Every network's published minimum, side by side, and what a small site actually takes home. Their numbers, not ours.
The minimums
As published by each network in 2026. These moved twice in the last twelve months and will move again.
| Network | Minimum to join | Exclusive | Payout | You pick the ads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raptive | 25,000 pageviews | Yes | Net-45 | No |
| Mediavine | 50,000 sessions | Yes | Net-65 | No |
| Mediavine Journey | 10,000 sessions | Yes | — | No |
| Monumetric | 10,000 pageviews | After trial | Net-35 | No |
| Ezoic | 250,000 users | No | — | No |
| Google AdSense | None | No | Net-30 | No |
| AdHotBox | None | No | Monthly | Yes |
Ezoic was the one that took small sites. Its minimum used to be a few thousand visits. In February 2026 it went to 250,000 monthly users, and the trade press described it as leaving the small-publisher market. Raptive sat at 100,000 until October 2025.
The money
No auction, no impressions to count, no RPM to explain. An advertiser takes a slot on a site for a month, the way somebody takes a billboard.
$20
Advertiser pays
Per placement, per month. One month at a time — no contract, cancel whenever.
$5
The site keeps
Every month the placement runs, whatever the traffic does.
$0
The plugin costs
Free, and no minimum before you are paid anything.
A site running ten placements
| Ten placements at $5 | $50.00 |
| Traffic needed to qualify | none |
| Months before the first payment | — |
| A month | $50.00 |
Compare that honestly. A site with a couple of thousand views a month running AdSense typically earns a few dollars in total — for the whole site, not per slot, and only if people click. Here the money is the same whether it is a quiet month or a busy one.
And we keep $15 of the $20. That is the selling, the billing, the approvals and the software. Somebody will do that division and call it 25%, so here it is first: the difference between this and a revenue share is that your five dollars does not move.
Why we can take a site nobody else will
The minimums are not snobbery.
A programmatic network sells every impression into an auction, and an auction needs volume before it can price anything at all. Below some number the revenue will not cover the account management, so they draw a line and enforce it.
There is no auction here. An advertiser buys a place — a town, a subject, a particular site — for a month. Nothing has to be thin enough to bid on, so there is no floor to defend.
Which is why two thousand readers in one town can be worth twenty dollars here and worth nothing at Mediavine. It is a different product, not a cheaper version of the same one.
The part that is not about money
| The big networks | AdHotBox | |
|---|---|---|
| Who chooses the advertiser | An auction. You may block a category afterwards. | You do. Each one, one click, before it runs. |
| Targeting | Country and tier. Nobody asks a small site where its readers are. | One town, if that is what the advertiser wants. |
| Exclusivity | Mediavine, Raptive and Monumetric require it. | None. Run this beside anything. |
| Your readers | Cookies, identifiers, retargeting across the web. | No cookie. No identifier. Nothing follows anyone. |
Creative is text, or an image with a line under it — and every image is uploaded to us and served from adhotbox.com. An image loaded from an advertiser's own server is a tracking pixel whether they meant it or not: it hands them the reader's address, browser and the page it appeared on. So they do not get to host it.
There is no demand yet. Mediavine and Raptive arrive with advertisers already signed. We arrive with the ones we have sold and our own. A site joining now will not see much at first, and there is no exclusivity here precisely so that you do not have to bet on us.
No auction means no price discovery. Twenty dollars is a number we set, not one a market cleared. That is fine at this size and it is a real limitation later.
Approvals are done by a person on both sides. That is slower than a machine. It is also the entire promise, so it stays.
Sources
Minimums, exclusivity and payout terms as published by each network and reported in 2026: Newor Media, Mediavine vs Raptive vs Newor Media, June 2026 — Raptive's reduction to 25,000 pageviews in October 2025 and Ezoic's increase to 250,000 monthly users in February 2026. EastonDev, AdSense Alternatives, January 2026 — Mediavine Journey at 10,000. MeshWorld, Best Google Ads Alternatives, April 2026 — payout terms and exclusivity. EarnifyHub, How to Get Into Mediavine 2026, May 2026 — the 50,000 figure measured in sessions rather than pageviews. Ecommerce Paradise, April 2026. Adsterra, May 2026. Blogging Explorer, March 2026.
Every figure on this page is checkable and every one of them can change without notice. If something here is out of date, write and it will be corrected with the date of the correction.