Best native network to start on (17)
I’ve spent a lot of time working on FB and have done some big profits on it over the past twelve months. I’m now looking to challenge myself and have a go on native. Which network is best to start out on? And how much money should I invest to begin with?
I would recommend definitely getting the James Van Elswyck iStack native course if you want to seriously get into natives. Also check out MAD Society (its a forum like STM but geared primarily to natives), even if you just join for a month and watch all the old livestream q&a's.
For networks, Revcontent has the best 'mix' in a way, in that they allow more aggressive vsl style offers and health stuff, but you can also run lead gen and high quality offers on it successfully. Taboola and Outbrain mostly only allow the more high-quality/gadget/lead-gen/etc stuff rather than vsl, but they are also about 9 times bigger than Revcontent so have more traffic, and have most of the highest quality sites like MSN, CNN, Fox News, Weather Channel, etc.
I would either start with all three of the above and try out each, or else start with 1) Revcontent, and 2) either Outbrain or Taboola.
As far as how much money you'll need that's a question you could write a whole book on I think but you can find discussion of it all over STM. It really depends on your goals. You can 'learn' natives with 50$ a day and know how to run traffic on them. But if you want to make lots of money and have it be your fulltime source of income, I'd say you're gonna need low to mid 5 figures to *hopefully* master it, and then likely the same amount as 'float' with which to buy traffic while waiting on commissions. Other folks might completely disagree though and again, it comes down to a massive mix of variables.
Natives are awesome though I absolutely love them 
Never done facebook though so can't compare..
Hey @Sam,
good to have you with us! @jack is a Native Veteran here with an extensive knowledge always sharing great insights so go ahead and take his advice
If you ever wanna try buying thru DSP you can get access to native traffic from all of these networks thru us. Once you register, ask your Account Manager for a WL/BL so that you can save your budget for scaling top-performing traffic. Our Account Managers are also on hand to provide any traffic insights about what's currently running and how to get started. We also have 24 hour campaign approval so you can get your campaigns up and running really quickly.
Read more on our Voluum DSP website or just PM me and feel free to register your account anytime.
Thanks,
Justyna
Originally Posted by jack_l
For networks, Revcontent has the best 'mix' in a way, in that they allow more aggressive vsl style offers and health stuff, but you can also run lead gen and high quality offers on it successfully. Taboola and Outbrain mostly only allow the more high-quality/gadget/lead-gen/etc stuff rather than vsl, but they are also about 9 times bigger than Revcontent so have more traffic, and have most of the highest quality sites like MSN, CNN, Fox News, Weather Channel, etc.
I would either start with all three of the above and try out each, or else start with 1) Revcontent, and 2) either Outbrain or Taboola.
As far as how much money you'll need that's a question you could write a whole book on I think but you can find discussion of it all over STM. It really depends on your goals. You can 'learn' natives with 50$ a day and know how to run traffic on them. But if you want to make lots of money and have it be your fulltime source of income, I'd say you're gonna need low to mid 5 figures to *hopefully* master it, and then likely the same amount as 'float' with which to buy traffic while waiting on commissions. Other folks might completely disagree though and again, it comes down to a massive mix of variables.
Natives are awesome though I absolutely love them
Never done facebook though so can't compare..regarding float - can you explain this more? is it not easy to get daily payouts or something if you are spending 5 figs a day?
+1 Everything Jack_l said
My suggestion is MGID. If you are serious and have a bit of $ to run their managers are great.
As a standard they will actively optimize your campaigns for you (unless you don't want them to.) That's a BIG help for anyone but especially someone new to natives.
When I started they had their creative team create many of my ads. After I had some bigger spend they even offered to create an lp for me.
But that was a few years ago when I started...their resources may be more stretched now and creatives are not available for new accounts...I'm not sure
It's either $500 or $1000 deposit to get a manager, so you might as well start out with one. They'll help you setup your campaigns with blacklists/whitelists, geos, bid suggestions, etc.
For natives I'd say you need to "lose" about mid 4-figures before your campaigns start breaking even. This number depends on a few things:
Are you willing to focus on learning and utilizing best practices - study courses, study spy tools, pick and stick to one vertical, etc...
Do you have a well-tested funnel that you can bring in from your fb campaigns?
How high are the payouts for your offers? Lower payouts allow faster optimization so less waste on bad ads/placements
Only thing I would consider is that quality is not as good as facebook. So stuff like dating cpl offers is harder to maintain quality. That's why a lot of people stick with cps offers
Originally Posted by micoangelo
Originally Posted by jack_l
Originally Posted by micoangelo
I also would recommend MGID. It was dismissed at first as a "dating only" type of network, but that's not truly the case. Other verts work well there because many of the users are pretty blind to dating ads at this point. This specifically was the case last year when I started on MGID.
Is there still much activity on the forum? And does he still host those Q&A sessions?
Last time I was a member there was not much activity on the forum and I had a feeling that Malan was more busy with his music career than with the forum or native ads.
Originally Posted by groomez
If I had to start over with native, Taboola would be the source. Best quality and most volume out there, with Outbrain being second. You will spend less time worrying about cutting bad placements and more time focusing on finding great offers and making good creatives.
Not sure how MAD forum is these days, but I was briefly a member there a few years ago. Always cool to be on the ground floor of a new community when spirits and activity are high. Took a break from forums for a while and but came back and decided this was the better place to call home - more history, more members, more activity, big organized events, etc
We're slowly but surely building up some good native content and discussion here.
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
Originally Posted by eurosen
Strict is relative mind you. Mainly you just can't make unsupported and outlandish claims.
Originally Posted by micoangelo
Originally Posted by thedudeabides
Is this DFO (https://www.dfo.global/)?
Also, funny I'm in GU too but when I look up the offers on adplexity... great sadness.
Why?
It seems like the offers I see are getting no volume even though my AM says they are doing well. Is my mind playing tricks on me, is adplexity, or is it something else?
What filters are helpful? (I'm just using "most traffic" with a minimum of 14 days ... over the last 30 days)
It is very difficult to see volume on Adplexity. Indeed I would say it's almost backwards.
The heaviest volume native campaigns are US Taboola lead-gen ones, but they won't appear when you select for 'Most Traffic'. Instead you'll get mostly Revcontent and Outbrain INTL Scattershot campaigns.
Partly that's because they're appearing on the highest number of distinct sites, and partly because Outbrain crops their ad images differently all the time, so Adplexity picks up each crop as a separate ad.
I've had Revcontent INTL campaigns doing 20$ a day that looked massive on Adplexity, and Taboola ones doing 1000$+ that you would be hard-pressed to find.
I think if you want to see if an offer works, just go to 'By Advertiser', then select 'All of the above', and then enter the offer url, and if someone is currently running it, or ran it for 3+ weeks at some point, then that's a sign it may work
After 6 months or so you'll have 5-10 other affiliates who you follow around via their tracking url, always checking on what they are doing, and usually several affiliate networks you'll search by, and maybe a couple search terms.
I like to always check what the biggest outfits are doing, check everything under GiddyUp and sometimes Clickbank, check every ad with 'Senior' in it, and usually check Taboola > Affiliate network > all. That's just me though, depending on what you run your common searches might be totally different.
It's also good to spy 'in the wild' at times, as you get a much better feel for what's being run hard from actually seeing the ad widgets on big sites like MSN, Breitbart, Fox News, Daily Mail, etc.
The only way to really tell volume on something in my opinion is to take the offer url and input it into similarweb. Even the free version of similarweb should be able to give you some idea of how much volume something is doing, but at a reputable network like GiddyUp or A4D you can usually just ask your rep and they'll tell you too. (Note: A4D doesn't show up in Adplexity - took me awhile to realize that).
But yeah, I hear Anstrex is good too but I haven't tried it out yet.
Wow makes so much sense now... I was wondering why the heck I couldn't figure out the truth.
I owe you one.
Adplexity’s method for identifying which affiliate network owns the offer is less reliable than in the past. It’s based on the affiliate tracking domain but these change quite often and some networks e.g. Giddyup have affiliate links that go straight to the offer page without a tracking domain.
So it takes a bit of work to identify exactly which offers belong to what networks, you can’t really rely on Adplexitys data on this.
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