Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Native

---

Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent, or MGID? (18)

---

If you were just starting out with native, which network would you choose (and why) between Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent, or MGID?

Of course, each has it's pros and cons, like anything. There are various factors like quality of traffic, consistency of traffic, click cost, the ability to run a whitelist, strictness of compliance, time it takes for approval, etc. I'm also assuming each one has a minimum deposit of some kind as well? which makes it more desirable to pick just one to start.

If the type of offer makes a difference in the choice, what type of offer would you choose to start with?

Yes ... I know spying comes in to play here, and if that's the final answer, so be it. Just thought I'd ask because there are a lot of factors and decisions to make about where/how to start.

---

Great question

I started with MGID, then went to Revc, then to Outbrain, then to Taboola, and currently run on the latter 3 of those.

I'm glad I was able to make all my dumb, rookie mistakes on the MGID and Revc, since they are more affiliate-friendly, but I sort of regret not trying all four right at the start, so I could have known which meshed with my personality best sooner.

If you click on my name you can see my whole post history here which is basically a long narrative of my progress in natives and essentially an exact match to the question your asking, but I'll throw out a few of my bigger thoughts below:

-Outbrain and Taboola are stricter than Revc and MGID, so it's mostly lead-gen and ecom on the first two. Revc is in the middle, so it's lead-gen and ecom on it AND VSL's and Nutra and Dating, and MGID is on the far end and is mostly just VSL's and Nutra and Dating-type stuff (although it looks like there's starting to be a little more lead-gen lately).

-The simplest, least-stressful, 'purest' form of buying natives that is ideal for newbies is, in my opinion, running on Revcontent 'Brands'. You literally just pick out which sites you want to run on, run pretty much anything you want, and if you're in the US you can go to those sites and see your ad in real time. You can pause the campaign, lower the bid, raise the bid, lower the budget, raise the budget, and Revcontent will respond instantly, no 3 hour delays for your change to come into effect, no finicky 'algorithm' to deal with, etc. Super good way to get started.

-Revcontent is awesome, and probably attracts the most new Native users, however it is VASTLY smaller than Outbrain and Taboola. Like on a 30 to 1 level if you factor out Push and WSHH and Mobile Posse and just stick with 'classic native' type placements, and more like 300 to 1 on a lot of INTL geo's like the UK, France, etc.

-None of the networks require a deposit as far as I know. Outbrain and Taboola just require a card on file that gets automatically charged, and Revc has you deposit money via a card or by Wire Transfer, and I *believe* MGID is similar to Revc.

-As far as what offer to start with, I would plan on testing 20+ offers before you find one that is 'successful'. Even after a year and a number of successful ones, I'd say I still try out 10-20+ offers for each one I run seriously. With that said though, if you try out a 'classic' niche you can at least be confident the losses you incur are at least buying you valuable data for the future. So Diabetes on Revc or Outbrain- it will be around forever. Car insurance/life insurance/etc is another big evergreen area. Men's Nutra on Revc. INTL Ecom on Outbrain or Taboola. Etc.

-Taboola SmartBid is way different than anything else you'll normally encounter on Native. In many ways it's more like Facebook's algorithm than it is like normal Revcontent or Outbrain campaigns. I find Taboola's SmartBid the easiest way to quickly get conversions, since it doesn't seem to require much 'revving the engine' with high bids, and seems to almost always get you conversions right off the bat. With that said I've struggled to get a really good long-term consistently profitable campaigns on it more than I have with Outbrain and Revcontent, even though they are tougher initially. Other folks are certainly having crazy success with Taboola SmartBid though so it may just be that I had the wrong campaigns for it (and also certainly that I made too many changes a lot of times and screwed it up!).

-No matter what network(s) you run on, it will be difficult and expensive and frustrating at times. The 'frame' that I now try to cultivate is to think about it more like fishing and less like farming (as I've said before on here). Even if you perfectly copy a campaign that you know is working, with identical ads, identical lp's, identical placements, etc, - like a farmer following an exact crop planting sequence- it's very possible it won't work. It's way more like fishing, where even if you use the same bait and fish in the same spot as another fisherman who's killing it, the fish just might not bite. You gotta just try out lots of things and then once you start getting bites, double down on what's working

Hope that helps man!

---

That was a very helpful reply (all of it, not just what I quoted thanks so much. I know it takes time to do.

Regarding offer testing:

- How much money would you suggest, on average, to test an offer before killing or moving on? I believe either you or @thedudeabides mentioned you can get a good enough idea (not statistical, but good enough) by the time you've spent $500-$1000 on any particular offer (yeah, I know it's really more like X times the CPA than a set amount), but if one really has to test 10-20 offers, it could be $20k just for testing. Granted, I do have the money, if I HAD to ... but it goes without saying I'd only want to do that if I actually found something profitable! So, it's a little nerve-wracking to think about. Of course, at least some of that ad spend comes back in commissions, even if it's only 10-50% or whatever your cutoff is, so total out of pocket testing budget would be less, right?

- Clickbank has dozens of broad-market products with proven VSLs. I know people are killing it on Facebook with Clickbank products (if you're willing to put up with FB's insane instability!). So, maybe it's just a matter of finding the right funnel for them on native?... if it worked, seems like there would be lots of potential winners on CB alone.

- Weight loss is a classic niche that always has a killer VSL on Clickbank for some product or another. I've been in the weight loss niche in the past so I have some affinity for it (plus I may have my own wt loss products to add to the mix later on). Seems like it'd do well on native, so I'm thinking that would be one of my initial tests.

- Do you think it's realistic to NET around $300/day in profit from MGID or Revcontent -- from a single winning offer/campaign -- or is the traffic too small? (that's my initial goal for paying the bills and such!) I'm guessing that's pretty small-fry stuff, but when you talk about 30:1 compared to Taboola or Outbrain, I guess I don't know what that means. I want to spend my time where I'm likely to reach my goal.

Thanks again.

---

Great questions man!

To answer your first one, it all depends... in some cases I might kill a campaign after 100$ if the ads are getting really low ctr's and just not popping at all, and of the people who did click through to the offer not a single one converts. Basically the more 'proven' the pubs you are testing the offer on, the more confident you can be in killing it if it does bad (another reason why Revc Brands are so valuable for testing). On the other hand, if you just run on Topics at the beginning, you have no idea if the problem is a bad offer or bad sites. But yeah, presuming it's either good Revc Brands or Taboola Smartbid, I'd say the lowest I'd ever spend testing an offer is maybe 100$, but usually more. If the offer is converting I might spend 4k on it before giving up, but in that case I hopefully made back a good portion of that so it's not a total loss. All just depends. Also, it's great if you can test several offers together in the same campaign (say, 3-4 nearly identical weight loss vsl's, or 3-4 nearly identical car-insurance lead-gen offers), since then you can test them against each other with all other variables being the same.

Re: Clickbank, absolutely, it's great. My two biggest campaigns to date have both been Clickbank ones. I believe it's also the biggest Affiliate Network represented on native according to Adplexity (although there's some other good ones like DFO and A4D that don't show up on Adplexity for some reason). But yeah, just spend a ton of time researching on Adplexity (or Anstrex) and you'll see all sorts of different Clickbank stuff.

Re: volume, I believe TheOptimizer released a free '2018 In Natives' report at the beginning of the year, which you can probably find on here somewhere, with data on volume. I believe Outbrain and Taboola do about one billion in revenue per year, and Revc was about 100 million (if I remember right). From there just do the math from their report based on each Geo's share, Desktop vs Mobile share, etc and you can get a good idea. For comparison sake though I think the most I ever spent on one day on Revc was 3k, and I'm sure I could have done much more if my campaign was more profitable, and the most I've ever spent on one website on Revcontent in one day is probably 300$ or so. So yeah, it's definitely possible to do 300$ profit a day on Revcontent, whether from one campaign or more

Definitely search for that Optimizer report too- I've spent hours studying that thing it's amazing

---

Powerinbox.

Good quality traffic, great for testing offers, but low volume. If you're targeting US then generally you're doing ecom offers, leadgen, and VSLs.

Then take those winning or break-even campaigns and scale big on Taboola.

---

I agree pretty much with everything that jack_l said.

With native ads, copying directly from the spy tools isn't as easier as in mobile. However once you find things working they tend to be more stable.

Finding a good / exclusive offer is usually the best way to have a profitable campaign.

---

@jack_l - Just finished reading your followalong when you first joined the forum. It was a great read, lots of nuggets to take away before I start my own journey. Thanks.

At one point you mention that Taboola and Outbrain didn't allow an offer you were running "because it's health related". Do they really outright reject any health offer -- even if you have a landing page or buffer page? Or are you direct linking? Do they also reject any offer that uses a VSL?
@thedudeabides mentioned something awhile back about strictness with Outbrain and Taboola mainly being about not making unsupported and outlandish claims. ... Which reminds me more of Facebook, where as long as the ad and the landing page are Facebook-compliant, it's a suitable buffer between FB and the offer (In reality, I know it's not that cut and dried ... the FB bot makes mistakes/reads it wrong ... or affiliates make mistakes in how they word things, etc, but generally speaking, having a landing page allows you to run health offers on FB)

---

My super limited observation after spending some time in Adplexity browsing Taboola ads is that many of the ads I saw weren't for offers at all. In fact, I was left puzzled as to what the purpose of "23 stars that had look alikes in the past" was designed for. Maybe its just to drive traffic back to some random content site.

Also the exact Diabetes offer I am looking at was on Taboola but with way toned down pitch and creative. The same ad running on MGID was like "You WILL DIE IMMEDIATELY if you don't do this NOW" and on Taboola it was like "maybe you should glance at these potential treatments"

LOL

---

Hey Summitview- I don't remember which offer that one was I was referring to, but I can give some info on others/all-around info.

Revcontent will accept pretty much any Clickbank VSL other than really borderline 'men's health' ones that veer into adult - so everything from Diabetes to Weight Loss to BizOpp to Mindset to DIY Power, etc. They will let you use the basic link even if it has autoplay, no link to a written version, etc.

Outbrain seems to allow the more whitehat vsl's like Back Pain, DIY Power, etc no problem, and seem to allow autoplay if I'm not mistaken, but they seem to draw the line somewhere around Diabetes and before Weight Loss. So you'll see a few people running Blood Pressure and Diabetes right now on Outbrain, but not weight loss stuff like Flat Belly Fix, and to get a Diabetes campaign approved you'll need to make sure the copy is toned way down and your lp is totally compliant with all their requirements.

The only big Clickbank vsl I've ever seen on Taboola is Erase My Back Pain, which is very whitehat, and I'm not even sure if they are still approving it. I FINALLY got a Clickbank offer approved on Taboola recently after running it on Revc and Outbrain for months. I had it denied over and over again until finally my new replacement rep (former one left the company or got transferred or something) decided to help me out with it and she got me a list of exactly what to change, so I was able to have the vendor make me a custom version of the VSL that was compliant with Taboola's rules (no autoplay, mute button, pause button, link to text version, etc). I also had to tone the copy way down on the lp.

It also depends on who you are though. For instance you'll see a couple big outfits on Adplexity that obviously spend well into 7 figures a year on each platform and they seem to get stuff approved that most people never could. And even for a solo affiliate, I think if you make an effort to really run things whitehat and have a rep who is at least somewhat helpful who you are polite with, you can often get stuff approved on the 2nd or 3rd attempt.

---

That's content-arb

They are stacking those slideshows full of ad widgets so they get revenue from every slide you view, and they break-even somewhere like the 4th or 5th slide or something like that.

So for instance let's say Livestly buys a click on Taboola for 20 cents, and then you go through 8 of their 10 slides before closing the browser, they might make back 40 cents in ad revenue from your visit.

But if the slideshow is bad and you click away immediately they would lose money.

It's actually bigger than affiliate marketing on natives if I'm not mistaken, although for whatever reason it seems to be a totally different world and you don't hear much talk about it on STM or other forums like it.

...

And then yes, much different headlines between networks you're right lol.

---

Thanks. Just to confirm, you are -not- referring to direct linking here; meaning the networks are clicking through the landing page and scrutinizing the final offer itself for compliance? If so, then clearly they are being more strict than Facebook.

---

Too funny. That's about what I was suspecting. But, if those super tame ads can be made profitable, that's a lot of potential volume!

---

Yep, that is exactly what I meant Again though that's more on the Taboola and to a lesser extent Outbrain end.

---

@jack_l @thedudeabides

What are some good affiliate networks for lead gen offers? (in particular, those that are accepted by Taboola. Or Outbrain)

I assume these offers run the gamut of email only (SOI), to complete applications. Or are the best offers or most popular offers mainly in certain categories (like solar, insurance, debt) which I'm guessing are more involved that SOI? Oh ... and what are typical payouts?

For ecom, I keep hearing about GiddyUp and A4D among others, but not much about the lead gen side. Yet, I'm hearing (and it makes sense) that going for lower payout offers (higher conversion rate) makes optimization easier. So maybe lead gen is the best way to start with natives?

Man, I'm full of questions.

---

And only testing gives the answer...


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums mobile app

---

There's a million ways to catch a mouse, lead-gen, ecom, vsl's are all good

And then yes, I'm far from an expert on networks, but I like GiddyUp and DFO very much, and Clickbank for vsl stuff, and then for large networks with lots of everything (including lead-gen) I really like A4D, Max Bounty, and Clickbooth. I'm sure there's tons of other great networks too though those just happen to be the ones I ended up working with.

---

Clickbooth, W4, A4D

Payouts maybe like $5-25

Leadgen is easier to start with yes, mainly if you have a smaller budget.

---

facts.

---

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Native