Best Native Ad Networks For Publishers in 2021 (Updated)

Native advertising (native ad networks) emerged as a medium that matches publishers’ and advertisers’ objectives as it synchronizes ads with the content, making them look like the organic content of a website. 

In the digital advertising industry, native advertising can fill publishers’ ad inventories with valuable content that genuinely interests the users and also helps advertisers to raise their brand awareness – all without hampering the user experience.

That being said, native ad networks aren’t guaranteed to deliver a better experience and ad revenue. In fact, most of the native ads are criticized for their irrelevancy and several publishers have taken them [native ads] down – citing their influence on media reputation. So, the ideal way to experiment with native ads while ensuring a better experience is to pick the best network, test, and analyze the performance.

Putting it simply, to get the most out of native advertising, publishers need to have suitable ad networks that meet their requirements. Hence, we compared and reviewed tens of networks, and created a list of the best native ad networks for you.

Table of contents:

• Best Native Ad Networks For Publishers
  
  • Outbrain
  • Taboola
  • Nativo
  • Revcontent
  • MGID
  • TripleLift
  • NativeAds
  • Sharethrough
  • Media.net
• Factors To Be Considered Before Onboarding a Native Ad Network
• What’s Next?

Here is the list of Native Ad Networks for publishers.

Outbrain

Trusted by some of the tier-1 publishers including The Guardian, Men’s Health, and BBC, Outbrain enables publishers to get access to leading DSPs with programmatic native ad demands.

Not only it supports various ad formats, but it also has a content recirculation feature for publishers to recirculate the content and provides more opportunities for visitors to read the content and navigate around the website. Besides, if you’ve AMP pages and looking to serve native ads on them, then Outbrain is the best choice for you.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Taboola

Just like Outbrain, Taboola is one of the most preferred native ad networks that has partnered with some of the top publishers including USA Today, The Huffington Post, and NYTimes. Taboola offers native advertising solutions in various forms. Via the “Taboola Choice” feature, users can remove the ads and also give feedback on why they did it. 

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Suggested Read: An Inside Look at Taboola’s Publisher Products

Nativo

Nativo is an advanced platform for deploying and serving native ads on a website that exemplifies ad content within the format of publishing streams. The ad network has worked with some of the premium publishers including Time Inc., and The Wall Street Journal. Besides ad formats and targeting options, it offers AdStore that enables publishers to select and activate several monetization partners at the same time.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Revcontent

According to its website, Revcontent offers 250B+ content recommendations per month and has worked with many tier-1 publishers including Forbes, Conde Nast, and Wayfair. A publisher can get a dedicated account management team to help with campaign performance. With Revcontent, you can monetize the native ad placements by running header bidding and also serve native ads for mobile apps.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

MGID

MGID is a popular ad network for publishers and suitable for all types of niches. With a large network of advertisers, it has the potential to bring decent native demand for your ad inventory. MGID’s Traffic Insights feature enables publishers to know which location has brought more conversions. With the help of Traffic Insights, publishers can divide their traffic into three categories i.e. Low competition, Hot opportunities, and Best performing. 

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Sharethrough

Sharethrough brings premium native demands and offers dynamic native templating technology that helps publishers to create and optimize native ads for higher CPM rates and viewability. Via Sharethrough’s Native Ad Generator, you can preview a live demo or create a custom ad.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Note: Though Sharethrough and District M merged last year, publishers can still sign up for Sharethrough via the website.

TripleLift

The TripleLift is another renowned native ad platform that helps web and OTT publishers to monetize their native ad inventory with their demand partners. The network provides a dedicated account manager and support team to help and assist in the ad campaign.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Media.net

Media.net is one of the fastest-growing contextual ad networks that has helped many top publishers including Forbes, CNN, Elle, CBS Interactive, and USA Today to monetize their native ad inventories. If you have traffic from the US, UK, and Canada, then you can try Media.net to monetize your site via native advertising.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

NativeAds

If 50% of your traffic is coming from the United States, then NativeAds is worth a try. Via NativeAds, you can create and monetize across all device types i.e. desktop, tablets, and phones. Also, the in-built dashboard of NativeAds can help you to track the performance of ad campaigns.

Eligibility Criteria and Benefits:

Factors To Be Considered Before Onboarding a Native Ad Network

Although the above-mentioned ad networks will help you to get the maximum possible revenue for your native ad inventory, there are a few points that you should know and consider before integrating a new network into your website.

1. Ad Quality: Though ad networks can get ads to fill your native ad impressions, ad quality varies a lot. Several fraudsters use the networks for traffic arbitraging, leading your users to fake content landing pages (with slides mostly). 
2. Pricing Model: The pricing model of ad networks varies with circumstances e.g. Outbrain doesn’t offer a CPC model at certain times of the day. 
3. Setup Process: There are a few ad networks (for example, Media.net) that require manual set-up for each website a publisher owns. That means if a publisher has 5 different websites, then he/she has to set up the ad network for the individual network manually. And all of the websites require approval from the network.

So, before integrating a new network to your websites, make sure you consider the points and also check if the network has an updated dashboard or analytics, supports various ad formats, and offers sophisticated targeting for advertisers. If advertisers can target accurately, your users are likely to see the relevant ads.

Sidenote: If you haven’t considered running display ads and native ads together, here’s why you should. Also, note that you can run native ads via Google Ad Manager and to do so, you aren’t required to partner with any of the native ad networks separately. But the demand will be limited and Google wouldn’t have to compete with anyone, which, in turn, results in lesser CPMs.

Pro tip: If you have more than a million page views, then reach out to us. We can help you connect directly to the demand partners and maximize display ad revenue.

What’s Next?

The list presents some of the Top native ad networks in the industry. Of course, they aren’t the only networks offering native advertising. There are many others e.g. AdNow, ZergNet, etc. and you can give them a try as well.

But, to pick up the right native ad network and monetize your inventory effectively, you need to test them and measure their results. From our experience, it’s better to identify the banner ads that aren’t earning you well and then make them compete against native ads.

So, you’ll end up showing the best paying ads to the users – native ads or banner ads. If you need to place “Content recommendations” at the end of the articles, then you need to partner with an ad network (refer to the above list). You cannot put them against regular banner ads.

Have questions? Let us know in the comments. We tend to reply within a day.

Related Read: How to serve native ads via Prebid?