CPM ads are a bit of an art. You’re paying for impressions by the thousand, but you’re not guaranteed clicks out of any of those impressions. Furthermore, even if you get those clicks, you then have the whole issue of the sales funnel and all the additional potential failure points along the way.
Therefore, if you want to succeed with CPM, you need to find the cheapest CPM ads you can possibly find. However, you don’t want to end up signing on with a network that’s riddled with bot viewers and very few actual users, or a wide range of actual users, most of whom don’t care about your site. After all, you need interested users on related sites to click through to your ad landing page. If they aren’t interested, no matter why they clicked, they won’t be buying, so you make nothing from the conversion.
Here are five excellent networks you can investigate. They won’t all work for you, but they’re all worth checking out, particularly if you have issues with the unmentioned giants.
- CPM success requires cheap rates and quality traffic; bot-heavy or disinterested audiences won’t convert regardless of impression volume.
- RichAds offers the lowest entry costs, with pop ads starting at just $0.50 CPM across 220 countries.
- Clickadu’s granular targeting by device, OS, browser, and geography helps reduce wasted spend on CPM campaigns.
- Kadam’s native ad format can improve engagement, helping offset CPM advertising’s inherent uncertainty around guaranteed clicks.
- These networks suit advertisers priced out of Meta and Google, which remain superior in audience scale but are costlier and more competitive.
PropellerAds
Founded in 2011, PropellerAds has grown into one of the most formidable CPM networks available to advertisers today. With access to over 1 billion users worldwide, coverage across 195+ GEOs, and an astonishing 15 billion ad impressions delivered per day, this is not a small-time operation. They support a wide variety of ad formats including push notifications, pop-under, interstitial, and native ads, giving you plenty of flexibility depending on your campaign goals.
Their self-serve platform is straightforward to use, making it a solid choice whether you’re a seasoned media buyer or just getting started with CPM advertising. The sheer scale of their network means you’re unlikely to hit inventory limitations even when running large campaigns across multiple regions.
RichAds
RichAds is one of the more budget-friendly options on this list without sacrificing meaningful reach. Their pop ads start at just $0.50 CPM, and domain redirect ads begin at $1.50 CPM, making them particularly attractive for advertisers who want to test campaigns without heavy upfront investment. They operate across 200+ GEOs and deliver over 5 billion ad impressions daily across 7 distinct ad formats.
What sets RichAds apart is the combination of low entry cost and genuine scale across 220 countries. If you’re trying to stretch a limited CPM budget as far as possible while still reaching a broad audience, RichAds deserves serious consideration.
Clickadu
Clickadu is a performance-driven ad network delivering over 6 billion ad impressions daily, making it one of the higher-volume networks on this list. They support multiple ad formats including pop-under, push notifications, banner, video, and interstitial ads, giving advertisers a range of options to suit different campaign types and audiences.
Their targeting capabilities are a strong point, allowing you to narrow down by device, OS, browser, geography, and more. This level of granularity is important with CPM campaigns, where precise targeting can be the difference between a profitable campaign and wasted spend.
AdMaven
AdMaven counts over 1 billion ad impressions daily across push, pop, interstitial, and banner formats. They’ve built a reputation for strong fill rates and competitive CPMs, which benefits both publishers and advertisers on their platform. Their self-serve dashboard makes it relatively easy to launch and monitor campaigns without needing a dedicated account manager.
One thing worth noting with AdMaven is that their network has historically included some aggressive ad formats, so it’s worth being selective about which formats you deploy to ensure your brand is appearing in contexts you’re comfortable with.
Kadam
Kadam rounds out this list with an impressive 10 billion ad impressions daily across 7 formats, including push notifications, pop ads, and native advertising. Their scale is genuinely competitive with some of the larger names in the industry, yet they tend to offer accessible pricing that makes them viable for smaller advertisers.
Their native ad format in particular is worth exploring if you want your CPM campaigns to feel less intrusive and blend more naturally into publisher content. Native ads consistently outperform traditional banner formats in engagement metrics, which can help offset the inherent uncertainty of paying for impressions rather than guaranteed clicks.
Honorable Mention: BuySellAds
BuySellAds is not an ad network, per se. Instead, it’s more of an advertising marketplace. As an advertiser, you sign on to their network and gain access to a marketplace where publishers post their sites. You bid for how much you’re willing to pay for the traffic and quality they post, and compete against other advertisers doing the same thing. When you win the bid, you get your ad placed on that site for whatever length of time you won. If you lose, you move on to another pick and repeat the process.
Some very potent sites with amazing traffic can be found on this site, as well as some surprisingly valuable sites with very little in the way of competition for your ads. This is particularly true if you’re part of a relatively narrow niche.
The one drawback to using this site is that it’s not a network, it’s a DIY solution. You do everything yourself. There’s not much in the way of automation beyond “bid this much again next month?” You also are limited in the amount of analytics information you get, because, again, there’s no centralized network to monitor. If you’re curious whether the platform is worth your time, read our breakdown of whether you can make money using BuySellAds.
The Giants: Meta and Google
As mentioned above, these are all alternatives to the giants, that is, Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google. These platforms are obviously excellent options, but they tend to be both more expensive and harder to use, due to the sheer amount of competition. On the other hand, they have massive audiences the likes of which other networks simply cannot compare. If you can still use Meta or Google, you may want to give them a shot and experiment with ways to make your ads a success. If you’ve found those platforms too costly, too competitive, or if you’ve been restricted from using them, these alternatives are all viable paths worth exploring in 2026.
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Great list. Thanks!
Thanks for your comment Colby, glad it helped!
I would recommend Adtomatik, took two months working with them and has given me very good results, they have given me tips that have allowed me to improve monetization strategies such as using native ads, imagene ads, etc.
Once I see your lists i stacked around and seeing all your articles. Nicely expressed. Thank you.
Hey Kenny:
Can you write some about PPV networks and which of those you recommend? I’m new for affiliate marketing. I’m grasping as much information to identify the best possibilities I can start easily with low cost.