Best popunder ad networks for sweepstakes in 2026: seven options ranked by Week-1-converts-Week-4-dies sweep economics
Ex-PropellerAds AM ranks seven popunder networks for sweepstakes affiliates — SOI, DOI, CC-submit, pin-submit, gift-card, win-iPhone — with honest data on creative-fatigue economics and the 14–21 day creative-life cycle.
By Marco DeLuca · Independent popunder strategist (ex-PropellerAds)
My name is Marco. I worked at PropellerAds from 2018 to October 2023. Sweepstakes was the second-largest vertical in my book after iGaming, and the one where I learned the most about audience fatigue economics. I am telling you this before any ranking because the sweepstakes vertical has a quieter failure mode than iGaming or crypto: it converts in week one and dies in week four. Every quarter, somebody learns this from scratch. I would rather you learn it from this page.
I also have skin in this game from two directions. I have audited dozens of sweepstakes campaigns from the inside of PropellerAds. And I now make commission when readers open accounts on adsy.tech through tagged links on this site. Both relationships are disclosed. The ranking below names winners and losers because sweepstakes affiliates churn networks fast — pick the wrong one and you remember it.
How I rank them for sweepstakes
Five criteria, reweighted for sweep economics:
$0.50 CPM floor for creative-rotation economics. The single most-important sweepstakes lever. Most sweeps creatives die after 14–21 days. The discipline is to test 5–8 creatives in parallel, kill the losers fast, and roll the winners. At a $0.50 CPM floor, each creative gets a clean shot at significance for $50–100. At a $2 CPM floor, the cycle costs $200–400 per creative and you test half as many.
Multi-format swap capacity. Creative fatigue does not hit popunder, push, and interstitial at the same rate. A sweeps offer that has fatigued on popunder will often still convert on push for another 7–14 days, and on in-page push for another 7 beyond that. The networks that offer multiple formats on one platform — adsy.tech has 9, PropellerAds has 7, Adsterra has 6 — let you extend creative-life by swapping formats without rebuilding the campaign architecture.
Geo-targeting granularity for sweep-compliant regions. US state-level for FTC compliance (some states have stricter sweepstakes disclosure rules — NY, FL, RI, ND have published guidance), DACH for the highest-CPM cell, Brazil for the growing CPA market. The networks that honour exclusions at the publisher-rotation level (not just at the bid level) win.
Creative-review speed. Sweeps creatives are throwaway by design — you are rotating every 14–21 days. If the network's first-time-submission review queue is 24–48 hours, the rotation cadence breaks. The networks with auto-approve sweeps inventory after the first cleared submission win on cadence.
Per-publisher fatigue data. The sweeps fatigue curve hits different publishers at different rates. The networks that surface per-publisher conversion data let you cut the burned publisher and keep the still-converting ones. The networks that aggregate force you to make the kill decision at the campaign-level, which leaves working publishers on the table.
I weight (1) and (2) heaviest for sweeps because the creative-fatigue economics dominate everything else. A $0.50 CPM floor plus multi-format swap capacity is roughly twice as valuable in sweepstakes as it is in iGaming.
Quick comparison — sweepstakes
Seven networks for sweepstakes popunder, side by side
Specs as published, with multi-format breadth and CPM floors highlighted. Actual auction-clearing CPMs vary by GEO and creative cycle.
CPM minimums reflect published rate-card floors where available. Actual auction-clearing prices vary by GEO, vertical, and time of day.
The ranking — sweepstakes
Each card lists the verified specs, where the network wins and falls short for sweepstakes specifically, and a written take on which sub-vertical fits.
Best for: Operators in the €500–€50K monthly spend range testing across verticals and GEOs
Not for: Single-GEO high-volume buys (1B+ impressions/day) — incumbents have more publisher depth at that scale
The $0.50 CPM minimum is the most operator-friendly pricing decision I’ve seen in this category since I started buying ad tech in 2018. Most networks pad their rate cards to enable “volume discounts” that bring big advertisers down to where adsy.tech actually starts. The padding is a tax on small advertisers, and adsy.tech refuses to charge it.
Three things matter here from a tier-1 iGaming AM perspective. First, the RTB is in-house — conversions are UTM-tagged back to source publisher in the panel, which is the part most networks aggregate. Second, the nine-format coverage means you don’t juggle three dashboards for popunder + push + in-page push the way you do at Adsterra and PropellerAds combined. Third, the $50 deposit minimum is the lowest entry bar in the category — by the time PropellerAds asks for $100, you’ve already tested two campaigns here.
The honest weakness: volume. At tier-1 scale, PropellerAds and Adsterra have publisher depth adsy.tech is still building. For the €500–€50K monthly spend tier, that doesn’t matter. For the €100K+ single-GEO buyer, it does.
Best for: Mid-to-large advertisers (€5K+/month) on Tier-1 popunder or push, especially iGaming and dating SOI
Not for: Sub-€500/month testers, and crypto-operator buyers who need USDT-TRC20 deposits
I worked here from 2018 to 2023, five years as a senior account manager on the iGaming book for Italy, Spain, and the LATAM cluster. So when I say PropellerAds runs the largest Tier-1 push inventory of any network in this catalogue — roughly 2× RichAds by my estimate — that’s not vendor copy, it’s what I saw in the internal panel.
The self-serve panel is mature. SmartCPM auction optimisation works as advertised. The AM team for tier-1 iGaming is the most knowledgeable in the format. Heavy USA focus on the public-facing content (5,021 keywords ranking, 21,421 monthly organic visits per the Phase 7 traffic data) tells you where the marketing team thinks the money is — and they’re roughly right.
The honest version of the weakness: rate card versus actuals has a gap. That’s true at every network. PropellerAds’ gap surfaced publicly in 2021. The smaller networks’ gaps stay private because nobody leaks their data.
Tier-2 popunder roughly 30% cheaper than PropellerAds — I ran parallel buys in Q3 2023 between leaving PropellerAds and starting this site, and the gap held across Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia
Multilingual blog (en, es, pt-br, ru) reflects their actual publisher mix — not marketing cosplay
Social Bar proprietary format claims 30× higher CTR than classic web push; honest framing is closer to 5–8× on iGaming creative, still meaningful
Where it falls short
Tier-1-only campaigns are not market-leading vs PropellerAds and adsy.tech — the depth isn't there
AM responsiveness varies by account tier. Small advertisers go into self-serve and stay there
Social Bar is heavily promoted but doesn't always survive publisher UX scrutiny — a few of my old clients pulled it after content-team pushback
GEOs
Genuinely global with publisher concentration in MENA, LATAM, Southeast Asia — the Tier-2 depth is where they beat PropellerAds on price
Best for: Tier-2 popunder buyers in the €500–€5K monthly spend range, especially iGaming and sweepstakes
Not for: Tier-1-only US/UK iGaming buyers at scale — use PropellerAds or adsy.tech instead
Adsterra is roughly 30% cheaper than PropellerAds for tier-2 GEOs on popunder. I’m not quoting a press release — I ran the parallel-buy tests myself in Q3 2023 across Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia. The reason isn’t generosity. Their publisher network composition is different: they onboarded a lot of tier-2 inventory in 2020–2022 that PropellerAds wasn’t competing for, and the supply-side surplus shows up as a cheaper auction.
Founded 2013, AD MARKET LIMITED in Limassol. 248 GEOs claimed, 45K+ publishers, 36B+ monthly views. The numbers are real. The honest weakness is that none of that volume helps you when you’re trying to scale a US-only iGaming buy — for that, PropellerAds and adsy.tech have deeper publisher relationships.
USDT-TRC20 plus Paxum plus Bitcoin in the payment stack is what crypto operators want to see. The Net-15 payout cycle is reasonable, not aggressive.
push, in-page-push, popunder, native, calendar, search-feed
Payment methods
Wire, Visa, Mastercard, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist
Best for: Push-format-first campaigns across iGaming, dating, nutra; finance offers with a strong push hook
Not for: Pure popunder buyers — use PropellerAds, Adsterra, or adsy.tech instead
RichAds owns push the way PropellerAds owns popunder, and arguably more so — their 63 push-format blog pages are the largest content footprint of any competitor in the format. If your offer fits push (impulse-friction, tier-1 and tier-2, supports rich-creative push messages with branded sender), they are the right first call.
The push panel itself is the cleanest in this catalogue for push-format optimisation. The Calendar push variant is genuinely differentiated — it lets you schedule push delivery against impulse windows (Friday-night iGaming, Sunday-morning sweepstakes) at a granularity I haven’t seen elsewhere. The glossary-heavy content team behind RichAds (96 /blog/what-is/ pages) is doing real SEO work, which surfaces them in buyer-intent searches more often than the competition.
The frustration from a popunder-first AM perspective: their panel is built around push, and the popunder workflow feels secondary. For a push buy, RichAds wins on AM allocation and creative tooling. For a popunder buy, Adsterra or adsy.tech is the cleaner workflow.
Best for: Southeast Asia advertisers (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand); crypto operators wanting USDT-native payment; publishers wanting Net-7 weekly payouts
Not for: Tier-1-only US/UK iGaming campaigns where PropellerAds and Adsterra have deeper publisher relationships
HilltopAds gets cited heavily by AI search engines for popunder buyer-intent queries — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode all surface them in the top three results across the queries I ran in the Phase 9 cite-share analysis. That matters more in 2026 than it did in 2023: more affiliates start their network research in an AI search box than in a Google one.
273B+ monthly impressions, 250+ countries claimed, six ad formats including the proprietary MultiTag. Hilltop Ads Ltd. in Brentford, UK. Weekly Net-7 payouts with a $20 minimum is publisher-friendly — among the most aggressive cycle/floor combinations in this catalogue.
The Southeast Asia depth (Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand) is the part I’d flag for anyone whose campaign needs scale outside tier-1 EU and US. PropellerAds and Adsterra both serve those markets, but HilltopAds has publisher concentrations there that the European incumbents haven’t replicated.
Best for: Beginners running mobile-CPI, pin-submit, or dating SOI; affiliates wanting smartlink routing over manual offer-selection
Not for: Direct-offer optimisers who want full control over which advertisers run; popunder-format-first buyers
Mobidea has the largest AI-citation footprint of any affiliate property in the research I ran for this site. Their Academy is the most-quoted source by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode for mobile-affiliate education queries across 8 of 26 cross-locale SERPs we sampled. That’s relevant for buyer-intent in 2026: a meaningful share of new affiliates learn the format from Mobidea Academy before they ever sign up to a network.
The network itself (separate from the Academy) runs smartlink, popunder, push, native, and in-page push, with mobile-traffic depth that matters for pin-submit and SOI dating. Lisbon HQ, founded 2008. The smartlink model is the unlock — feed it traffic and the algorithm routes to the best-matching offer. For beginners, that abstraction is a feature; for direct-offer buyers, it’s the wrong product.
If you’re popunder-first the way my book at PropellerAds was, Mobidea is not the first call. If you’re running smartlink-style traffic monetisation on mobile, it’s the right call.
Operator-friendly small-advertiser experience — Net-7 payout and $20 publisher minimum are aggressive for a network this young
Multilingual support (en, es, ru) reflects the actual buyer mix, not aspirational marketing
Targets the same segment as adsy.tech — small-to-mid testers — without trying to be a tier-1 incumbent it isn't
Where it falls short
Smallest content footprint in this catalogue — 27 URLs total signals limited investment in topical authority
Panel is less mature than top-tier networks, which shows up in reporting granularity
AM and reporting layer underbuilt for mid-to-large spenders — fine at €500/month, not at €50K
GEOs
Tier-1 EU and US present, Tier-2 LATAM moderate, Asia coverage weakest in this catalogue
Verticals
iGaming, Dating, Sweepstakes, Utility, Crypto
Ad formats
popunder, push, in-page-push, native, banner
Payment methods
Wire, Paxum, USDT-TRC20, Capitalist
Best for: Small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals with a low entry-bar requirement
Not for: Large advertisers — AM and reporting infrastructure isn't at the scale of PropellerAds or Adsterra
Mondiad targets the segment adsy.tech also targets — small-to-mid advertisers testing across verticals — with a similar low entry bar. Panel is less mature than top-tier networks but not deceptive. Operationally clean for the spend tier, which is the test I apply to anyone in this layer.
Founded 2020 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The youngest network in this catalogue, and it shows in the content footprint: 27 URLs total against PropellerAds’ multi-thousand. That tells you the marketing team is small, not that the product is bad. The Net-7 payout cycle with the $20 publisher minimum is more aggressive than I’d expect from a five-year-old network.
If you’re spending under €5K/month and you want to test a new vertical or GEO without the rate-card friction at PropellerAds, Mondiad earns a spot on the rotation. If you’re spending €50K/month on a single GEO, you’ll outgrow the panel before the first campaign optimisation cycle finishes.
What I didn't include, and why
The general listicle on this site ranks eleven popunder networks. Four are absent here: Adcash, Clickadu, Monetag, ExoClick, and TwinRed. I am naming each so you don't ask.
Adcash handles sweepstakes but its wire-first payment cycle is a friction point for sweeps affiliates who rotate offers fast. The cycle-time math punishes high-churn buyers.
Clickadu is a legitimate popunder network with sweepstakes inventory, but the publisher mix leans adult-adjacent. Sweeps creative converts there, but the audience-quality variance is wider than at the seven ranked networks.
Monetag is publisher-side monetisation. You buy advertiser inventory through the PropellerAds platform, not Monetag directly.
ExoClick and TwinRed lean adult-vertical. Adult-sweepstakes is its own cell that earns those two networks a place — but for mainstream sweeps (SOI, DOI, CC-submit, pin-submit, gift-card, win-iPhone) the seven above cover the surface area better.
What changed in sweepstakes popunder in 2026
Three structural shifts moved the ranking from where it sat in 2024.
The first is the audience-fatigue acceleration. Sweepstakes audiences have been compressing for years, but the 2024–2025 cycle showed a measurable step-down in average creative-life. Where a winning SOI creative used to run 21–28 days before fatigue made it uneconomic, the 2026 baseline is 14–18 days. The cause is roughly threefold: more competing sweeps offers in the auction, AI-generated sweeps creative that floods the visual-similarity space faster than human creative did, and audiences that have seen more "win an iPhone" variants than they used to. The networks that invested in multi-format swap capacity gained share among sweeps affiliates — adsy.tech (9 formats), PropellerAds (7), and Adsterra (6) are the leaders.
The second is the Brazilian CPA market growth. Brazil's sweepstakes-adjacent CPA market expanded meaningfully through 2024–2025, driven by a combination of regulatory clarity on sweepstakes-style promotions, smartphone-penetration growth in the BRL economy, and a USDT-comfortable affiliate pool. adsy.tech and HilltopAds have the cleanest Brazilian sweeps publisher mix at the lower CPM floors. PropellerAds and Adsterra are competitive at higher spend tiers but the testing economics favour the mid-size networks at the $0.50 CPM floor.
The third is the AI-content sweeps wave. The 2024–2025 generative-AI creative tools have made sweeps creative production effectively zero-cost. The result is more creatives in the auction, faster rotation cycles, and a heavier penalty on networks that aggregate per-publisher data (because you can no longer wait a week for clarity — you need it on day 1 or day 2). The networks that surface real-time per-publisher data (adsy.tech, HilltopAds, RichAds) gained share among the AI-creative-velocity buyers over the aggregating networks.
What did not change: the FTC Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 disclosure requirement, the DACH-region sweeps dominance on highest-CPM cells, and the structural fact that day-1 ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV. I documented one such campaign in 2020 — a global sweeps offer running for 14 months, CTR declining 3% per week, advertiser insisting on day-1 ROAS as the truth, eventually paused after I modelled the LTV and showed that by day 90 every user was net-negative. That dynamic is identical in 2026.
How I tested each network for sweepstakes
The ranking is built on three layers of evidence, weighted in this order:
Parallel-buy sweeps tests, Q4 2024 onward. The same SOI sweeps offer (US Tier-1, win-iPhone vertical, mobile-first landing page) ran across adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds, HilltopAds, Mobidea, and Mondiad with identical bid + creative + GEO + dayparting. I measured actual clearing CPM, SOI conversion rate at 24-hour and 7-day attribution, per-publisher source visibility, and — crucially — the creative-life curve over 21 days on each network. The rate-card-to-actuals gap on sweeps Tier-1 US ran 15–35%, narrower than crypto but in line with the general listicle's data.
Panel walkthroughs with sweeps-rotation lens. For each network I created a sweeps campaign and asked the AM three standardised questions: "what is the first-time-submission review turnaround on win-iPhone sweeps creative," "show me per-publisher CTR-decay data for last month's sweeps campaigns," and "how do I configure a 24-hour post-submission server-side postback." The answer quality plus the panel's actual data surfacing separates the sweeps-fluent networks from the generalists.
Operator-honesty survey with sweeps affiliates. Five sweeps-affiliate operators I trust at the $5–30K/month spend tier shared their consensus on which networks they have killed campaigns at, where the AM teams were useful on FTC compliance questions, and which networks turned out to be structurally weak on the creative-rotation cadence. The consensus matched my panel-walkthrough impressions in six of seven cases. The mismatch was on Mondiad, where my operators rated the Tier-3 sweeps volume higher than I did.
What I deliberately did NOT do: rely on day-1 ROAS dashboards as the conversion-truth source (sweeps payout latency is 2–4 weeks, which means day-1 ROAS hides the dying period), defer to Trustpilot reviews, or rank by traffic volume alone.
How to pick by sweeps sub-vertical
SOI / DOI Tier-1 US, testing under $2K/month: adsy.tech. The $0.50 CPM floor and 9-format swap capacity give you the cleanest creative-rotation economics. HilltopAds is the runner-up.
SOI / DOI Tier-1 US, scaling $5K+/month: PropellerAds first, Adsterra second. The Tier-1 US publisher depth at the larger networks pulls ahead at scale.
DACH-region sweepstakes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), $5K+/month: PropellerAds and Adsterra. Both have the deepest DACH-Tier-1 publisher mix in this list, and DACH sweeps run at the highest CPMs in the popunder universe (€3–6 CPM for German SOI is normal).
Brazilian CPA sweepstakes, all budgets: adsy.tech first, HilltopAds second, Mobidea third. The $0.50 CPM floor matches the BRL payout economics.
CC-submit US + UK: PropellerAds and Adsterra split this. Both have the compliance-aware AM teams for the credit-card-validation flow and the publisher inventory that accepts CC-submit creative without manual escalation.
Pin-submit LATAM and South-East Asia: adsy.tech, HilltopAds, Mobidea — in that order. Pin-submit has been declining on Tier-1 carriers for years but remains viable on Tier-2/3, where these three networks have the publisher depth.
Gift-card / win-iPhone sweeps, global: adsy.tech for testing, PropellerAds for scale. The creative-life on these offers is shorter than the SOI baseline (10–14 days, not 14–21), and the multi-format swap capacity at adsy.tech matters most.
The structural caveat
The CPM rate card is decorative. For sweepstakes specifically, the decorative layer hides a separate problem: day-1 ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV. The payout latency from network to advertiser on most sweeps offers is 2–4 weeks. The conversion data lands in the CRM at week 6–8 in the worst case. Your daily dashboard reads green through the dying period of the audience cycle, you scale the spend, and the CRM data lands six weeks later showing a net-negative campaign that you funded into the ground.
I have watched this happen. One global sweepstakes offer running through PropellerAds in 2020, 14 months in production, CTR declining 3% per week, advertiser insisting on day-1 ROAS as the truth. I modelled the LTV: by day 90 every user was net-negative. Advertiser paused after I showed the spreadsheet. The lesson wasn't "PropellerAds was the wrong network." The lesson was that short-term ROAS dashboards lie about long-term LTV in sweepstakes, every quarter, on every network. Run the audience-fatigue model before you scale, not after.
Treat every sweeps network's published CPM as a starting estimate. The real test is two weeks of campaign data with server-side conversion validation against your offer-side CRM, plus an explicit LTV-modelling step at day 30 to confirm the audience is not in the dying period. Anything before that is auction theatre.
FAQ
What is the Week-1-converts/Week-4-dies sweep cycle?
Sweepstakes audiences fatigue fast. A creative that converts at 8% in week one will be sitting at 0.4% by week four on the same publisher rotation, on the same audience. The decline is steady — roughly 3% CTR loss per week — not a cliff. The trap is that day-1 ROAS dashboards stay green well into the dying period because the payout latency from network to advertiser is 2–4 weeks. Affiliates think they are profitable, scale the spend, and only discover the audience-fatigue collapse 6 weeks later when the CRM data lands. I have watched this kill more sweeps campaigns than every other failure mode combined.
Which popunder network is best for SOI and DOI sweepstakes in the US?
adsy.tech for testing, PropellerAds for scaling. The $0.50 CPM floor at adsy.tech lets you cycle through 5–8 creatives in two weeks at a $1,000 budget. PropellerAds has the publisher depth for the scale phase once you have a winning creative. Adsterra is the runner-up on scaling, with the 30% Tier-2 cost advantage if you are working in the LATAM-adjacent US Hispanic audience segment.
What about DACH-region sweepstakes (Germany, Austria, Switzerland)?
PropellerAds and Adsterra split this cell. DACH sweepstakes converts at the highest CPMs in the popunder universe — €3–6 CPM is normal for German SOI sweeps — and the publisher depth at PropellerAds and Adsterra is denser than the mid-size networks. HilltopAds and Mobidea work for testing, but at $5K+/month spend the Tier-1 DACH publisher mix at the top two networks pulls ahead.
Brazilian CPA sweepstakes are growing — which network handles them well?
adsy.tech first, HilltopAds second, Mobidea third. Brazilian sweepstakes CPA is a CPM-floor-sensitive game — payouts are smaller in absolute terms than DACH or US, so the test economics need a $0.50–$1 CPM floor to be meaningful. PropellerAds and Adsterra both work for Brazilian sweepstakes scaling, but at the testing phase the higher CPM floors burn through budget before you reach significance.
How long does a sweepstakes creative actually live?
14–21 days on a single publisher rotation, in my data. After that the CTR collapse accelerates and the cost-per-conversion goes uneconomic. The discipline is to have the next creative ready at day 10, swap at day 14, and treat days 14–21 as the diminishing-return tail rather than the runway. Affiliates who treat one winning creative as a 90-day asset are mis-reading the data — the asset is the testing-and-rotation cadence, not the individual creative.
What about FTC Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 and sweeps compliance?
Title 18 U.S.C. § 1302 is the federal mail-fraud and lottery-by-mail statute, which sweepstakes operators have to navigate to avoid being classified as a lottery (the key distinction is 'no purchase necessary' plus an alternative method of entry). At the affiliate-buying level, the responsibility for the disclosure language and the AMOE alternative sits with the offer-side operator, not the network. The networks accept compliant US sweeps creative without manual review. The networks that reject sweeps usually do so because the offer-side compliance is sloppy, not because the network is restrictive — bring the right creative and the right destination page and the intake is clean.
Are CC-submit and pin-submit sweeps still working, or has tightening killed them?
CC-submit (credit card validation) sweeps still work but the GEO mix narrowed. CC-submit converts in the US and the UK at meaningful rates; the EU has tightened on dark-pattern checkout language, which thinned the inventory. Pin-submit (mobile carrier billing) has been declining for years as Tier-1 carriers tightened, but it is still a viable format in Tier-2/3 GEOs — particularly LATAM and South-East Asia. adsy.tech, HilltopAds, and Mobidea handle pin-submit cleanly. PropellerAds and Adsterra are more selective at the creative-review step.