The best ad networks for gaming sites, according to 3,600 of them
Almost every "best ad network" list is written from the food-blogging world and then applied to everything else. For gaming it is simply wrong: the networks that lead this category barely register anywhere else, and the famous ones are nearly absent.
1 August 2026 · 6 min read
We index 3,734 gaming sites carrying at least one identifiable ad network, at a median authority of 13.
That makes gaming one of the largest categories we track, and it behaves unlike any of the others.
Who actually monetises gaming sites
| Network | Sites in category | Share |
|---|---|---|
| PubGalaxy | 1,162 | 28.5% |
| NitroPay | 520 | 12.8% |
| Venatus | 489 | 12.0% |
| Playwire | 393 | 9.6% |
| Ezoic | 337 | 8.3% |
| Raptive | 327 | 8.0% |
| Publift | 268 | 6.6% |
| Mediavine | 153 | 3.8% |
| Snigel | 82 | 2.0% |
| AdPushup | 74 | 1.8% |
Why gaming is its own industry
Three things separate gaming inventory from lifestyle inventory, and all three push publishers toward a different set of partners.
The audience is young, male-skewed and heavily ad-blocked, which depresses the sell-through rates that generalist networks are optimised for. The sessions are long and deep — a wiki or a database site can serve dozens of pageviews per visit — which makes the ad formats that work here different from the in-content units a recipe post relies on. And a large share of gaming traffic is international, where the generalist networks’ advertiser demand thins out fastest.
Networks like PubGalaxy and Venatus built their businesses on exactly this shape of inventory. Venatus in particular is a gaming and entertainment specialist — outside this category it barely appears in our index at all.
What about Mediavine and Raptive?
They are present, but small here. Mediavine runs on 153 indexed gaming sites and Raptive on 327. Compare that with their thousands of food and lifestyle publishers. If you run a gaming site, the standard advice to “grow until you qualify for Mediavine” is pointing you at a network that is not really competing for your inventory.
Real gaming sites and the networks on them
These are indexed sites in the category where the relationship is confirmed by both parties — the network lists the site and the site points back:
How to choose
If you are a gaming publisher deciding where to apply, the practical shortlist is the top of the table above rather than the top of any general-purpose list. Check where sites of your size in your specific corner — wikis, news, guides, browser games — have landed, and note that specialists in this category tend to accept smaller sites than the generalist networks do, because they can sell the audience.
Our approval-difficulty ranking shows the authority profile each network actually carries, which is the fastest way to see whether you are in range.
The sub-categories behave differently too
“Gaming” covers several businesses that share a word. Wikis and databases run enormous pageview counts on shallow sessions, and monetise on volume. Guide and news sites look more like ordinary publishing and sit closest to the generalist networks. Browser-game and emulator sites carry the longest sessions in the category and the heaviest ad-block rates. Esports and community sites have the most valuable audience to endemic advertisers — hardware, peripherals, publishers — and the least value to everyone else.
The networks above are not equally strong across those four. The specialists earn their position on endemic demand, which is worth most where the audience is identifiably a gaming audience rather than simply people who arrived from a search for a walkthrough.
What to watch out for
Two things cost gaming publishers money more often than network choice does. Ad blocking is the obvious one, and it is high enough in this category that headline RPM comparisons against lifestyle sites are meaningless — you are selling a smaller fraction of your traffic than they are. The other is traffic geography: a large international audience is worth substantially less per impression than a comparable audience in the countries where advertisers spend, and gaming skews international more than almost any other category.
Neither is a reason to avoid monetising. Both are reasons to compare yourself against other gaming sites rather than against the food-blogging numbers that dominate public discussion.
Questions gaming publishers ask
Why do gaming sites use different ad networks from blogs?
Because the inventory is different and the networks that specialise in it can sell it better. The audience is younger, more ad-blocked and more international than a lifestyle audience, and sessions are deeper. Our index shows the result: PubGalaxy leads the category with 1,162 live gaming sites, while the networks that dominate food and lifestyle publishing hold a small fraction of it.
Can a gaming site join Mediavine or Raptive?
Yes, and some have — we index 153 gaming sites on Mediavine and 327 on Raptive. But they are a small share of a category with thousands of monetised sites, which suggests these networks are neither targeting nor winning gaming inventory. Meeting their traffic minimum does not mean they are your best option.
Do gaming ad networks accept smaller sites?
Generally yes, relative to the premium lifestyle networks. Specialists can sell an identifiably gaming audience to endemic advertisers at a size where a generalist network would see only a small volume of undifferentiated inventory. The approval-difficulty ranking on this site shows where each network's floor actually sits.
Does ad blocking make gaming sites not worth monetising?
No, but it changes the arithmetic. A significant share of a gaming audience will not see ads at all, so your revenue per visitor will look poor against a lifestyle site with the same traffic. The right comparison is other gaming sites. Many of the largest sites in this category are monetised entirely by display advertising and have been for years.
The full list of indexed gaming sites and the networks on each is at gaming sites. To check one specific site, search it from the home page; to compare two networks head to head, use compare networks.
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.