What people actually do with this data

Searching for "write for us" pages surfaces the sites that want your money, not the sites worth a link. Backlink tools rank by domain authority, which a private blog network can manufacture. Neither tells you whether a real publisher is on the other end.

Being in an ad network is proof of a working publication. A site in Mediavine has cleared roughly 50,000 sessions a month and passed a manual review. A Raptive site has cleared around 100,000 pageviews. Nobody buys their way past that with a purchased backlink profile.

So pick the network whose entry bar matches the quality you need, filter to your subject area, and you have a list of active, human-run sites in your niche. Journey by Mediavine and Ezoic sites sit at a lower traffic bar and tend to be more receptive to a first approach; Mediavine and Raptive sites are harder to reach but carry more weight.

Most publisher prospect lists are guesswork. You do not know who already spends money on monetisation, who is on a competitor you can displace, or who is small enough to still be looking.

A publisher running a managed ad network is, by definition, someone who has already decided monetisation is worth paying attention to. They have revenue, and they have a stack you can sell into: header bidding, consent management, site speed, video, newsletter tooling, ad ops consulting.

Competitive displacement is the sharper play. If you sell against a specific network, its publisher list is your prospect list. If you sell a service that complements one, the same list is a warm audience who already understand the category.

The advice available is a forum thread, an affiliate-motivated review, and somebody’s RPM screenshot. None of it tells you whether a site like yours actually gets accepted.

Look up sites in your own niche and see which networks they are on. If your subject area is thin in Mediavine but well represented in Ezoic, that is a real signal about who accepts what, drawn from thousands of live decisions rather than one person's experience.

The new badge marks recently detected placements, so you can see which networks are actively taking on publishers in a category right now rather than which were popular three years ago.

Programmatic gets you reach and no relationship. Finding publishers to deal with directly, in a specific subject area and at a specific scale, usually means a broker.

Filter to a niche and you have the inventory in that category, grouped by the network that already qualified it for traffic. Approach the publishers directly for sponsorships, newsletter placements, affiliate partnerships or fixed placements that never reach an exchange.

The network a site runs also tells you roughly what it costs to compete for its inventory, because each network sits in a different RPM band.

A seller says the site earns well on a premium network. Verifying that before you are deep in a deal is awkward, and finding acquisition targets usually means waiting for a marketplace listing.

Check what a domain actually runs before you take a revenue claim at face value. A site claiming premium-network earnings that is not detected on one is a question worth asking early.

Working the other way, a niche filtered to a high-threshold network is a list of sites that have already proven traffic. Most of them are not for sale, which is precisely why approaching them off-market is worth doing.

Ad network market share is asserted constantly and measured almost never. Public numbers come from the networks themselves.

Counts per network and per niche give you a measured view of where publishers actually are, and which categories a network is strong or weak in. Because sites that leave a network are marked as removed rather than deleted, movement between networks stays visible instead of being quietly rewritten.

If you operate a network yourself, the same view shows which competitor is concentrated in which niche, and where you are underrepresented.