek of their source distribution:

So why choose to work with EvaDav?

Well, for one, they have traffic in 250 GEOs, and work with any vertical, making them the perfect partner for CPA campaigns and affiliate advertisers.

You’re also looking at some quality top-tier traffic with over 1 million new monthly subscriptions, so you’ll be able to get your offers seen by hungry traffic sources, no matter where in the world you wanna advertise.

Here are just a few of the verticals that are getting amazing results from the platform:

Gaming
Dating
Beauty
Sports
eCommerce
Health
Tourism
Education

Then there’s the slick campaign creation and targeting options that enable you to map your campaign down to the granular level.

These include:

Ad format
Frequency capping
Countries & bid
City
Device
Browser
Language
Subscription period
Start and stop hour
ISP
Advertising limit
Audiences

The other good news for affiliates is super fast campaign approval, 100% viewability, premium inventory, and fraud protection, as well as ad tech which shows your ad to the right user at the right time, to make sure the CR and CTR stay in your favor.

In regards to payments, all major payment methods are supported, including:

PayPal
Skrill
WebMoney
ePayments
Paxum
Bank transfer
Visa
Payoneer

Plus with a $25 payout and only $100 initial deposit and top-up amount, it’s an extremely advertiser-friendly platform to use.

Approval to the platform is fast and it works seamlessly with all major trackers such as Voluum, RedTrack, BeMob, Binom, and Thrive to name a few.

You’ll also be assigned a personal account manager available 24/7 to help you kickstart your campaigns and get the most bang for your buck.

Our verdict?

EvaDav is a cutting edge native ad tech platform that is delivering some consistently good results in top GEOs and verticals.

For quality traffic and volume, they’re at the top of their game, and if helps a bunch that the platform is so user-friendly and intuitive to use.

Wanna give EvaDav a try?

Signup on EvaDav

5. Adsterra

Adsterra is a world-renowned ad network with a Partner Care approach, serving over 30 billion ad impressions per month worldwide.

It works with 18K+ direct publishers and 12K+ brands, affiliates, media agencies, and ad networks dealing with mainstream and non-mainstream verticals.

Adsterra provides unique push, popunder, native, video and banner traffic from all over the world. Leading verticals with powerful profits: dating, utilities, subscriptions, sweeps, VPNs, gambling.

With Adsterra Native ads, advertisers run AdBlock-resistant and cost-effective CPC, CPM, and CPA campaigns. Native banners blend in the web and mobile content driving up to 8x higher CTRs compared to classic display ads.

Main benefits for advertisers:

Partner Care: personal touch, quick replies, top-notch problem-solving skills, access to in-house developed design concepts.
No malvertising is allowed at Adsterra. Malware, along with redirects, unsolicited downloads, and alerts, is strictly prohibited.
Easy start: takes less than an hour to launch a campaign.
Minimum deposit is only $100.
Traffic Estimator gives an estimate of volume and bids.
Three-level anti-fraud protection.
Payment methods include: Visa/Mastercard, Paxum, Capitalist, PayPal,
Webmoney, Wire Transfer.
Easy API and tracking integration.

Bidding Models: CPA, CPM, CPI, CPL, RTB, CPC.

Minimum Deposit: $100

Targeting: 20+ filter targeting incl user activity and retargeting option. As well as rare finds like Browser versions, OS versions, carrier, user lifetime and IP targeting.

Sign up with Adsterra

6. TwinRed

Advertisers/affiliates can expect the same excellent standards of service and support that they have always known from the experienced and knowledgeable Double Impact team.

TwinRed offers global inventory, across all GEOs, and supports many high converting verticals.

Related: TwinRed Review

You can choose between CPC or CPM price models and take advantage of the platform’s extensive targeting capabilities for highly profitable native ad campaigns.

Targeting options include:

Country
City
Sexual orientation
Network targeting
Channel targeting
Device targeting
OS
Browsers

TwinRed uses a custom widget that displays your ads on the publisher site. These ads have a high engagement and CTR and can be used with macros to boost your ROI.

Popular verticals on TwinRed include:

Dating
Gaming
Nutra

Publishers running native ads on their site can benefit from TwinRed’s ‘compete’ technology. This shows banners ads or native ads within the same widget, allowing for a higher CPM value.

Setting up your account is quick and easy, and Skype support is offered as standard.

The campaign creation interface is highly intuitive and simple to use, and advertisers can edit any of the targeting options should they need to make changes to their campaigns.

The system will show you the estimated daily inventory volume and median bid for any placements you create, giving you a benchmark figure from which to assess your campaign performance.

Funds can be added in the following ways:

Wire Transfer
Paxum
PayPal

Deposits are as low as $100 for Paxum payments but customers using wire transfer will need to deposit $500 to get started on the network.

Most popular trackers are supported and advanced macros are available to help you optimize your campaigns.

Users are advised to get in touch with their account manager if they need any help in this area.

TwinRed is a top-performing adult ad network with enough traffic to appeal to high-volume adult affiliates.

Sign up with TwinRed

7. BidVertiser

BidVertiser platform has over 76M daily impressions for the Native Ad format.

Advertisers can choose to run Native Ads for mainstream campaigns, with a daily budget of just $5 and a minimum bid of just 0.003$ per click.

There’s a large number of networking sites, and the platform boasts over 1.5M daily conversions, so it’s’ well worth a closer look.

See also: BidVertiser Review

Along with a large volume of high converting traffic, BidVertiser also has ample targeting and tracking capabilities to make your campaign a success.

These include:

GEO: Country, Region, State
Context: Run of Network
Filters: Quality, Day Parting, Freq Cap
SubID
Device: Operating System, Browser
Environmental: Connection Type, ISP, Carrier

Advertisers can use keywords to get highly targeted traffic which displays their ads in relevant search results.

One neat feature of the platform is the addition of the Real-Time Bid Analyzer, which allows advertisers to see the real-time system top bid for specific campaign targeting options.

Setting up the campaign is quick and easy, and there’s a bunch of advanced settings to fine-tune your targeting and bids.

Advanced targeting options include:

Daily Ad Budget
GEO Targeting
Language Targeting
OS/Browser
Connection Type
Carrier Targeting
Day Parting
Subid Blacklisting
Subid Whitelisting
Bid Override
Bid Automation
Bid Automation Log

You can maximize your traffic with BidVertiser’s Campaign Health Analysis and see which settings may be holding you back.

You can also throttle your campaign which will cut back the visibility potential, or click the reporting tab to get a daily summary of your performance stats

Creating your account only takes a few seconds, and you’ll be able to start running campaigns as soon as you have added funds to activate your account.

BidVertiser is one of the few platforms that allow you to fund your account using cryptocurrencies along with the following payment methods:

Credit Card
WebMoney
PayPal
Payoneer
InterKassa
Cryptocurrency

You’ll need to deposit a minimum of 300$ to get started and activate your account.

Tracking works well with all major trackers and you can use the in-built destination URL macros to identity high and low performing traffic sources.

The platform also has some advanced ad-tech solutions, including top security to protect against bot traffic and malware.

The knowledgeable and helpful support team can be contacted via support ticker or Skype and can assist you with campaign creation or any problems that you may be experiencing.

Claim our BidVertiser coupon here.

Sign up with BidVertiser

8. ClickAdilla

One of the things we love most about ClickAdilla is the interactive traffic chart tool. Use this tool in connection with filters tailored to your traffic to see impressions, clicks, minimum price and recommended price for your ads, based on the last week of traffic activity.

You’ll can also use the price box tool on the campaign creation tab to get a visual overview of the audience reach and traffic volumes, based on your bid settings.

Creating a native ad is as simple as entering a Title and a URL, and uploading an attention grabbing image to rack up the clicks.

You can also use a variety of tracking tokens, including:

[DOMAIN] – HTTP referrer domain name.
[PRICE] – your ad price (in USD).
[DEVICEUA] – user agent.
[CAMPAIGN_ID] – your advertising campaign id.
[NATIVE_AD_CREATIVE_ID] – ID of the native ad image in the rotation.
[CLICK_ID] – click counter.

ClickAdilla is a leading self-serve ad network, based in Dublin, with global traffic from over 240+ Geos. They offer a variety of ad formats, including Native, In-app native, and In-app Banner, along with advanced targeting options to make your campaigns a success.

You’ll find there’s a high volume of exclusive native traffic on offer, in top performing verticals, including Dating, Sweepstakes, Gambling, and Adult.

You can run native ads using CPC or the CPC price model, and enjoy full control over your expenses with the bid management tools.

Along with some killer placements on exclusive traffic sources, you’ll find targeting that you can tweak to your heart’s content.

Targeting includes:

GEO
Device
OS
ISP/Carrier
Broswer
IP
Website
Language
Time
Category
Demographic
Retargeting
Black/White List
Frequency Capping

This ad network works well with many popular verticals, including:

Dating
App downloads
Desktop downloads
E-commerce
Games

If you’re the type of affiliate who likes to track your performance down to the granular level, you’ll love ClickAdilla’s tracking solutions.

The self-serve ad network is fully compatible with many of the leading ad trackers.

Plus, you can head over to the stats tab to get detailed stats on the costs and impressions for your campaigns and ad placements.

You can fund your account from just $50, and choose from a wide selection of payments including Credit Card, Wire, Paxum, Bitcoin, WebMoney, Capitalist, Robocassa, Perfect Money, and QIWIAd Format.

ClickAdilla is a great ad network with a high CTR, that will boost your conversions and provide enough volume for large scale-media buys. They’re a great traffic source for adult and mainstream affiliates, and with a low barrier to entry, should rank high on any list.

Ready to get started with ClickAdilla?

Use the promo code MOBIDEA5 and get a 5% cashback on your first deposit from $100.

Read our full ClickAdilla Review here.

Sign up with ClickAdilla

9. Galaksion

Galaksion is a global ad network with native traffic in over 160 countries from a pool of exclusive publishers and optimization tools.

They have over 30 billion monthly impressions with direct traffic from manually verified publishers and a free database of high-converting creatives to choose from.

The ad network has a low barrier to entry, with a minimum deposit threshold of just $50, and employs some fantastic targeting and security features that make it worth a closer look.

The Latvian ad network Galaksion has its offices in Riga, and specializes in digital advertising in Asia (ID,IN,MY,PH,TH,VN,SG), Latam (BR,MX,AR), Tier-1 (US,GB,CA,AU), Europe (IT, FR, ES, DE) and Mena (AE, SA, KW, EG).

You can get pretty cheap in tier 1 Geos, and benefit from global support from the Galaksion team.

The platform also has some impressive targeting capabilities, including Country, Region, City, Browser, Browser language, Black and White lists, Platform OS + OS version, ISP, Time targeting, and Frequency Capping.

You can take advantage of various pricing models, including CPC, CPM, and CPA. Galaksion also has some good optimizers, engaging placements, and has good tracking technology.

One of the neat things about the platform is the ability to see potential traffic volumes at a glance, before you start running a campaign.

The website and SSP platform have both recently been revamped, and have benefitted from a lot of neat changes. Setting up a campaign is super quick, but make sure you check the list of prohibited ad campaigns before you get started.

Setting up a native ad is super simple-all you need is a header, a body, and an image. You can add macros from the list provided, and even choose from high-converting recommended templates to give yourself a running start.

You can choose from either the CPM or CPC pricing model, select a frequency, and even import black lists or white lists to use with your campaign.

One cool feature is the CPA goal, which allows advertisers to profit from the platform’s in-built optimizers. Just make sure to set up your postback if you wanna use the automatic optimization tools.

While the network is perhaps best known for pop and push traffic, you can do pretty well with their native ad placements, and the granular targeting helps to get high engagement with users.

You’ll need to click the advanced options to find ISP or carrier on the campaign setup, and the ability to see your projected impressions is a nice feature to have.

If you want to get more technical, you can view the traffic volumes tab, which will give you daily impressions and recommend rate for each Geo for your chosen ad format and targeting.

Plus, with just a $50 minimum deposit, there’s a low barrier to entry, and you can create a test campaign with just $20 to see how well it performs.

Ready to get started? Sign up with Galaksion today, and get a 15% top up on the value of your deposit, using the code MOBIDEA15.

Read our full Galaksion Review here.

Sign up with Galaksion

10. MyBid

MyBid is another adult advertising network that works with multiple ad formats, including native ads. They deliver an average of 16 million native ad impressions per month, the majority of which come from direct publishers — not bad for an advertising network that has just recently opened its doors to the public.

But that’s not MyBid’s best feature. What makes this network stand out from the rest is that it offers only fully-managed advertising; there’s no self-service option available.

Now, a lot of affiliate marketers are not really familiar with working with managed networks since most of these cost a lot — either by requiring a high deposit or charging a fee for their services. However, MyBid does neither of those. For one, the minimum deposit required in MyBid is only $100, and for another, they don’t charge anything to manage their advertisers’ campaigns!

MyBid’s native ad traffic has been proven to work on Dating, Cams, and Nutra offers. They don’t have a minimum daily budget, so you can start a campaign with almost any daily limit.

Upon signing up, someone from MyBid’s team will reach out to you via the chatting platform you chose (Skype or Telegram) within the next hour or so. That is, if you sign-up on a weekday; if on the weekend, expect someone to contact you the following Monday.

So how do you start running campaigns? Once your personal account manager reaches out to you, that’s the time to discuss your advertising plans with them. If you are scaling a campaign that is already successful on a different platform, you can simply share the creatives you want to use and exchange links such as postback and tracking URLs.

Suppose you’re not exactly scaling but would want to test this ad network’s traffic. In that case, you must discuss with your dedicated manager all about your campaign goals, the niche you are focusing on, the offer’s conversion type, what ad creatives you’d like to test, and more.

MyBid already has a list of native ad sources and publishers that work best (and worst!) in specific niches, so they can create a whitelist campaign for you or just block the poor-performing ones from your campaign so you can still test the traffic. Either way, you can expect your campaign to work better than when you’re testing a new traffic network on your own.

Apart from the manager setting up the campaign for you, you still get to decide how you want to filter the audience. Available targeting options in MyBid are as follows:

Geolocation (Country and/or City)
Type of Operating System
Operating System version
Operating System family
Browser family
Browser version
Language
User interest
ISP / Provider
IP Range
The bidding options available at the moment are CPC and CPM, though they focus more on CPC.

When it comes to ad management, your dedicated account manager will take care of everything — from set-up to optimization. Of course, if you want specific changes done on your campaigns, you can ask your account manager to do it for you. They are available 24/7.

Read our comprehensive review on MyBid here.

Best Native Ad Networks for Advanced Affiliates

1. Ad.Style

Ad.Style is a native advertising network that has been in business since 2015. The platform allows advertisers to buy native ads from thousands of website publishers. The network focuses on mainstream traffic and offers a variety of widgets to help advertisers reach their desired audience.

Signing up for an account in Ad.Style is pretty easy. In fact, we can say it’s the easiest we’ve seen for native advertising networks. You only have to fill up a one-page form, confirm your email, and that’s it.

The network has an easy-to-use platform that lets you set up campaigns in a matter of minutes. While it has an impressive traffic volume of 40 billion ad impressions per month, it can only reach up to 65 countries.

Its targeting options are also only a handful. You can narrow it down to the region/state and country, device, and connection. This is very restrictive when you compare it with other networks mentioned above.

Ad.Style has a minimum top-up of $1,000. This can be a barrier for small businesses or individuals who don’t have a lot of disposable income. Additionally, the funding options are quite limited, as Ad.Style only accepts credit cards and Paypal.

While other native ad networks focus only on content recommendation widgets at the bottom of articles, Ad.Style provides multiple widget types. These are:

Native

This is the typical content recommendation ad that comes in the following layout and sizes:

Under-Article

3×2 ratio
4×2 ratio
custom

Sidebar

1×3 ratio
1×4 ratio
1×6 ratio

In-Content

This ad is shown in the middle of the publisher’s text. The available layout and sizes are as follows:

In-Content

2×2 ratio
2×3 ratio

Sidebar

1×3 ratio
1×4 ratio

Tabs

This content recommendation type shows multiple tabs: Suggested, Trending, and Featured.

In-Content

2×6 ratio
custom

Sidebar

1×8 ratio
1×6 ratio

Banner

This shows up as a single native ad recommendation (unlike the usual 3 to 6 ads per widget) that can be placed in the middle of content.

It comes in two sizes: 728×90 pixels and 300×250 pixels.

On-Scroll

This appears as a small widget at the corner of the screen if on a desktop and tablet, and at the bottom of the screen if on mobile. It scrolls together with the page as the user scrolls down the content.

It comes in two sizes as well: 1×3 ratio and 1×4 ratio.

Discover

This one appears like a banner ad within the content. Just like the banner type, only one ad is shown per widget. It only comes in one size, which is 1×1 or square.

The Header Text for Native, In-Content, and On-Scroll can be changed to any of the following:

You Might Also Like
What Others Are Reading
What’s Popular Now
Most Popular
From the Web
People Also Read
People Also Liked
Popular Content
Popular Stories
Popular Articles
Related Stories
Related Content
Related Articles
Recommended Content
Recommended Stories
Recommended Articles

Most networks won’t give you these options, which is one of Ad.Style’s advantage over other networks.

Signup on Ad.Style

2. Outbrain

Now that we’ve talked about affiliate-friendly ad networks, let’s move to the more conventional ones – those that have defined the native ad space.

Our first contender for this category doesn’t require big presentations, as Outbrain has been one of the top platforms for many years now.

Their motto is simple – quality.

Quality in every possible respect.

Just think of it – in order access Outbrain’s network, a website is required to have 1,000,000 US visits per month! That’s a huge turn-off for most websites, even if that number is negotiable (which it is anyway).

But, as a result, you’ve got an opportunity to appear on absolute top-quality placements, such as CNN, Fox News, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Mashable, and more. Got a sense of the level now?

The traffic source distribution is also close to perfect, dominated by Tier 1 countries.

Source: SimilarWeb

But, as it often happens, high quality and strict policies aren’t really good news for affiliates. The approval process on Outbrain is crazy strict. You can submit your creatives numerous times, but still get rejected for no apparent reason.

Make sure to check the 2k-word worth guidelines on their website – it’s gonna prevent a lot of frustration when you’re just starting out. In order to be really frugal on headaches make sure to use a native ad spying tool like AdPlexity (Exclusive Discount Coupon)and see which campaigns are actually runnable by Outbrain standards.

Common sense dictates that if you’re considering Outbrain in your budget, you can prolly afford an ad spying tool (did we guess correctly?), so by all means – do use it!

Even though the minimum ad spend on Outbrain is just $20 (it’s $75 on Taboola), you can expect a pretty high CPC with your campaigns running at as much as $1 per click even in low-competition top tier GEOs.

Now, let’s check the targeting options. The most important question is how well can you tailor your campaign to your target audience from the start?

Turns out, not too much.

Outbrain’s campaign setup assumes the look of Facebook Ads, which would probably get you excited – up until you actually start targeting and see the missing options:

Location – nothing unusual here

Platform – simple device category selection, but with no specific OS targeting (which makes it harder to promote CPI offers)

Audience Segmentation – a retargeting tool to reach out to past clickers/viewers or lookalike audiences

Interest Targeting – the strongest tool from Outbrain. Here you can apply lots of options and create sophisticated combinations for reaching out to your ideal customer

Outbrain isn’t closed for affiliate marketers, but in order to get there you should convince them that you, like their publishers, are the absolute top of the bunch.

Signup on Outbrain

3. Taboola

Taboola has been around since 2007 and has built a lot of authority. It’s the platform to use if you want your content (or offers really) to be displayed on AOL, NBC, Business Insider, MSN, USA Today etc. – a.k.a. the real authority carriers.

If you check their traffic flows, you’re really gonna like the picture:

Source: SimilarWeb

At least 50% of the network’s traffic comes from Tier 1 countries, which makes Taboola a definitive source of high-quality traffic.

Aside from serving regular ads and content suggestions, it also brokers some Absence traffic and serves video ads (for instance, Taboola carried out the Dollar Shave Club video campaign).

However…

It’s a network with a tough entry barrier. For one, they don’t except websites with less than 500,000 monthly traffic, their content policies are pretty strict, and they are super focused on the publisher’s and the consumer’s experience.

Taboola, for example, allows publishers to add negative keywords to restrict ads/content with certain headlines from ever appearing on the publisher’s website.

Or there is also an option for the viewer to hide any ad they don’t like (aka Taboola Choice feature).

What about the part that all affiliates love – targeting? Well, Taboola proves to be kinda conservative here:

Location – Country, Region (+ blocking/exclusion)

Device – Desktop/Smartphone/Tablet

Operating system

Publisher blocking – who knows, maybe you already know that certain publishers aren’t a match for your offers

Audience

The last option – Audience – is somewhat tricky. Basically, it allows you to do two things:

Retarget your audience (Campaign Clickers or Pixel Based options)
Target a specific audience (Audience Segments) – something of a mash between Affinity and Demographics targeting, if we were to compare it with AdSense).

Then come CPC settings, which you’re gonna find are very helpful. Taboola is a CPC blackhole due to its high-quality traffic and top geos, thus you’re gonna have to set your budgets very carefully.

There’s a common CPC Bid, your CPA goal, accelerated/even spending and so on – Taboola generally gives recommendations for default values, which you can use while in the “data gathering” mode.

You can edit your campaign at any time by simply adjusting those settings on the go to increase ROI.

Taboola is really a place for seasoned native affiliate marketers and should only be approached by you when you’ve juiced the hell out of MGID and Revcontent or have more budget and high-quality offers that need premium traffic.

Signup on Taboola

4. Revcontent

Revcontent is a relative newcomer who strives to strike a good balance between the quality of publishers and being affiliate friendly.

And they mean business. It’s not by accident that they’re frequently named as the “top growing native advertising network” despite the fact that their growth strategy is pretty self-limiting.

The Revcontent team set high standards for their publishers, such as requiring a website to generate at least 50,000 monthly visits, and proudly claim (right there on the homepage) to reject 98% of all applicant publishers.

The results? Check them out:

Source: SimilarWeb

Revcontent’s got at least two Tier 1 countries in its GEO list, which is good. But what’s way better – The US generates the absolute majority of the traffic. No wonder, they even have different requirements for US and Indian websites.

They say that “Not every website is created equal”, and they definitely practice what they preach.

Let’s talk about what Revcontent offers to advertisers, shall we?

The list is familiar to you, but there’s a twist.

Revcontent allows you to use one of the bidding models:

CPC – standard cost per click
vCPM – you’re only gonna be billed per viewable 1k impression, i.o.w. when your ad is actually seen.

Most marketers are probably gonna go for CPC, as that makes ROI optimization clear and straightforward. But it’s still nice to have an alternative, especially if you come up with a super attractive angle.

Oh, and don’t forget about the Optimization option – you can optimize for clicks or for actual ROI.

All of the other options are as you probably expect them:

Geo Targeting – both Include and Exclude options
Device & OS Targeting
No WiFi/Carrier targeting – they make it about content discovery, not conversions – so we, marketers, have to live with that
Language
Retargeting – available only for vCPM bidding, for some reason
Brand targeting – for targeting their exclusive top publishers (and skyrocket your CPC)
Topic targeting – for choosing website topics – where you want your ads to appear on

and – ah! – the super dope Exclude Low Volume Widgets option!

How’s that useful? Well, you can filter out websites that have worsened their visits stats since joining the Revcontent network – and this way improve the traffic you’re buying.

Another thing that makes Revcontent stand out is the option for Push Notification Traffic. They offer 180mm – 500mm daily impressions, both for Mobile and Desktop, with 0.42% – 1.52% CTR and $0.01 – $0.20 CPCs. Considering the cost and reach – it may be something worth exploring with the appropriate type of offers, right?

So far, we’ve covered the good sides of this remarkable native ad network. How about its downsides?

Well, consider this – if they reject 98% percent of publisher applicants, they do hold affiliate marketers to even higher standards of scrutiny. Affiliate marketers are often on the dark side of the quality force, so you gotta be realistic in your expectations.

The approval time can easily take 10+ days.

And it’s in your best interest to avoid applying with an exotic credit card. It’s gonna instantly put a big fat red flag on your application.

All in all, Revcontent is a great ad network and traffic source – and that may bring you both headaches (when pleading for approval) and joy (when getting conversions).

Signup on Revcontent

Conclusion

The native ad space is great at producing high-quality leads, scalable results, international reach, and volumes of data and revenue. And the most important thing you should know is that where content is King, native ads are the crown jewels!

So go ahead – run your offers there and shine!

Tatiana Alshevskaya

Key Account Manager

Tags: Affiliate Industry Ad Network Getting Started Native Advertising

The Best Native Ad Networks You Should Be Using

Introduction

The Native Ad Spend Trend

Best Native Ad Networks for Beginner – Experienced Affiliates

1. MGID

2. Adcash

3. TrafficStars

4. EvaDav

5. Adsterra

6. TwinRed

7. BidVertiser

8. ClickAdilla

9. Galaksion

10. MyBid

Best Native Ad Networks for Advanced Affiliates

1. Ad.Style

2. Outbrain

3. Taboola

4. Revcontent

Conclusion

Thanks!