Verifying Payout Figures Before Publication
Every number on this site carries a source and a check date, and this page explains the machinery behind that claim. It covers what counts as a source, the order in which sources override each other, the exact routine a payout figure passes through before publication, how conflicts are handled, and what happens when something turns out to be wrong. The reason for writing it down in this detail is practical: a publisher deciding where to route inventory is making a revenue decision, and they are entitled to know how much weight a given figure can carry.
The source hierarchy, in order of authority
Tier one: platform documentation. Help-centre articles, payout pages, publisher agreements and API documentation published by the platform itself. This is the only tier that supports an unqualified statement of fact. When a figure on this site appears without a hedge, it came from here. The weakness of this tier is that these pages are frequently undated and are edited without revision notes, which is why every figure also carries the date we read it.
Tier two: direct observation. What can be seen without spending money — registration flows, the structure of an account interface, published terms, whether a stated threshold exists at all. This supports a first-person description of what was observed and nothing beyond it. Observing that a platform publishes no traffic requirement is a legitimate finding; inferring what its unpublished requirement must be is not.
Tier three: regulatory and court records. Statute text, bill numbers, published judicial opinions and regulator trackers, used for anything touching compliance. These are cited with the identifying number so a reader can retrieve the original. The Supreme Court decision discussed on the main page is cited by docket number and links to the opinion PDF for exactly this reason.
Tier four: industry write-ups. Aggregator listings, affiliate blogs and trade articles. This tier establishes nothing on its own. A figure that appears only here is either labelled unverified in the body text or omitted. The failure mode is well documented within this segment: one write-up quotes another, the original source ages out, and a threshold from six years ago circulates as current because nobody re-opened the platform's page.
The routine a payout figure passes through
The first step is locating the platform's own payout documentation, which usually means the help centre or the publisher agreement. Marketing pages state the friendliest number in the account; help centres state all of them. Where the two disagree, the disagreement itself is the finding and both go into the text.
The second step is recording every threshold, not the lowest one. This is the single change that makes the comparison table on the main page useful, because the headline minimum is almost always attached to a rail a given publisher cannot use. One platform in the table lists five dollars for an e-wallet and one thousand for a standard bank wire, a two-hundred-fold spread inside a single account. A table that printed only the five would be accurate and useless.
The third step is recording the fee alongside the threshold, because a fee expressed in dollars means nothing until it is set against the smallest withdrawal that can trigger it. A thirty-five dollar wire fee is seven per cent of the five-hundred-dollar minimum wire on the platform that charges it, and that ratio is the number a publisher can act on.
The fourth step is the schedule: hold period, release day, release cadence, and whether payment is automatic or request-based. From those we calculate the days between earning and cash ourselves. That column in the comparison table is arithmetic, not a platform claim, and it is labelled as such on the page so nobody attributes our calculation to a platform's marketing.
The fifth step is dating the check. Every page carries a verification date, and that date refers to when the underlying documentation was last read, not to when a paragraph was last reworded.
What happens when sources conflict
Conflicts get published. Nothing here is settled by preference. When a platform's own pages give two different thresholds for the same withdrawal method, both figures appear together with a note that the pages disagree and an instruction to confirm in the dashboard. Two such contradictions are live on the main page at the time of writing, and they are among the most useful things on it, because a publisher who plans around the lower figure and hits the higher one loses a payout cycle.
A discrepancy between a marketing page and a terms document is treated identically and is usually more informative than either page alone, since it shows where a platform's public framing and its contractual position diverge. Where the conflict is between a platform statement and a third-party write-up, the platform wins outright and the write-up is not cited.
Figures this site refuses to publish
Invented personal measurements are the hard line. If a payout took a specific number of hours in a specific account, that has to be an account we ran; otherwise the text describes what the platform states and what its schedule implies, and says which is which. A fabricated timing figure is the most damaging possible error here because it is precisely the kind of detail a reader treats as first-hand evidence.
Live bid rates by GEO and format are not estimated. They are visible only inside a traffic calculator after registration, and any figure we produced would be a guess dressed as data. Where reference rates appear on the main page they are labelled as segment averages for a stated period, with a note that they are not measurements from any particular account.
Company-reported volume figures are labelled self-reported and unaudited, because nothing in this segment is independently audited. The main page carries one such figure and explains, in place, why the two numbers cannot be divided into a fill rate at all. A single ad request fans out into dozens of bid requests. That ratio describes bid density. It says nothing about a publisher's own zones.
Arithmetic we do ourselves
Some values on this site are calculated rather than quoted, and those are marked so the calculation can be audited. The days-from-earning-to-cash column derives from each platform's published hold and release schedule. Fee-to-minimum percentages derive from two published figures, both of which are shown so a reader can redo the division. The GEO-mix worked example on the main page shows the traffic split, the reference rates and the resulting dollar figures, and lets the reader finish the sum. The arithmetic convinces where the claim would not.
Re-checking and corrections
Pages are re-read against platform documentation on a rolling basis, with the payout figures prioritised because they change most often and cost the most when stale. A clear factual error on a threshold is corrected as a priority; a disagreement with a judgement is not an error and gets argued rather than edited. When a figure changes, the verification date on the affected page changes with it, so a reader can see that the page moved.
The method above is applied to every figure on Adult Ad Networks, including the payout table, the fee percentages and the GEO worked example. Why the site exists at all and how it is funded is on the about page; the limits of what any published figure can be relied on for are stated in the terms and conditions. Our own data practice is held to the same standard of specificity in the privacy policy and the cookie policy.
Reports arrive through the contact page and are actioned faster when they include the platform document that contradicts the published figure, because a claim without a source cannot clear the hierarchy above. The standards this process operates under are set out in the editorial policy, and the background of the person applying them is on the author page.