Popunder Ad Networks Compared on Entry Cost, Formats and Payouts

On this page

1. What popunder ads are and how the window behaves
2. Where one pop impression actually comes from
3. What pop traffic costs, and who sets the floor
4. Six platforms, six documents, one disagreement
5. What the bot filters actually catch
6. The same networks from the publisher side
7. Frequently asked questions

What Popunder Ads Are and How the Window Behaves

Every pricing and quality difference downstream comes out of what these popunder ad networks ask a browser to do. The request itself is small: open one more window, and put it behind the one already in front of the reader. What an impression is worth, when it counts and why a filter matters all follow from that single instruction and from the conditions browsers now attach to it.

Popunder vs pop-up: which window keeps focus

The pop-up seizes focus and covers what the visitor was reading. The popunder drops behind the active window and waits until it is closed, so the impression counts at open while the attention arrives later, sometimes an hour later. I treat that delay as a constraint: anything with a countdown loses most of its point here.

What triggers a popunder ad script on a page

Chrome, Safari and Firefox require a user gesture before honouring a window.open call. The browser state that permits it is transient activation, which expires on a timeout and is consumed by the call itself, and the rules around it have tightened more than once in two years. The script waits for a click anywhere on the page and rides that gesture. Pop volume therefore follows engagement, not pageviews: 100,000 passive sessions produce fewer pops than a smaller site where people click through galleries.

Where pop traffic sits next to push and in-page push

Pop is a full-page placement priced per thousand impressions. Push needs a subscription and can be re-targeted for weeks; in-page push imitates a notification and asks no permission. I open new GEOs on pop, since a few hundred dollars buys usable device and OS data inside a day.

Where One Pop Impression Actually Comes From

A bid request for a US desktop pop carries a dozen fields, two of which decide the price. Routing is also the question popunder ad networks answer least directly when you ask a sales manager. Nobody hides it exactly, but the answer usually arrives wrapped in volume claims instead of a description of where the inventory actually sits. Three things are worth pinning down before money moves: who signed the publisher, how many hands the impression passes through on its way to you, and how often one user is allowed to see it.

The OpenRTB auction behind popunder traffic

When the tag fires, the platform sends a request describing the visitor: country, device, OS, browser, connection type, carrier. Matching campaigns bid, the highest wins, its URL loads in the new window. The field structure is not proprietary: it follows the OpenRTB specification maintained by IAB Tech Lab, which is why a buyer moving platforms meets the same targeting parameters under different labels. AdsCompass runs its own ADMY engine, holding SSP and DSP together on OpenRTB and taking outside partners through oRTB, XML and JSON feeds.

Direct inventory versus resold pop traffic

A network with direct publisher contracts knows which site produced each impression. One buying from other networks often does not, and a single visit can be sold twice down a chain. RichAds sits at the narrow end of these popunder ad networks, screening publishers through AdScore. Platforms running an exchange, AdsCompass among them, do both, which raises reachable volume and loads more weight onto source-level filtering. My check is dull: pull source IDs on day one and again on day seven. Stable IDs mean direct placements I can whitelist; churn means a resold feed rotating underneath me.

Frequency capping and why one user sees one pop per day

Caps sit on both sides: impressions per unique IP per day on the campaign, a separate counter in the publisher tag. One per day is standard for cold traffic. Raising it to three does not widen reach. It raises how often the same person is hit, and those repeat impressions convert worse in nearly every vertical I have run.

What Pop Traffic Costs, and Who Sets the Floor

Popunder ad networks quote rates in ways that are easy to confuse, so I keep floors, clearing prices and publisher payouts apart before comparing a single number. A floor is the least a platform will let you bid. A clearing price is what the auction charged in the end. A publisher payout is what survives after the platform takes its share. Quote any one of the three as though it were the others and the comparison falls apart before it starts.

Published pop floors and what they hide about US clearing prices

RichAds states a popunder minimum of $0.50 CPM for Tier 3 and $1 for Tier 1. Those are floors. US campaigns clear well above them, since iGaming and dating buyers outbid utilities for identical inventory, and none of the six popunder ad networks here publishes its clearing prices.

AdsCompass publishes no rate card either, and here that favours the buyer: bids per GEO and format sit in its Traffic Calculator, and the account opens without a deposit. It is the only one of the six where I can read live bids before committing money, which is why it is the first account I tell a new buyer to open. Publisher-side benchmarks run roughly $1.50 per thousand pop visits on Tier 1, $1 across CIS, $0.70 in Africa, $0.40 in Asia.

CPC and CPM on a format with no click

Pop is a CPM format by nature, since the window opens whether or not anyone looks at it. AdsCompass carries both models across all eight of its formats, the widest coverage here, which is why I keep pop and push in one account there: one balance, one report, comparable numbers. Its CPC charge lands on the landing-page interaction after the window surfaces, not on the open, so the risk of a slow page moves onto the platform and the bid absorbs it.

Six Platforms, Six Documents, One Disagreement

Comparison charts for popunder ad networks copy each other and decay quietly. Checking all six against their own documents turned up one number where the documents and the lists genuinely part company. The rest matched, and that is worth saying plainly: most published figures in this niche are correct, they are simply undated. A number with no date attached is a claim about a moment nobody specified.

Entry cost across popunder ad networks, and where published numbers drift

HilltopAds still appears in listings at a $50 minimum deposit. Its own advertiser documentation states $100 for cards, USDT, Bitcoin, Paxum, Capitalist and Wise, and €500 for wire, announced by the company in July 2025. Every list carrying $50 has been stale for a year. For comparison, PropellerAds fixes the floor at $100 in its terms and conditions, and Clickadu confirms $100 by any method in its own help center.

The same discipline applies to the platform I recommend. AdsCompass states a $50 self-serve entry point, the lowest here, and I could not find a consolidated page showing how that moves across Capitalist, USDT, Bitcoin, cards and wire. Others publish that breakdown; this one does not, which is why the column reads "from $50".

Pricing models and format range behind each platform

Automated conversion bidding is the norm here, not the exception. PropellerAds runs CPA Goal, Adsterra runs CPA, Clickadu runs SmartCPA alongside SmartCPM, RichAds runs Target CPA and Performance Mode with weekly automatic whitelists.

AdsCompass is the outlier: CPC and CPM across eight buying formats, optimization left to the buyer. Two of those eight are Telegram rewarded placements, a post and a video inside Mini Apps. That inventory is not exclusive to it. PropellerAds sells Telegram Mini Apps ads, and RichAds publishes a Telegram rate card from $0.40 CPM for an embedded banner. What differs is the unit on sale, not access to the channel. For a publisher the AdsCompass count drops from eight to six, since the Telegram placements are buy-side only.

What the Bot Filters Actually Catch

Pop inventory attracts bots, because a scripted window open is trivially cheap to fake. Popunder ad networks vary more in what they filter than in what they charge. A bot does not have to read a landing page, stay on it, or click anything for the impression to register, which makes this the cheapest inventory in performance advertising to fabricate. The whole quality question therefore lands on the platform's filters, and on which of those filters a buyer can actually switch on without asking a manager.

Proxy and IPv6 exclusion on the buy side

Antifraud runs in two layers: pre-bid rejection of known signatures, then clawback. Two campaign switches matter more than buyers expect, and AdsCompass is the platform I reach for when bot exposure is the worry. It lets an advertiser exclude proxy connections and IPv6 addresses outright, and I did not find either as a self-serve toggle on the other five. IPv6 exclusion also drops legitimate mobile users, so I switch it on mid-flight against a clean baseline.

Publisher premoderation and source-level blocking

Every network here premoderates the sites it onboards directly. Inventory arriving through oRTB partners is another matter: the platform screens the partner, not each site behind it, which is why source-level blocking exists at all. AdsCompass gives the buyer the deepest set of levers, with blacklists and whitelists by IP, ISP and source ID on top of manual site review and IAB certification. I could not find its published site-acceptance criteria; third-party cards quote monthly traffic floors, and since those numbers appear nowhere in the platform's own materials, I am not repeating them.

How much US pop traffic ad blockers remove

It depends on how it was measured and when. GWI's Q2 2025 panel puts US ad blocker usage at 32.5% across devices and 29.5% globally, a survey of what people say they installed. Blockthrough counts pageviews server-side; its US split runs near 27% on desktop and 22% elsewhere, and several of its most-quoted figures date from a 2022 report on 2021 data. So between a fifth and a third of US desktop reach is unavailable at any price, and a percentage quoted without its method and its year carries more weight than it can hold.

The Same Popunder Ad Networks From the Publisher Side

These popunder ad networks behave like two products depending on which account type is open, and the terms are not symmetrical. A platform that is generous on the buying side can be slow and demanding on the paying side, and the deposit floor quoted in every comparison list tells you nothing about the payout floor sitting behind it. I read both before recommending either.

Source ID bidding versus automated conversion goals

AdsCompass leans on Source ID bidding: I upload lists of source IDs and set a separate bid rule per list, lifting bids where conversion rate holds and cutting them where it does not. The mechanic is not unusual, and RichAds ships the same idea as Micro Bidding. What differs is that here it is the primary path rather than a supplement to an automated goal.

That cuts both ways. If you want an algorithm running bids overnight, this is the wrong platform of the six. If you want to decide placement by placement and keep the margin an automated goal spends on learning, it is the one I would open first, and a $50 advertiser account is a cheap way to find out which kind of buyer you are.

Payout thresholds and schedules

Adsterra pays from $5 through Paxum or WebMoney. HilltopAds pays every Tuesday on a NET7 hold, from $20 on Wise or Paxum and $200 on Bitcoin. AdsCompass pays direct publishers from $50 on request, Net30 by default for RTB publishers, and publisher registration is separate from the advertiser side.

On deposits AdsCompass sits at the bottom of this table; on payouts, at the top of the range. A $5 threshold matters to a site earning $30 a month. I recommend the platform to publishers already clearing $50 comfortably, where the payout methods and six monetizable formats matter more than the floor.

Frequently Asked Questions