Last updated: July 31, 2026
The four principles
All content on this site is produced under four rules that we apply without exception: accuracy of every checkable claim, independence from the commercial interest that funds the site, transparency about where each figure came from, and currency of the research. They are listed in that order because that is the order in which failures destroy a page's usefulness. A beautifully sourced page full of stale numbers helps nobody, and a current page that quietly flatters its sponsor is worse than no page.
We are conscious that our subject matter feeds directly into financial decisions. A publisher reading this site is deciding where to send traffic they spent years building, and whether to sign an exclusivity clause that will govern their main income for the next year. That is the standard we hold the writing to, and it is why the site carries a named author rather than an editorial "we" that nobody can be held to.
Source hierarchy
We rank sources in a fixed order and do not depart from it. First, the network's own published documentation: help centres, requirements pages, pricing pages, and dated policy announcements published on the company's own domain. Second, official filings and press releases carried by a named wire service, which are attributable and timestamped even though they are promotional in tone. Third, first-hand publisher accounts that describe a documented experience with a date attached — these can establish what actually happens in practice, but never what a rule formally says.
Competitor comparison articles are not a source at any level. They copy from each other, and that is exactly how Mediavine's retired 50,000-session threshold survived in circulation long after it stopped applying to new applicants. A figure that appears only in other comparison articles does not appear on this site, however many times it is repeated.
How a figure gets onto a page
Step one — locate the primary page. Before writing anything about a requirement, we find the page on the network's own domain that states it. If no such page exists, that absence is itself a finding and gets reported as one.
Step two — record the exact wording and the unit. Units matter more than people expect in this subject. Mediavine measures sessions, Raptive measures pageviews, Ezoic measures monthly active users, and Mediavine's main network now measures dollars. The same site produces four wildly different numbers depending on which is being asked for, so we record which unit the network actually uses rather than converting silently.
Step three — check for internal contradictions. Networks are large enough that their own pages disagree. Ezoic's Incubator page protects sites active before February 18, 2026, while its support knowledge base gives February 19 for the same cutoff. We publish the contradiction rather than picking whichever version reads better.
Step four — label anything that is not primary. Monumetric's geographic requirement and its setup fee are described consistently by publishers who went through the process and appear nowhere on the company's own site. Where that happens the text says the figure is reported rather than documented, and the label sits in the sentence itself.
Step five — date the check. Each page carries the date its figures were last verified. That date moves only when something was actually re-checked.
Independence from the commercial interest
This site is published by AdsCompass, which appears in its own comparison. Independence under those conditions cannot be asserted, only demonstrated, so we demonstrate it in three specific ways.
The comparison names the limitations of the sponsoring network in the same table that lists its strengths, including the fact that it publishes no entry criteria and that competing self-serve networks advertise payout floors ten times lower. The table is ordered by how hard each network is to join rather than by preference, and the ordering rule is stated beneath it. And no other network named on the site pays us, has reviewed the text, or has any influence over whether it is included.
What we will not do is pretend the funding does not exist. It is stated on about us and again in the terms of use, because a reader who discovers a commercial relationship after trusting a page has been misled even if every fact on it was accurate.
What we refuse to write
- Invented first-person measurements. We do not write that a withdrawal cleared in a given number of hours or that an application was approved in a given number of days unless it happened and can be evidenced. This is the single most common form of fabrication in monetization content and it is entirely undetectable to readers, which is exactly why the rule has to be absolute.
- Estimates presented as facts. Where a worked example rests on an assumption — sessions per user, pages per session — the assumption is stated in the same sentence so you can substitute your own figures and watch the conclusion change.
- Rankings, scores and superlatives. Suitability depends on your traffic volume, your audience's location and your subject matter. A network that is wrong for a gambling site may be the obvious answer for a recipe blog, and a single ranked list hides that entirely.
- Filler written to reach a word count. If a section can be deleted without removing an answer the reader needs, it should be deleted, and in review it is.
Corrections
Corrections are made in place, and the check date on the affected page moves at the same time. We do not silently edit: if a figure was wrong in a way that could have changed a reader's decision, the correction is visible rather than absorbed into a routine update.
To report an error, send the network's own page as evidence through contact. The research these rules govern is the comparison on Ad Network. You do not need to explain who you are. Author credentials are on the author page, and how we handle anything you send is covered by the privacy policy.