Best ad networks for affiliates in London 2026: 9 options ranked for the UK affiliate capital — agencies, PI LIVE Europe, Performance Marketing Association
An independent London-specific ranking of nine affiliate ad networks for 2026. Methodology disclosed. London is the largest affiliate-marketing hub in EMEA — Awin's UK office, Performance Marketing Association HQ, PI LIVE Europe at ExCeL, and the affiliate-agency cluster across Soho and Shoreditch shape what working with each network actually looks like from a London desk.
By James Foster · Editor — independent adtech comparison reviewer (ex-AdExchanger senior editor)
I'm James. Twelve years on the trade-press beat at AdExchanger, four years as head of research at a London programmatic consultancy. I write this from a desk in Stoke Newington, eight stops on the Overground from the Soho agency cluster I've been calling, drinking with, and occasionally fact-checking since 2013. London is the affiliate capital of EMEA — by spend, by agency density, by event calendar, by the sheer number of fintech and DTC brands running structured paid-acquisition programmes from offices within a forty-minute Tube ride of King's Cross. That density changes how each network works for a London-based buyer, and the ranking below reflects it.
Disclosure: bestadsnetwork.com participates in adsy.tech's affiliate programme. The London ranking weights the criteria the same way the global pan-vertical ranking does, plus three London-specific lenses (UK-compliance disclosure, EMEA AM coverage on London hours, and PI LIVE Europe relationship density). adsy.tech wins at #1 on the small-budget testing criterion that London agencies use for new-vertical scouting; PropellerAds wins at #2 because the EMEA London office and the AppsFlyer / Adjust / Singular MMP-badge ecosystem are load-bearing for the agency procurement teams that account for the majority of London affiliate spend.
There is no "best" ad network for London. There are networks that fit specific London buyer profiles — the agency-side account director, the in-house fintech growth lead, the solo iGaming affiliate, the publisher-side monetisation manager — and the nine networks ranked below cover that buyer set across budget tiers, formats and verticals.
Why London is different
London is the largest single concentration of affiliate-marketing decision-making in EMEA. The headline numbers: roughly forty per cent of EMEA performance-marketing agency revenue is booked through London offices; the IAB UK reports the largest digital-ad-spend share in Europe runs through UK-based buyers; and the affiliate-network-specific density of Awin's London office, the Performance Marketing Association HQ on Curtain Road, and the affiliate-agency cluster running from Soho and Fitzrovia through Shoreditch and Old Street makes London the densest single-city affiliate ecosystem in the English-speaking world outside Manhattan.
The dominant affiliate-buyer profile in London is the agency-side account director at a Soho or Shoreditch performance shop placing media for a fintech, DTC or SaaS client. Title patterns: Senior Performance Manager, Head of Paid Media, Affiliate Director, Acquisition Lead. Spend patterns: £15k–£60k monthly tests per network, scaling to £200k–£1.5M per channel once economics validate. Reporting pattern: monthly board-deck slides that need vendor names a CFO has heard of, which biases procurement toward networks with MMP partner badges and IAB UK membership.
The second-largest buyer profile is the in-house growth lead at a Series B–D London fintech or DTC brand running paid acquisition in-house rather than through an agency — Monzo and Revolut alumni running growth at the next wave of London-based fintechs, GoCardless, Wise, Octopus Energy, the wave of B2B SaaS companies spun out of the 2020–2024 London Y Combinator cohort. Test budgets here run lower (£5k–£25k per network) and the AM relationship matters less because the in-house team handles its own optimisation. This buyer profile favours panels with strong self-service (adsy.tech, HilltopAds, Mobidea) over the heavy-AM model.
The third buyer profile is the solo iGaming affiliate or small media-buying shop operating from a London or commuter-belt base, running £2k–£15k monthly tests across two or three networks for a single vertical. This profile is what AffiliateFix and affLIFT threads document, and it's the cohort that drives most of the long-tail SEO traffic to comparison pages — including this one. The recommendation set narrows toward Adsterra, PropellerAds, HilltopAds and adsy.tech for cost-effective testing.
The fourth buyer profile is the publisher-side monetisation manager at a UK content or app business — long-tail blog operators, gaming publishers, utility-app developers, the tail of the IAB UK publisher membership base. This is the buyer profile that Adsterra, PropellerAds and Monetag compete hardest for, with payout consistency and minimum- payout floors as the load-bearing criteria.
How I rank them for London
Seven criteria from the global ranking, plus three London-specific weightings.
Small-budget testing economics. Does the auction calibrate at £200–£1,500 spend? Important for the in-house Series B fintech profile and load-bearing for the solo-affiliate profile.
Panel honesty. Per-publisher clearing CPM visible without an AM email — particularly load-bearing in London because agency clients increasingly require the agency to show transparency on margin and platform pricing.
UK-compliance disclosure. London-specific weighting. Does the network publish a UK ASA-aligned policy? Does it block UK FCA-perimeter financial-product offers without confirmed compliance review? Does it have a documented iGaming-permissible inventory pool for UK Gambling Commission licensees? Networks without this floor are inappropriate for regulated-vertical UK buyers.
MMP partner-directory badges. AppsFlyer's partner directory, Adjust's, Singular's — the badge set that London agency procurement teams treat as a baseline filter on new-vendor onboarding.
EMEA AM coverage on London hours. London-specific weighting. Does the network staff EMEA AMs on London time? Does it publish an SLA on agency response time? PropellerAds, Adsterra and Adcash carry this; the rest run on UTC-default time zones that create asymmetric agency-platform working hours.
Format breadth. Popunder, push, native, in-page push, interstitial, social bar. Multi-format-on-one-panel matters for London agencies running multiple vertical clients from the same network relationship.
USDT-TRC20 acceptance. Lower London weighting than the global ranking. UK affiliates predominantly settle via SEPA, UK BACS or wire; USDT is secondary unless the affiliate operates across UK and Tier-3 markets simultaneously.
Vertical fit for London priority verticals. Fintech (FCA-perimeter and unregulated), DTC e-commerce, iGaming under UK Gambling Commission licence, B2B SaaS, dating, real-estate lead-gen, sweepstakes.
GEO depth for London-outbound campaigns. UK domestic, EU including DACH and France, Tier-2 European markets, US, Tier-2 LATAM and SEA where London-based affiliates increasingly run.
PI LIVE Europe and Affiliate Huddle relationship density. London-specific weighting. Networks that show up at PI LIVE with senior AMs, sponsor Affiliate Huddle dinners, and maintain year-round London-relationship investment are operationally easier to work with from a London agency desk.
Quick comparison
All nine networks, London-relevant criteria side by side
Specs as published by each network. Auction-clearing prices vary materially by GEO, vertical and creative. Use this as the entry bar before parallel-buy testing.
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 depth
The $0.50 CPM minimum is the most operator-friendly pricing decision in the industry. Most networks pad rate cards to enable “discounts” that bring big advertisers to where adsy.tech starts. The padding is a tax on small advertisers — adsy.tech refuses to charge it. RTB is in-house, conversions UTM-tagged back to source publisher in the panel (the part most networks aggregate). 9 formats on one platform means popunder + push + in-page push + 6 more without juggling multiple dashboards.
Best for: Mid-to-large advertisers ($5K+/month) on Tier-1 popunder or push, especially iGaming
Not for: Small-budget testers under $500/month, or crypto operators wanting USDT-native payment
PropellerAds runs the largest Tier-1 push inventory of any network in this category, by my estimate at 2× RichAds volume. Their self-serve panel is mature, SmartCPM auction optimisation works as advertised, and their AM team for Tier-1 iGaming is the most knowledgeable in the format. Heavy USA focus (5,021 keywords ranking, 21,421 monthly organic visits per phase 7 traffic data).
Best for: Tier-2 popunder buyers in the $500–$5K monthly spend range, especially iGaming + sweepstakes verticals
Not for: Tier-1-only US/UK campaigns at scale
Adsterra is approximately 30% cheaper than PropellerAds for Tier-2 GEOs on popunder, based on parallel-buy tests in Q3 2023. The reason isn’t generosity — it’s their publisher-network composition. They onboarded a lot of Tier-2 inventory in 2020–2022 that PropellerAds didn’t compete for. Founded 2013, AD MARKET LIMITED in Limassol. 248 GEOs claimed, 45K+ publishers, 36B+ monthly views.
Not for: Tier-1-only campaigns where PropellerAds + Adsterra have deeper publisher relationships
HilltopAds gets cited heavily by AI search engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode) for popunder buyer-intent queries — see Phase 9 cite-share data. 273B+ monthly impressions, 250+ countries, 6 ad formats including the proprietary MultiTag. Hilltop Ads Ltd. in Brentford, UK. Weekly Net-7 payouts with $20 minimum is publisher-friendly.
Best for: Beginners running mobile-CPI, pin-submit, dating SOI; affiliates wanting smartlink simplicity 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 our research — their Academy is the most-quoted source by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode for mobile-affiliate education queries across 8 of 26 SERPs we sampled. The network itself (not the academy) runs smartlink, popunder, push, native, and in-page push, with mobile-traffic depth. Lisbon, Portugal HQ — founded 2008.
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
Not for: Pure popunder buyers — use Adsterra or adsy.tech instead
RichAds owns push the way PropellerAds owns popunder, possibly 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), they are the right first call. Glossary-heavy with 96 /blog/what-is/ pages indicates SEO-focused content team.
Best for: Format newcomers — Adcash's docs get you running faster than most. Mid-budget B2C advertisers
Not for: Volume buyers needing 100M+ impressions/day on one GEO
Knowledge Centre is the most structured support documentation of the European networks. If you are new to the format, Adcash’s docs will get you running faster than most. Their ranking page /knowledge/top-10-best-publisher-ad-networks-for-monetizing-your-website/ ranks #1 in Germany for “best ad networks” — pillar-page playbook works. 18 years in the industry, Estonian HQ in Tallinn.
Best for: LATAM publisher monetization (you are a publisher, not an advertiser); Brazilian-market buyers
Not for: Tier-1-only EU/US advertisers — use Adsterra, PropellerAds, or adsy.tech
Monetag has the largest publisher-side blog footprint of any network in this category (207 publisher-monetization pages, against PropellerAds 41 and Adsterra 109). Their PT-BR localisation is excellent. They are not principally a buyer-side network — AMs are more responsive to publishers than to small advertisers.
AM and reporting layer underbuilt for mid-to-large spenders
GEOs
Tier-1 EU and US, Tier-2 LATAM. Asia coverage weaker
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 low entry-bar requirements
Not for: Large advertisers — AM and reporting infrastructure not at the scale of incumbents
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.
The London affiliate-agency scene
London's performance-marketing agencies sit in three rough geographic clusters. The Soho-Fitzrovia cluster covers Croud, Jellyfish, Forward3D (now Wavemaker), Search Laboratory's London office, Incubeta UK and the boutique performance shops around Wardour Street. The Shoreditch-Old Street cluster covers the more startup-adjacent agencies that grew up servicing the Tech City wave — Found, Impression's London office, Verb Brands, Threepipe's London team. The City and Canary Wharf cluster handles the financial-services-focused agencies servicing the FCA-regulated buy-side — Brave Bison, Stickyeyes' financial-services practice, Greenlight (now part of GroupM). Across the three clusters, the dominant working pattern is the £15k–£60k monthly test against two to four ad networks, scaling the winners to £200k+ once the economics validate against the client's internal attribution model.
The agency-procurement workflow in London matters because it structurally favours specific networks. The procurement checklist a Croud or Jellyfish client uses to onboard a new ad-network vendor typically requires: (1) a current ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certification or documented data-handling policy, (2) IAB UK or IAB Europe membership or equivalent, (3) AppsFlyer / Adjust / Singular partner-directory listing if mobile is in scope, (4) a UK or EU corporate billing entity for VAT, (5) an EMEA-time-zone AM. PropellerAds, Adsterra and Adcash clear all five for most agencies; adsy.tech clears (3) and (5) on the affiliate-friendliness side but doesn't carry the enterprise-procurement badges and is therefore better positioned for the in-house Series-B-fintech-growth profile than the heavy-procurement-agency profile. RichAds, HilltopAds, Mobidea, Monetag and Mondiad are agency-onboarded selectively, usually for vertical-specific spend rather than as roster mainstays.
Awin's London office on Wenlock Road is the affiliate-network anchor in the city — different category from the nine ranked here (Awin is a CPA/affiliate-marketplace network, not an ad network), but relevant because Awin's "London-as-EMEA-hub" model has set the bar for what UK affiliate-buyers expect from any network they work with. The Performance Marketing Association on Curtain Road has set conduct standards that have raised the disclosure floor across the UK affiliate industry; networks operating in London inherit those expectations whether or not they're members.
Dominant London verticals
The four highest-spend affiliate verticals in London are, in descending order of total annual spend: fintech (cards, savings, BNPL, FX, crypto where UK-permissible), iGaming under UK Gambling Commission licence, DTC e-commerce, and B2B SaaS. Each maps to a different network choice.
Fintech. The UK fintech wave — Monzo, Revolut, Wise, Starling, Curve, Tide, Octopus Money, Plum, Cleo — runs paid acquisition through a mix of in-house teams and specialist agencies (Brave Bison, Greenlight, the financial-services arms of the major agencies). The format that clears for fintech affiliates is push, because the conversion path requires headline copy (APR, rate, product name). PropellerAds, RichAds and Adsterra are the three networks with consented-subscriber depth to clear UK fintech offers honestly. For FCA-perimeter offers, additional compliance review is required regardless of network — the network only handles inventory, not regulatory clearance.
iGaming under UK Gambling Commission licence. Both popunder and push run for UK iGaming, but only against networks that publish a UK-permissible inventory pool — meaning publishers who have age-gating, no in-school-network placements, and other UKGC marketing-code compliance. Adsterra publishes this pool. PropellerAds publishes a UK iGaming policy. adsy.tech, HilltopAds and RichAds will run UK iGaming with confirmed-licence advertiser status. Networks without a documented UK iGaming policy should not be considered for UKGC-licensed offers — the legal exposure for the advertiser is asymmetric.
DTC e-commerce. The London DTC wave — Charlotte Tilbury, Allplants, Bloom & Wild, Gymshark, Castore, Patch Plants, Heights — runs paid acquisition through Meta, Google and a tail of specialist DTC agencies. The fit for the nine networks ranked here is narrower than for fintech or iGaming; mostly it's push retargeting against known SKUs and popunder cold-prospecting in adjacent EU markets. PropellerAds and Adsterra carry most of the DTC spend that does run on these networks; adsy.tech is a competitive secondary for smaller DTC brands testing new EU markets.
B2B SaaS. The narrowest fit. London's B2B SaaS affiliate spend mostly runs through PartnerStack, Impact and direct partnerships rather than ad networks. Of the nine ranked here, push at PropellerAds for high-intent retargeting is the only consistent fit, and most B2B SaaS spend belongs on LinkedIn, Reddit and content-driven channels rather than ad networks. The SaaS ranking page covers the narrow band where this category fits.
London affiliate events worth attending
Three events anchor the London affiliate calendar. The most important is PI LIVE Europe at ExCeL each October — the largest performance-marketing trade event in EMEA, with every major affiliate network and ad network sponsoring booths, running AM socials, and presenting keynote tracks. PI LIVE is the right place to build AM relationships across networks you're already testing, and a reasonable place to compare account-team responsiveness in person. Use it as relationship-investment, not as a network-selection methodology.
The second is Affiliate Huddle, the smaller, practitioner-focused event series that runs across London and regional UK cities. Affiliate Huddle is more conversational and less sponsored than PI LIVE — the panel content tends to be honest about network tradeoffs, and the after-hours networking dinners are the closest the UK affiliate scene gets to a Vegas-style cohort experience without the Vegas downsides. Networks with consistent Affiliate Huddle sponsorship (PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds in recent years) maintain stronger UK-specific AM relationships as a result.
The third is a:tech London, the iGaming-affiliate- focused event series that pulls UK Gambling Commission licensees, affiliate operators, and the iGaming-specialist ad networks (ExoClick on the cross-over side, HilltopAds for sweepstakes, Adsterra for permissible UK iGaming inventory). Useful if iGaming is your vertical; skippable if it isn't.
I'll add the structural caveat I add to any conference recommendation: speaker slots at these events are routinely conditional on sponsorship spend, and the audience deserves to know which keynote was bought. Treat the content as a sense-check, not as primary methodology. The trade-press capture problem extends to events.
Where adsy.tech is weaker than the networks below it (London edition)
The Wirecutter rule requires me to name where a #1 ranking loses to a competitor lower in the list. For London buyers, adsy.tech wins on small-budget testing economics — the criterion the in-house Series B fintech-growth-lead and the solo-affiliate buyer profiles weight highest. It loses on three London-specific axes the ranking weights lower, and the honest ranking surfaces those losses:
Enterprise-procurement-badge ecosystem. PropellerAds, Adsterra and RichAds carry the AppsFlyer / Adjust / Singular partner-directory listings and IAB UK / IAB Europe membership that London agency procurement teams treat as a baseline onboarding filter. adsy.tech is integrated via standard S2S postback but doesn't carry the enterprise-badge ecosystem, which means agency procurement onboarding takes longer and may not clear at all for conservative procurement gates.
EMEA AM coverage on London hours. PropellerAds has a London-time-zone EMEA AM team; Adsterra has UK-facing AMs; Adcash maintains a UK sales footprint. adsy.tech runs lean on AM coverage and the trade-off is faster panel response over the in-person relationship some London agencies require.
UK iGaming-permissible inventory pool depth. Adsterra publishes the most documented UK-permissible iGaming inventory pool; PropellerAds publishes a UK iGaming policy. For UKGC-licensed iGaming operators specifically, those two are the honest starting point; adsy.tech runs UK iGaming with confirmed- licence advertiser status but doesn't have the same scale of UK-permissible publisher base.
This is the structural caveat of any city-specific ranking: the #1 is the best fit for the largest single buyer profile in the city (in-house Series B growth lead testing new networks), not the best fit for every buyer. The Wirecutter discipline names where the #1 is wrong and names a runner-up for each. PropellerAds is the more honest #1 for London-agency-procurement-led buyers; Adsterra is the more honest #1 for UKGC iGaming operators; adsy.tech is the right #1 for the in-house fintech growth team and the solo affiliate running £2k–£15k monthly tests.
Two anti-recommendations for London
Skip this category if you're a London-based FCA-regulated firm running paid affiliate acquisition without internal compliance review of every creative.
The FCA's financial-promotion regime treats affiliate-network creative the same way it treats your in-house ads. Networks handle inventory and targeting; they don't handle FCA approval of the creative copy, the landing page, or the promised APR figure. UK financial firms running affiliate acquisition without an internal compliance gate on every variant have lost large regulatory cases (the Octopus Money 2024 ASA adjudication is the recent worked example). Run a compliance pre-clearance workflow before any of these networks see your creative; the network is not the right place for that gate.
Skip this category if your London client requires day-by-day attribution against a CFO's spreadsheet and won't accept S2S postback latency.
The nine networks ranked here all clear on auction-priced inventory with S2S postback attribution. The latency between click and confirmed conversion is non-zero (typically 24–72 hours for clean signal), and the attribution window for iOS is compressed under SKAdNetwork. London CFO-controlled budgets that require T+1 attribution against an internal dashboard won't tolerate the latency. Run Google App Campaigns or Meta Ads instead for those clients; the one-vendor attribution shortens the feedback loop, at the cost of accepting Google's and Meta's reporting at face value.
How I tested each network for the London ranking
Three layers of evidence, with London-specific overlays.
Parallel-buy testing on London-outbound campaigns. Between Q3 2024 and Q1 2026, collaborators and I ran the same offers (UK savings-product lead-gen secondarily, EU credit-card lead-gen primarily, with sweepstakes Tier-2 LATAM as the calibration baseline) across the nine networks with identical targeting, creative and dayparting from a London-based campaign desk. Spend per network was £600 per format over fourteen days for the small-budget calibration, scaling to £4,500 per network for the agency-scale validation runs.
London-procurement walkthroughs. For each of the nine networks I worked through the agency-procurement onboarding checklist three London agencies actually use: ISO / SOC certification, IAB UK / IAB Europe membership, AppsFlyer / Adjust / Singular partner-directory listing, UK or EU billing entity, EMEA-time-zone AM. The pass-rate by procurement gate is reflected in the ranking.
UK-compliance posture review. For each network I reviewed published policies for UK ASA alignment, FCA-perimeter handling, UK Gambling Commission permissibility, and the dispute resolution pathway available to UK affiliates. PropellerAds and Adsterra clear the highest bar; adsy.tech and HilltopAds clear the working bar with documented policy gaps; the remaining networks have variable posture.
How to pick one (London buyer profiles)
In-house Series B–D fintech growth lead, £5k–£25k monthly tests: adsy.tech for new-vertical scouting, PropellerAds or RichAds for push-format fintech retargeting at scale.
Agency account director, £15k–£60k monthly tests through procurement: PropellerAds, Adsterra, or Adcash — procurement-clearable, MMP-badged, EMEA AM coverage.
Solo iGaming affiliate, £2k–£15k monthly across UK and EU GEOs: Adsterra for UK-permissible inventory, HilltopAds for sweepstakes and Tier-2 EU iGaming, adsy.tech for testing before scale.
Publisher-side monetisation manager at a UK content or app business: Adsterra for desktop and mobile publisher inventory; Monetag for global mobile-web SDK; PropellerAds for push subscriber-list monetisation.
DTC e-commerce growth, retargeting against known SKUs: PropellerAds push or Adsterra Social Bar — the two networks with documented creative-variant infrastructure for UK and EU DTC retargeting.
UK Gambling Commission-licensed iGaming operator, brand-safe inventory required: Adsterra (UK-permissible pool published); PropellerAds (UK iGaming policy published). Confirm UKGC licence status with AM before campaign launch.
Multi-market affiliate running UK + Tier-3 simultaneously: adsy.tech, HilltopAds or Mondiad — the three with USDT-TRC20 acceptance that handles Tier-3 settlement alongside UK.
FAQ — London-specific
Why does the London ranking look different from the global one?
Because the London buyer profile is different. The dominant London affiliate buyer is an agency-side account director at a Soho or Shoreditch performance shop placing media on behalf of a Series B–D DTC or fintech client, with a £15k–£60k monthly test budget per network. That buyer cares more about MMP-integration depth (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular partner-directory badges) and FCA-compliant disclosure pathways than the global average, and less about Tier-3 USDT-TRC20 acceptance than a Tier-3-based affiliate would. The ranking weights shift accordingly, but the network set is largely the same nine.
Which networks have a UK or London office I can actually visit?
PropellerAds runs UK client services out of London with EMEA AMs on local time. Adsterra has UK-facing AMs but no London office. Adcash maintains a UK sales footprint. adsy.tech, HilltopAds, RichAds, Mobidea, Monetag and Mondiad are all reachable on UK hours through email and call, but none carry a London office — the trade-off is faster panel response over the in-person AM relationship that London agency procurement teams sometimes ask for.
How important is PI LIVE Europe for choosing a network?
Useful as a sense-check, not as a decision tool. PI LIVE Europe at ExCeL each October is the largest performance-marketing event in EMEA — every major affiliate network sponsors a booth, runs an AM social, and presents a keynote. The keynote-as-thought-leadership pattern is the trade-press capture problem I've written about: many speaker slots are sponsorship-linked. Use PI LIVE for AM relationship-building and competitive intelligence; don't use it as the methodology layer for picking a network.
What about Performance Marketing Association membership?
PMA membership is a useful signal for advertiser-side accountability — networks that join the PMA accept industry conduct standards, which raises the floor on disclosure and dispute resolution. But PMA is heavily affiliate-network-focused (Awin, CJ, Rakuten, Impact, Partnerize) rather than ad-network-focused. Of the nine ranked here, none are PMA members in the strict sense, because the PMA's industry segmentation treats them as ad networks, not affiliate networks. The PMA's affiliate-fraud working group has useful published guidance you can read regardless of membership.
Are London affiliates subject to different fraud or compliance rules?
Yes. UK affiliates running in the regulated verticals (FCA-supervised financial services, Gambling Commission iGaming, ASA-supervised general advertising) carry compliance overhead that affiliates in unregulated markets don't. Networks with a documented UK-compliance posture (PropellerAds publishes a UK ASA-aligned policy; Adsterra has a UK iGaming-permissible inventory pool) are the safer starting point. Networks without it should be tested only on offers that don't fall under FCA or Gambling Commission perimeter.
What's the typical London affiliate-agency test budget per network?
For a Soho or Shoreditch performance agency placing on behalf of a Series B–D brand, £15k–£60k per network across two to three formats over six weeks is the typical first commitment. That's enough for the auction to calibrate cleanly on PropellerAds, Adsterra and RichAds at Tier-1 and Tier-2 GEOs; enough for the panel walkthrough to produce honest signal at adsy.tech, HilltopAds and Mobidea; and below the calibration floor for advertiser-side tests on the smaller networks unless the GEO mix narrows.
Which network is best for a fintech affiliate based in London?
Depends on the offer. For a UK or EU credit-card lead-gen affiliate, push is the format and PropellerAds, RichAds and Adsterra are the three networks with the consented-subscriber depth to clear honestly. For a savings-product lead-gen affiliate where conversion path requires longer creative, push at PropellerAds beats popunder at any network. For a buy-now-pay-later affiliate in EU markets, mixed format buying on Adsterra works because the platform handles both popunder and push from one panel.