Websites Using Venatus

Venatus is an ad platform built around gaming: game publishers, fan sites, browser games and the tools players use. It manages monetisation for websites, apps and games and sells campaigns to brands that want those audiences. The publishers below are verified from public advertising records.

What Venatus is

Venatus was founded in 2010 by Matt Cannon and Rob Gay, opened regional offices in the US and Australia in 2015, and took investment from Livingbridge in 2021. It employs more than 120 people and names EA, Rovio and FUTBIN among its publisher partners, with brands such as LEGO, PlayStation and Disney on the advertiser side.

It sells to advertisers in three places, which it calls in the game, around the game and away from the game. For publishers the toolkit is header bidding, video, high-impact formats, ad block recovery, private marketplaces and a direct sales team. Website, app and browser game monetisation are handled as separate publisher types.

Requirements

Venatus publishes no traffic threshold. Its publisher page is a contact form rather than an application with a number attached. Figures quoted elsewhere online are not Venatus's own, so they are not repeated here.

What it does say, in its guidance on getting approved by demand partners, is what gets sites rejected: too little traffic, low-quality content, a poor user interface or ads that break industry standards. It also says it aims for 80% viewability across its publishers, which tells you the kind of layout it will expect.

Who actually uses it

The extensions say a lot. About 15% of Venatus domains end in .io, the extension browser games have made their own, and another 6% in .gg. A handful are games hosted on GitHub Pages, and many of the rest are game wikis, databases and community sites. Its largest overlaps are with Playwire and NitroPay, the other two gaming specialists in the directory.

What publishers typically earn

Venatus does not publish rates. Gaming inventory is cheaper per impression than finance or home content, but brand campaigns for games, consoles and toys are a real premium on top, and a direct sales team selling those campaigns is the main thing a gaming specialist offers over a general network.

How this list is built

Membership is established from public advertising records: the standardised files and tags that networks and publishers maintain so advertisers can confirm who is authorised to sell a site's inventory. Nothing here is self-reported by the site, and nothing is inferred from how a page looks.

Records are cleaned before they reach this list: duplicate entries are collapsed, malformed entries are rejected, and two test hosts, one of them on Venatus's own domain, are excluded. See our methodology for what we check and what we deliberately leave out.

The honest caveat: authorisation records can lag reality slightly when a publisher leaves a network, which is why entries are re-checked over time and carry the date they were last confirmed.

Frequently asked questions