How to get into Raptive: what their publishers actually look like
Raptive’s stated requirement is a number of monthly pageviews. That tells you whether you can apply, not whether you will be accepted. Here is what their approved publishers have in common, measured across their live roster.
1 August 2026 · 7 min read
Raptive — the network formerly called AdThrive — is one of the two large managed networks for independent publishers, and the application process is a black box from the outside. You submit, you wait, you are told yes or no with little explanation.
What we can do is describe the outcome. We index Raptive’s live publisher roster from its own published seller file, cross-checked against each site’s records, so the profile below is the set of sites that made it through.
What the numbers say about the bar
The spread matters more than the median. A network whose floor sits close to zero has accepted small sites whatever its published policy says; a network with a high floor has not. Raptive’s floor is low enough to show that authority alone does not decide the outcome — plenty of modest sites are on the roster.
Against its closest competitor: Mediavine’s median publisher sits at 29 across 8,638 sites, Raptive’s at 33 across 6,979. Raptive carries the stronger book on average, which is the opposite of the common assumption that Mediavine is the harder of the two to join.
Which categories they favour
Traffic is necessary but category is where applications quietly fail — a network only accepts inventory it knows how to sell. Raptive’s roster concentrates heavily:
| Category | Sites |
|---|---|
| Food & Drink | 2,439 |
| Crafts & DIY | 427 |
| Home & Garden | 411 |
| Lifestyle (General) | 390 |
| Travel | 369 |
| Gaming | 327 |
| Parenting & Family | 246 |
| Technology | 223 |
Food and drink alone accounts for 2,439 of their publishers. If you write in one of the categories above, you are applying with the grain. If your site sits outside them — hard news, adult-adjacent content, or anything with brand-safety friction — the traffic minimum is not your real obstacle.
What actually improves your odds
Nothing here is insider knowledge; it is what the roster implies. Sites on it tend to have an established backlink profile rather than a traffic spike, meaning a history rather than a moment. They sit in categories with deep advertiser demand. And they are almost always single-topic: the shape of the roster is specialists, not general-interest sites.
The practical sequence is to check your own authority first — every indexed site has a page here showing it — then compare against the floor above. If you are below it, the honest answer is that another network is a better use of the next six months, and our approval-difficulty ranking shows which ones accept sites at your level.
Publishers they accepted
Confirmed Raptive publishers — the network lists them and their own records point back:
If you are turned down
The usual advice is to reapply in three months with more traffic. Worth adding: the sites that eventually get in tend to have grown their link profile, not just their sessions. Authority is the thing our data can see moving underneath a successful application.
In the meantime, the networks lower down the ladder are not a punishment — several carry sites that later moved up. The full roster for every network we track is under all networks, and Raptive’s own page lists every publisher we have found.
What we can verify about Raptive itself
One thing worth checking about any network before you commit: how much of the publisher list it advertises is real. Raptive publishes 6,979 relationships in its seller file, and 6,663 of them — 95% — are confirmed by the publisher’s own records pointing back. Only 150 are one-sided claims, and 146 are sites that now show no trace of the network at all, which is the signature of a publisher who left and was not removed.
That is a high confirmation rate by the standards of this industry — several networks we track sit close to half unverifiable. It matters here because it means the roster figures above describe a real book of business rather than an inflated one, and because a network that maintains its files is a network that is straightforward to leave.
Questions people ask about joining Raptive
What is the minimum requirement for Raptive?
Raptive publishes a monthly pageview minimum, and that is the gate on the application form. What our data adds is the other half of the picture: across 6,979 indexed Raptive publishers the median authority is 33 on a 0-100 scale, and the 10th percentile is 7. Sites below that floor are rare on the roster even when they meet the traffic bar.
How does Raptive compare to Mediavine?
They are the two largest managed networks for independent publishers and they are close in size: Raptive carries 6,979 indexed sites, Mediavine 8,638. The difference is the publisher profile. Raptive's median authority is 33 against Mediavine's 29, so Raptive's typical publisher is the stronger site — the opposite of the common assumption that Mediavine is harder to join.
Is Raptive better than AdSense?
They are different products rather than competitors. AdSense is self-serve and will take almost any site; Raptive is a managed partner that takes over your ad stack, applies an approval process, and sells your inventory on your behalf. Publishers who qualify for a managed network generally report materially higher revenue than AdSense alone, but we cannot verify earnings — nobody outside a publisher dashboard can, and any specific figure you see quoted is one site, not a rate card.
How do you qualify for a Raptive second site?
Raptive treats additional sites from an existing partner separately from a first application. Our index cannot see account relationships, so we cannot measure how second-site approvals differ — but the roster does contain many domains that are clearly part of the same publishing group, which is consistent with second sites being a well-trodden path rather than an exception.
What does a Raptive partner site mean?
It means Raptive manages that site's advertising and sells its inventory, rather than simply supplying ads to it. In the public record it shows up as Raptive naming the site in its sellers.json file, and the site naming Raptive back in its own ads.txt or loading Raptive's ad script. When both sides agree we label the relationship confirmed.
What is the Raptive application process like?
You apply with your traffic figures and the network reviews the site. From the outside it is opaque, and rejections are not published, so nobody can describe the rule being applied. What is observable is the outcome: the profile of sites that ended up on the roster, which is what the figures in this article describe.
We index the public record, not application outcomes — nobody outside the network sees rejections, so this describes who got in, not the rule that let them. 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.