How Figures on This Site Are Verified
These rules govern every figure in the adult web traffic comparison and on all other pages here. They are applied by one person, whose background is on the author page, working within the scope described on the about page. Advertising networks publish their own terms. Competitors summarise them. Aggregators copy the summaries. By the third hop the minimum deposit is two years old, the format list includes a product that was discontinued, and nobody in the chain has opened the account. This page sets out the rules applied here to stop that happening, in enough detail that a reader can check whether they were followed.
Source hierarchy
First tier: primary documents. Statutes and bills as filed, court opinions, regulator publications, card-scheme rules, technical standards from the body that maintains them, and a network's own help centre, payment pages and terms of service. A figure from this tier can be published as fact with the date it was read.
Second tier: direct observation. What is visible in a platform's public interface or registration flow without spending money — which formats appear in the campaign builder, whether a calculator is available before a deposit, what the sign-up form asks for. This is published as observation, with the date, and labelled as such where the distinction matters.
Third tier: documented user reports. Dated accounts from advertisers on independent forums. These are labelled as reports and attributed to their source. They are only worth including when several independent accounts converge on the same specific claim.
The rules on what these pages may be used for, and the disclaimer that none of it is professional advice, sit in the terms and conditions.
Not a source: competitor articles and aggregator listings. They can be read to see which questions the market is answering badly. A figure that exists only inside one of them is treated as unconfirmed until the original document says the same thing. This is the single rule that does the most work, because copying is the mechanism by which stale numbers survive.
Company claims are labelled, not laundered
Networks publish traffic volumes, bid request counts and impression totals about themselves. None of these are independently audited anywhere in this market. They are reported here as company statements, attributed to the company, and where the internal arithmetic can be checked it is checked and shown — a figure that resolves into a consistent funnel is more credible than one that does not, and saying so is more useful than either repeating or ignoring the number.
Everything carries a date
Minimum deposits, bid floors, format lists, moderation timings and payment methods all change without announcement. Each page states when its figures were checked, and comparison tables state the window during which the underlying documentation was read.
Verification dates are moved only when figures have actually been re-checked against the source. They are not refreshed to signal currency. A page dated three months ago and correct is more honest than a page dated yesterday that nobody re-read.
When sources disagree
Conflicts are published rather than resolved silently. When a network's FAQ and its policy pages state different moderation times, both numbers appear with their sources, because the disagreement itself tells an advertiser something about how firm the commitment is. When aggregator listings contradict a network's current help centre, the help centre wins and the discrepancy is named, since the gap is a warning about the rest of that aggregator's data.
Where a network publishes several thresholds depending on payment method or campaign type, all of them are listed. Averaging them into one tidy figure would make the table prettier and less true, and it would mislead exactly the reader who intends to fund by wire.
When a figure cannot be confirmed
It is left out or marked as unpublished. Empty cells labelled "not published by any network in this set" are acceptable here; invented ranges are not. Where a number exists only inside an advertiser account behind registration, the page says so and, where useful, says what to ask support for instead.
This applies to the site's own gaps as well. Where an honest answer would need a paid campaign that nobody here has run, the page says so. The editorial policy covers why invented measurements are treated as the most serious failure available to a site like this one.
Ranges and estimates
What is recorded when you read any of this is set out in the privacy policy. Some numbers in this market genuinely are ranges: indicative CPM by geo tier, for example, assembled from published floors and payout benchmarks, with no rate card behind them. Where that is the case the page says explicitly that the figure is an order of magnitude, names what it was assembled from, and tells the reader where the live number actually lives. A range presented as a precise figure would be a fabrication with extra steps.
Legal and regulatory material
Statements about statutes cite the bill or opinion itself, with the signing date, the effective date and the enforcement status treated as three separate facts, because they routinely differ. A law can be enacted, not yet in force, and unenforceable under an injunction all at once, and a page that collapses those into "26 states require age verification" misleads an advertiser planning geo targeting.
Enforcement paused by agreement or court order is stated with its date. Limits on what may be advertised at all are separate again and sit in the advertising standards. Where a legal question turns on a distinction the reader's own situation determines — whether their landing page hosts explicit material, for instance — the distinction is explained rather than resolved on their behalf. This site does not provide legal advice.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, out of date, or contradicted by what you can see inside your own account, write to [email protected] with the page, the figure and a link to the current source. Corrections are made on the page and the verification date changes with them. Other contact routes are on the contact page.