Eleven years buying pop, push and in-page inventory

How I got here

I started in affiliate media buying on push inventory, moved into pop when push CPCs in Tier 3 stopped clearing, and spent most of the last decade running self-serve accounts across networks that sell both. Most of that work has been iGaming and subscription offers in Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, where volume is cheap enough that a campaign produces readable source-level data within days rather than weeks.

The habit that stuck is reading the report by source ID rather than by campaign. Pop delivers from thousands of publisher zones inside a single campaign, two or three of them carry the conversions, and a campaign total will never tell you which. Everything I find useful about a platform follows from that: whether it lets me bid on an individual source, what it will filter before an impression is billed, and what it passes into a postback so a tracker can attribute the conversion at all.

What I know well

• Source-level bid control. The difference between a dashboard where the only lever is the campaign bid and one where a list of source IDs can carry its own rule. Raising a campaign bid 30% raises it on every zone that has never converted, and over a month that costs more than a $50 difference in deposit floors.
• Pop auction mechanics. Why the impression and the visit are the same event on this format, why a $2 CPM and a $0.002 CPC therefore buy the same traffic at the same cost, and why the choice between them is about ceilings rather than price.
• Pre-impression filtering. What IPv6 and proxy exclusions do and, more importantly, what they cost in volume in specific GEOs. Neither is a fraud solution, and treating them as one is how buyers end up with a clean report and no traffic.
• Postback and S2S tracking. Which macros the pop networks pass, why source ID is the only one that determines whether the rest of the optimization is possible, and why attribution cannot be reconstructed after the fact if the postback was not wired before the first impression.
• Tier economics. What a hundred dollars buys in Tier 1 against Tier 3, and how many source IDs that translates into at a volume where the data means anything.

What I verify myself on this site

Deposit floors, payment-method splits, pricing models available on the pop format, optimization controls and the label each dashboard puts on popunder are all read from the networks' own help centers, terms pages and announcements, and recorded with the date I read them. When a figure is missing from a network's own site I say that rather than substituting one from a directory; on one platform the format pages render client-side, so the deposit breakdown never reaches the served HTML at all, and that is stated on the page instead of quietly filled in.

Contradictions get the same treatment. When a press release and a set of directory listings disagree about a minimum, I publish both and say which one has a date behind it. Those disagreements are usually the most useful thing on the page, because they tell a reader exactly which number to confirm at the payment screen before committing a budget.

What I will not claim

The practical consequence is that some sections of this site are shorter than they would be if I were willing to invent the missing data. That trade is deliberate, and the reasoning behind it is written out in the editorial policy.

How I would use this site

Read the comparison table for the entry conditions, then register on two or three platforms before funding any of them. Registration is free everywhere, no deposit is needed to open the rate calculators, and an hour spent reading real bids for your own GEO is worth more than any benchmark table including mine. Then decide where the deposit goes.

Contact

If a figure on this site is out of date, if a network has changed a threshold, or if you think a conclusion here is wrong, write to the editorial address on the contact page and I will check it within two working days. I am also reachable on LinkedIn. What happens to an email you send is covered by the privacy policy, and the limits of what this site undertakes are in the terms of use. Background on the site itself is on the about page, and the comparison I maintain is Buy Popunder Traffic.