The ad network landscape by niche: who dominates what

We index 39,459 monetised sites across 28 categories. Because we know which networks run on each of them, we can do something no network and no review site publishes: show the whole market broken down by subject, and name the leader in each.

Every category, its size, and who leads it

How to read the median authority column

Authority runs 0–100 and is derived from a site’s backlink profile — the authority score guide explains it properly. The median here is the middle site in each category, and the spread between categories is much wider than most publishers expect.

News & Politics sits at 42 and Other at 12. That is not a quality judgement about the writing in either. It reflects how each subject accumulates links: categories where publications cite each other build authority quickly, and categories dominated by individual practitioners answering narrow questions do not, however useful those answers are.

The practical consequence is that the same site would look strong in one category and unremarkable in another, and network approval does not adjust for that. Benchmark yourself against your own category, never against the index as a whole.

Three patterns worth naming

• The premium networks own the domestic-audience lifestyle categories. Food, travel, home, crafts, parenting — subjects with a concentrated audience in the countries where advertisers spend, and content that sits near a purchase. This is the block that general advice is written about.
• The open-funnel network takes the internationally distributed ones. Technology, education, pets. Different subjects, one shared property: traffic spread across many countries, or publishers too small to clear a premium floor, or both.
• Specialists own the categories built on a defined audience. Gaming and news are the clearest cases, and in both the networks that dominate consumer publishing are close to absent. These are the categories where general advice is not merely imprecise but actively wrong.

Why generic advice fails so badly here

Almost all publicly available guidance about ad networks was written from inside one of those blocks — usually the first. It is not wrong about food blogging. It simply does not transfer, and the table above quantifies how far.

A gaming publisher told to “grow until you qualify for a premium lifestyle network” is being pointed at a network that is not competing for their inventory. A news publisher reading about pageview minimums is reading about a business model that does not describe their category’s leaders. In both cases the advice is confidently given, internally consistent, and inapplicable.

The reason this table does not exist elsewhere is that producing it requires knowing which network runs on tens of thousands of individual sites. Networks know their own roster and nobody else’s; publishers know their own site. The cross-tab only appears if someone indexes the whole market from the public record, which is what this site does.

Using this to choose

Three steps, in order. Find your category in the table and note its median — that tells you whether you are strong or ordinary for your subject, which is the only comparison that matters. Then read the leader column: those networks are demonstrably in the business of selling your kind of inventory. Then check the floors in the approval-difficulty ranking to see which of them you can realistically reach today.

The detailed breakdown for a category — every network in it, not just the leader — is on its own page under all niches, and several categories have a full write-up on this blog.

What the table does not tell you

Leadership by site count is a measure of where publishers ended up, not of what anyone earns. A network can lead a category because it accepts everyone in it, which is a fact about its funnel rather than its rates. Read the median authority column alongside the leader column and the difference is usually visible: a leader in a low-median category is winning on breadth, a leader in a high-median one on selection.

And no public dataset can show revenue. Ours is built entirely from what publishers and networks disclose to the advertising supply chain, which is complete about relationships and silent about money. Anyone presenting per-niche RPM tables is extrapolating from a handful of self-reports.

Category leadership is measured by live site count, which describes where publishers ended up rather than what they earn. Every figure on this page is read from our own index when the page is built, and refreshes on a weekly cycle — so the numbers move as the data does. Method and evidence rules: coverage & method.