5 Ad Networks: My A/B Test Results

chloeest

Running a few finance sites with my partner, I've spent the last year genuinely A/B testing five premium ad networks. No fluff - here's what the data said.

Test A: Mediavine
My best-performing site (millions of impressions monthly) went here. RPMs held steady around €55-€70 depending on the quarter - Q4 obviously spiked. Dashboard is clean, support replies fast, optimisation is basically set-and-forget. If you qualify, it's a no-brainer. My other sites kept getting rejected though.

Test B: Raptive
Moved my second site here after Mediavine turned it down. RPMs around €50-€65. Slightly more conservative with ad placements, but solid for brand-safe niches. Stable traffic around 9 million impressions a month.

Test C: AdPlunge
This was the wildcard. A colleague recommended it, so I threw my third site (rejected by Raptive - sigh) on there expecting nothing special. RPMs landed €47-€60, and in some GEOs actually beat Raptive. Less strict on entry, more flexibility. Ended up onboarding a second site. Their team optimises placements and demand actively - made a real difference. Demand quality felt similar to the big two.

Test D: Ezoic
Used for site four. With Premium enabled, RPMs were €12-€17 for a couple of months, then collapsed. Ads also turned way too spammy.

Test E: Adsterra
First network I tried before getting into the others. Awful. That's it.

Takeaway: If you've got the traffic and can get in, Mediavine and Raptive are consistent top performers. AdPlunge held its own and offered more flexibility across multiple sites. The others are stage-dependent - there's a clear jump once you hit the top tier.

ryanseo

It's pretty obvious when a post is just a thinly veiled affiliate play. No real breakdown of CPM floors, no mention of site quality tiers or integration quirks - just glowing "I tried it" language. The lack of any comparative negatives or technical gotchas screams promotion. Anyone who's run programmatic through multiple networks knows you don't get a clean win with zero headaches. Smells like a push for AdPlunge.

maya-b2b

not the most balanced comparison, to be fair. pitting the top performers against the bottom of the barrel doesn't give us much to work with. Would've loved to see a proper shootout between the top 4 or 5 - that would actually tell us something useful. appreciate the effort, but the dataset here skews the takeaway.

sophiasaas

adplunge? total scam

roichaser

50+ RPM is a pipe dream unless you're laser-focused on tier 1 traffic. Chasing that with tier 2 or 3 audiences is a waste of budget-might as well burn cash.

liamcopy

Tried a few of those myself.

Adsterra stood out. Easiest adoption I've seen. You can monetise literally any niche.

I've been running Latin American traffic through it. CPM lands between two and four US dollars.

For that region? That's solid. Most networks struggle to hit half that.

prpro

Those RPM figures are impressive, but I'd want to dig into the traffic mix before jumping to conclusions. Finance is a fascinating vertical-it can behave like a completely different beast depending on GEO, device split, whether the traffic is direct or from search, and how aggressive the ad placements are.

The network comparison is useful, but the bit about "rejected here, strong results there" is where it gets tricky to generalise. Sometimes it's not just about network quality-it's about how each network categorises the site, what kind of demand they expose it to, and how much control you have over layout. I'd love to know whether those RPM differences held up after normalising for GEO and seasonality. That would tell a much clearer story.

olivia-roas

Nice numbers, OP. But that "feel free to contact me" pitch gives me the creeps. Every time someone pops up promising "additional revenue" from a random ad network, it's usually recycled remnant inventory or shady redirects. Burned a few hundred bucks testing exactly that kind of offer a year ago-spent more time cleaning up bot traffic than actually earning. Watch your back, especially if you're scaling. The second your fill rates look off or the CPM dips below your floor, pull the plug. Stick with the networks that let you control your own floors and demand sources. If anyone's actually found a non-sketchy network that holds up at volume, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just noise.

noahcontent

I've been testing ad networks for a while and would love to hear how Playwire performs for you. I've come across the name but haven't run a full audit yet.

Right now I'm on Ezoic with a gaming site pulling about 1.8M page views monthly. Honestly, the numbers haven't matched the hype. the RPMs are fine, but the user experience hit and the constant fiddling with placeholders has been exhausting. I've been piecing together a decision framework for ad networks - basically a weighted matrix of RPM, latency impact, fill rate, and support responsiveness. if you end up testing Playwire, would you be open to sharing a few data points from that stack? Always keen to plug gaps in the model

miaaffiliate

Did you run Playwire through your filter? Curious about their payout structure for premium offers.

chloeest

Feels like bait-and-switch. My A/B tests on ad network referrals always flag Mediavine or Raptive disguised as 'recommendations'. Come on.

liamcopy

Tried Adplunge myself.

Complete letdown. Nothing like the hype.

Adsterra, though? That actually delivered. Way more bang for the buck. Cost-effective without all the fluff.

tagmanager

It frustrates me when people set up comparisons like this without controlling for site quality. That's like me running a campaign on a premium US desktop publisher and comparing it to cheap Indian mobile traffic - then acting surprised the US site wins. Of course it does. I've seen fantastic RPMs with my own in-house stack on solid US audiences, and honestly, I wouldn't give those middlemen 15-20% either.

funnelhacker

top 5 by ROAS? got a specific vertical?

chloeest

acceptance isn't guaranteed - that's a variable we can't control. From a CRO perspective each network becomes its own A/B test: getting approved vs not, then conversion rates. if there's a specific one from your list someone wants data on, name it - I'm willing to bet someone here has run a heatmap on that approval funnel and can share insights.

avadata

you're mixing up eCPM and RPM - common mistake. eCPM is what the network reports as effective cost per mille, RPM is what you actually take home after their cut. if someone's claiming 80 eCPM on 500k impressions, that's a 5-figure payout alright (around £40k), but you'd need to check whether that's net or gross. most networks quote gross eCPM and pocket the difference. So no, you're not hitting five figures on less than half a million impressions with real RPM unless you've got some premium direct deals running

storyweaver

Oh, you've stumbled into the exact two that make me want to throw my laptop out the window. Ezoic's interface is a masterclass in making you feel like you've accidentally opened the wrong app - and then it still won't load your reports. Playwire's just as bad, but with extra helpings of confusing dashboards and vanishing support. Two peas in a frustrating pod.

chloeest

Right - but the title says 'I Tried Out These 5 Ad Networks', not 'Top 5 Ad Networks To Use'. Test A vs Test B: reading the actual title vs assuming a 'best of' list.

I get the frustration of wanting a benchmark, but this was a personal A/B test across the only networks I got accepted into and could properly monetise. Listing the usual suspects I had no data on would've been a waste of everyone's time.

This isn't a recommendation - it's a rundown of what I actually saw in my heatmaps and conversion data. Take it as a case study, not a definitive guide.

maya-b2b

From my experience running B2B campaigns, Raptive comes out top, followed by Playwire, Mediavine, and Freestar.