The Best Ad Networks for Publishers in 2026
Most lists of ad networks are copies of lists written in 2021. They still name AdThrive, which has been called Raptive since 2023. They still say Ezoic takes sites at 10,000 visits a month, which stopped being true in February. They still send publishers to PropellerAds, which moved its publisher business to a different brand four years ago.
The entry requirements moved in both directions during 2025 and 2026, and they moved a long way. Here is where each network actually stands, what it pays, and who it will take.
What changed this year
Three changes matter more than the rest.
Ezoic raised its minimum 25 times over. Until 19 February 2026 the bar was 10,000 monthly visits, which made Ezoic the default answer for anyone too small for Mediavine. It is now 250,000 monthly active users. Sites already running Ezoic before that date keep their access, but only while they stay integrated. Pull the code for more than seven days and the exemption is gone.
Raptive went the other way. In October 2025 it cut its minimum from 100,000 monthly pageviews to 25,000 and folded its Rise program into its entry tier. A premium managed network became reachable for mid-sized sites.
Mediavine stopped counting sessions. From January 2026 the requirement is $5,000 in annual ad revenue rather than 50,000 monthly sessions. Its smaller product, Journey by Mediavine, now starts at 1,000 sessions from tier-one countries, down from 10,000.
So the market split. The premium networks opened up, and the network that used to serve small publishers left that market.
The comparison
| Network | Minimum to join | Payout threshold | Terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | No published minimum | $100 | 21st to 26th of the following month |
| Monetag | None stated | $5 PayPal, $500 wire | Biweekly |
| PurpleAds | None | $20 PayPal, $500 wire | NET+15, monthly |
| Infolinks | None stated | $50 PayPal, $100 wire | NET 45 |
| Media.net | Not published | $100 | NET 30 |
| Journey by Mediavine | 1,000 tier-one sessions | $100 | NET 65 |
| Newor Media | 5,000 monthly users | $50 PayPal | NET 30 |
| Monumetric | 10,000 pageviews, $99 setup | Not published | Paid 5th and 25th |
| Raptive | 25,000 monthly pageviews | Not published | NET 45 |
| Setupad | 100,000 monthly visitors | EUR 100 | NET 60 |
| Mediavine | $5,000 annual ad revenue | $100 | NET 65 |
| Publisher Collective | 3,000,000 monthly pageviews | Not published | Not published |
Where a cell says “not published”, the network does not state it publicly, and a gap is more useful than a number copied between review sites. Everything else comes from the networks themselves, with three exceptions that are widely reported but not published by the network: Raptive’s NET 45, Monumetric’s 10,000 pageview minimum, and Newor Media’s $50 threshold.
If your site is new or small
Google AdSense is still the default, and it is still worth starting there. There is no traffic minimum. The bar is editorial: original content, enough of it, and policy compliance.
Two things about AdSense are commonly misreported. Since early 2024 it pays per impression rather than per click, matching the rest of the display market. And its revenue share is now quoted as two numbers instead of one: you get 80% of what is left after the buying platform takes its fee, and when that buyer is Google Ads, Google keeps about 15% of advertiser spend. The publisher ends up with roughly 68%, which is what it was before. If your account status is confusing, we wrote a guide to what each AdSense status means.
Monetag is where PropellerAds sends publishers now. The split happened in 2022 and the old publisher URL redirects. It takes sites with no traffic minimum and pays from $5. Be clear about what you are buying: the formats are popunders, push notifications and interstitials, not premium display. That earns on traffic other networks will not touch, at the cost of the reading experience.
Infolinks runs in-text and overlay formats rather than standard banners, which suits text-heavy sites that have run out of sensible banner positions.
PurpleAds, which is us, takes sites with no traffic minimum and pays at $20 through PayPal on NET+15 terms. The formats are responsive display, in-page push, interstitial and video. The reason to run it is usually not that it beats AdSense on rate. It is that you can run both, and we fill the requests AdSense returns empty. If you are weighing us against the alternatives, our comparison with PropellerAds is more useful than this section.
Media.net deserves a correction rather than a recommendation. Nearly every list still describes it as the Yahoo and Bing contextual network. Its own site no longer says that. Founder Div Turakhia reacquired the company in 2023 and it now presents itself as a supply-side platform doing managed header bidding. Whether the contextual product still exists in the form those lists describe is not something I could confirm either way.
If you have real traffic
Journey by Mediavine starts at 1,000 sessions from the US, Canada, UK or Australia, tracked through their plugin. It upgrades automatically once you reach $5,000 of trailing annual ad revenue.
Newor Media says on its own blog that it accepts publishers from 5,000 monthly users. Older reviews say 30,000. The lower number is the one Newor publishes, so that is the one in the table, but expect the real bar to depend on where your traffic comes from.
Monumetric starts at 10,000 pageviews and charges a $99 setup fee at that tier. It also requires at least six ad slots on the page, which is worth knowing before you apply. That is a denser layout than many sites want.
Raptive is the interesting one this year. At 25,000 monthly pageviews it is now within reach of sites that would have had to wait years under the old 100,000 rule. The catch is geography: it wants the majority of traffic from the US, Canada, UK, Australia or New Zealand. For sites at 100,000 pageviews and above with $12,000 of prior ad revenue, it offers a 15% minimum RPM lift guarantee.
Setupad sits around 100,000 monthly visitors and is built on header bidding, combining Prebid, Google Open Bidding and Amazon TAM. Payment is NET 60 with a EUR 100 threshold.
If you are large
Mediavine at $5,000 annual ad revenue, with a share that scales from 75% up to 90% as earnings grow. Full tiers are on their revenue share page.
Publisher Collective is what Snigel became. The two merged in February 2025, and the entry requirement is now 3 million monthly pageviews plus roughly EUR 300 a day in earnings. Any list still showing Snigel at 100,000 pageviews is wrong by a factor of thirty.
The thing that actually moves your revenue
Picking a network matters less than most articles suggest, because the number that decides your earnings is fill rate, not headline RPM. A network paying a $3 CPM on 60% of your requests earns you less than one paying $2 on all of them.
Three things affect fill more than your choice of network.
Running more than one network. Almost none of them demand exclusivity, and a second network in the waterfall picks up what the first declines. This is the entire reason unfilled recovery works.
Your ads.txt file. If a demand partner is not authorised in it, that partner cannot bid on your inventory, and you will never see the missing money as anything but a lower rate.
Where your traffic comes from. Fill rates fall hard on traffic from outside the markets with the most advertisers. This is not something a different network fixes.
If those terms are unfamiliar, our guides to publisher metrics and the pricing models cover the vocabulary.
Two pieces of 2026 context
Third-party cookies did not go away. Google abandoned deprecation in July 2024, cancelled the replacement user-choice prompt in April 2025, and in October 2025 retired the Privacy Sandbox APIs altogether, including Topics and Protected Audience. Chrome still allows third-party cookies by default. Safari and Firefox still block them. Any advice written around the coming cookieless web was describing something that was called off.
Search traffic to publishers fell sharply. Chartbeat data in the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends report, covered by Press Gazette, puts the global drop in Google search referrals at about a third in the year to November 2025, with Discover referrals down 21%. Pew found that when an AI Overview appears, organic click-through roughly halves and only 1% of users click a link inside the overview.
That reframes the whole question. If you have a third less traffic than you did, the gap between a good network and a mediocre one is smaller than the gap between filling your inventory and not filling it.
How to choose
Start with what you can join. Apply to AdSense first, since approval there tends to make other applications easier, then add whichever tier your traffic qualifies for. Add a second network for the requests the first one declines. Check your ads.txt before concluding a network underpays.
Then leave it alone long enough to measure. Rates move with the ad calendar, and a fortnight of data in January tells you almost nothing about what a network pays in October.
