Smith Jones, Performance Media Buyer and Analyst
Eleven years buying and selling traffic across adult, dating and iGaming. I write every analytical page on this site and I am the person to argue with when a figure is wrong. Profile on LinkedIn.
I write in the first person on this site because the alternative is a corporate voice pretending to be a research institution, and there is one of me. What follows is where the experience behind these pages actually comes from, how I verify a figure before publishing it, and where my knowledge runs out. That last part matters more than the first two: an analyst who never says he does not know is an analyst you cannot calibrate.
Where the experience comes from
I started on the buy side, running pop and push campaigns against dating and iGaming offers. That is where you learn quickly that a platform's advertised eCPM and the money that reaches an account are two separate numbers separated by fill rate, invalid-traffic filtering and a payout schedule. Media buying teaches you to read a dashboard adversarially, because every metric on it was chosen by someone with an interest in how it looks.
The publisher side came later, when the sites I was buying traffic for started carrying their own ad zones and the arithmetic reversed. Working both directions changes what you notice. It has to. An advertiser sees a bid; a publisher sees a payout; the distance between the two is platform margin plus the pops-per-visit ratio, and almost every confused argument in this segment comes from someone comparing a per-visit figure to a per-impression figure without converting. I put that conversion in the main page because it is the single most common error I see quoted back at me.
What I work on now
Three things occupy most of my time. Format mixing and frequency policy, specifically the point at which popunder capping stops protecting session length and starts costing returning traffic — my working position is one pop per unique IP per twenty-four hours, and I say so as a judgement that I have not measured. Fill recovery, meaning the shift from a single-demand tag to a feed connection so unsold impressions go into an exchange instead of rendering blank, which is where oRTB, XML and JSON integrations earn their setup time. And payout structure comparison, which in practice means reading a platform's own help centre rather than its marketing page, because those two documents disagree more often than anyone would like.
How I verify a figure before it goes on a page
A number reaches publication through one of four tiers, and the tier decides how it is written. Platform documentation — a help-centre article, a payout page, a publisher agreement — supports an unqualified statement. Direct observation of what is visible without spending money supports a first-person description of what I saw. Regulatory and court records support anything touching compliance, cited with the docket or bill number so a reader can pull the original. Industry write-ups support nothing on their own; a figure found only there is either labelled unverified in the text or left out.
When sources conflict I publish the conflict. Settling it silently would be a guess dressed as an answer. Two live examples sit on the main page. EvaDav states a twenty-five dollar minimum on one of its own pages and one hundred on another; both pages are live, neither is dated, and I could not establish which is current. HilltopAds does the same thing with Bitcoin, listing fifty dollars in one help-centre article and two hundred in another, with a third threshold for USDT appearing in neither. Picking one figure would have looked cleaner and would have been a guess presented as a fact.
What I will not write
I do not publish invented personal measurements. If a payout took a specific number of hours, that has to be an account I ran, and where I have not run one the text describes what the platform states and what its schedule implies. I do not hold a degree in this and I am not going to invent one; there is no relevant university programme, and a fabricated credential is trivially checkable and worth less than nothing. The evidence for my competence is the specificity of the pages themselves, which is the only evidence that would matter to a reader anyway.
I also avoid the ranking format. This site publishes no scores and no "best network" verdict, because payout terms are multidimensional and the platform that suits a tube site withdrawing to a bank account is not the one that suits a small blog withdrawing to a crypto wallet. Comparison tables here carry factual columns and the reader does the weighing.
The commercial relationship, from my side
This site earns from a referral arrangement with AdsCompass, described in full in the editorial policy. I write the comparison tables anyway, including the rows where that platform loses. It has the highest e-wallet payout floor of the seven listed and defaults to Net30 on RTB accounts, and both facts are printed in the same table as its advantages. My reasoning is self-interested: a publisher who catches an omission stops reading, and a page that has stopped being read earns nothing for anybody.
Where my knowledge runs out
I have not run live publisher accounts on all seven platforms in the comparison, and I say so on the main page. I do not have a reliable segment-wide figure for ad-blocker losses on explicit inventory and distrust the ones I have seen quoted. I cannot tell you what a specific platform will pay for your specific GEO mix, because that is visible only in a traffic calculator after registration. Anything that would require me to guess at those gets flagged in the text instead of filled in.
The pages I write sit on Adult Ad Networks, and the wider context for the site — its scope, its funding and its jurisdiction — is on the about page. The legal frame I work inside is in the terms and conditions, and because readers in this segment care about it more than most, the privacy policy and cookie policy describe exactly what is and is not recorded when you read something of mine.
Have documentation that contradicts something published here? The contact page reaches me directly. Reports that include the source get actioned faster, because verification follows the hierarchy in how we check figures, and a claim without a source cannot clear it.