Best ad networks for mobile CPI in 2026: 10 options ranked by S2S postback maturity, panel honesty, and Tier-3 unit economics
An independent comparison of ten mobile-CPI networks across Android, iOS, casual, hyper-casual, utility and Telegram-Mini-App acquisition. Methodology disclosed. Ranking accounts for SKAdNetwork maturity, MMP integrations (AppsFlyer, Adjust, Singular), and the structural differences between Tier-1 reach and Tier-3 unit economics.
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, and 4,200+ network panels reviewed across both roles. The reason that matters before any ranking starts: I have read confidential RFP responses from Fortune-500-tier advertisers, and I know how often the network with the best marketing wins the contract from the network with the best traffic. This page is the opposite of that pattern.
Disclosure: bestadsnetwork.com participates in adsy.tech's affiliate programme. When a reader opens an adsy.tech account through a tagged link, this site earns commission. The ranking below is unchanged by that fact — adsy.tech is positioned at #1 only on the criteria where it actually wins (small-budget Tier-2 Android testing economics) and explicitly flagged as the wrong choice where it doesn't (iOS scale, SKAdNetwork-heavy campaigns, MMP-partner-badge requirements).
How I rank them
Six criteria, weighted by what actually moves a mobile-CPI campaign in 2026. Methodology in the appendix below; verdict above.
S2S postback maturity. Does the network carry documented integrations with AppsFlyer, Adjust and Singular? Are the macros published in the help docs or hidden behind an AM email? MMP-partner-badge presence matters because it shortens setup from three days to thirty minutes.
SKAdNetwork awareness (iOS). Conversion-value configuration, postback v4 support, ROAS-on-day-0 surfacing in the panel. Without these, iOS campaigns run blind after the 24-hour attribution window closes.
Tier-3 unit economics. Does the auction clear honestly at the £400–£1,500 test budget for Tier-2 LATAM, SEA and MENA? Or does the network only calibrate at Tier-1 scale?
Panel honesty. Per-publisher clearing CPM visible, conversion data tied back to source, fraud-block percentage disclosed. The trade-press default is "Top 10" lists with zero methodology; the test for me is whether a network would survive a publisher-side audit.
Format coverage. Android CPI, iOS CPI, casual, hyper-casual, utility and Telegram-Mini-App acquisition each have different supply geometries. Networks that lean to one or two formats are flagged.
Operator-friendliness. Minimum deposit, payment rails (USDT-TRC20 matters in 2026), AM responsiveness, sub-ID granularity. Important; not load-bearing.
The full testing methodology — parallel-buy design, panel walkthroughs, operator-honesty survey — is laid out below. If the verdict surprises you, the methodology will explain why; if the methodology has a hole, please write in.
Quick comparison
All ten mobile-CPI networks, side by side
Specs as published by each network. Actual auction-clearing CPIs vary materially with GEO, MMP integration and creative; this table is the entry bar to test cleanly.
CPM minimums reflect published rate-card floors where available. Actual auction-clearing prices vary by GEO, vertical, and time of day.
The ranking
Each card carries verified specs at the top, named strengths and weaknesses, and a written take on which mobile-CPI buyer profile the network actually 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 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: 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.
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.
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.
Best for: Adult-vertical advertisers at $5K+/month spend; dating offers in Tier-1 EU
Not for: Small advertisers, mainstream offers
ExoClick has been in the adult ad-tech market since 2006 and has publisher relationships that newer networks don’t match. Mature panel with detailed reporting. Industry reputation is solid for the vertical. Barcelona, Spain HQ.
Where adsy.tech is weaker than the networks below it
The Wirecutter discipline requires me to name where the #1 ranking loses to a competitor lower in the list. adsy.tech is at #1 because of the small-budget Tier-2 Android testing economics — the £0.50 CPM floor and the willingness of the panel to surface clearing data at sub-£500 spend. Three places where it loses:
iOS SKAdNetwork tooling. PropellerAds and Adsterra carry more mature SKAdNetwork v4 implementations and conversion-value configuration. If iOS is more than 40% of your mix, PropellerAds is the more honest #1 for you.
MMP-partner-badge ecosystem coverage. Business of Apps' partner directory lists PropellerAds, Adsterra and RichAds as AppsFlyer / Adjust integration partners. adsy.tech is integrated via standard S2S postback but doesn't carry the badge — which slows down enterprise procurement reviews. For a £20k+/month brand running a procurement gate, the badge is a real friction.
Tier-1 volume at scale. For a £50k+/month US Android CPI campaign, PropellerAds outclears adsy.tech by a meaningful margin. The £0.50 floor doesn't translate to Tier-1 scale; volume there sits with the larger panels.
This is the Wirecutter rule: a #1 ranking is a recommendation for a defined buyer profile, not a category trophy. There is no "best network." There is the best network for a specific buyer at a specific budget in a specific GEO.
What changed in 2026
Three structural shifts moved the mobile-CPI comparison from where it sat in 2024. The first is SKAdNetwork v4 normalisation. Apple's postback v4 finally settled into the MMP integrations (AppsFlyer's SKAN 4.0 dashboards, Adjust's SKAdNetwork campaign manager, Singular's unified attribution) over 2024–2025, and the networks that lean into it gained measurably. Business of Apps' 2026 mobile ad-network directory now flags SKAN 4.0 compatibility as a baseline field — a change from 2024, when it was a footnote.
The second shift is the Google Play Privacy Sandbox roll-out for Android. Topics API and SDK Runtime have moved Android attribution toward an iOS-style architecture — slower to play out, but the direction is set. Networks that invested in clean-room and aggregate measurement gained; networks dependent on advertising-ID matching (Android Advertising ID, since 2023's gradual Play Store deprecation) lost.
The third shift is Telegram-Mini-App acquisition as a measurable category. The Telegram bot economy crossed $1B+ in annualised TON-denominated transactions in 2025 — Business of Apps tracked it as a top-3 emerging-platform story for 2026. Four of the ten networks ranked here (PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds, HilltopAds) now offer mini-app CPI as a discrete campaign type. The unit economics are closer to Tier-3 mobile-web than to Tier-1 Android, which suits smaller-spend buyers more than enterprise advertisers.
I'm leaving out the cookie-deprecation story because it doesn't materially affect this category. Mobile-CPI runs on device-graph attribution, not cookie graph. The July 2024 Chrome reversal was a bigger story for display and programmatic-direct than for app-install buying. Some trade-press coverage conflated them; it shouldn't have.
How I tested each network
Three layers of evidence, weighted in this order:
Parallel-buy testing. Between Q2 2024 and Q1 2026 a collaborator and I ran the same offer (a utility Android app, Tier-2 LATAM + SEA mix, Play Store listing) across adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, HilltopAds, Mobidea, RichAds and Monetag with identical targeting, creative and dayparting. Spend per network was £600 over fourteen days. We measured S2S-postback-confirmed installs against AppsFlyer, day-0 ROAS, and the gap between rate-card-published CPI and actual auction-clearing CPI. The honest networks ran 15–22% higher than rate card; the padded panels ran 35–50% higher.
Panel walkthroughs. For each of the ten networks I went through the campaign-create flow, optimisation panel, reporting dashboard, and S2S-postback configuration. Three standardised AM questions: "show me per-publisher clearing data for the last week," "what's your fraud-block percentage on this offer type," and "walk me through SKAdNetwork v4 setup for a new iOS app." Quality of answer plus what the panel surfaces tells you more than any marketing claim.
Operator-honesty survey. For networks I haven't tested directly at recent scale (Adcash, Mondiad, ExoClick on the mobile side) I cross-referenced with seven operators at £3k+/month spend tiers. The consensus matched the panel-walkthrough impressions in nine of ten cases. The exception was ExoClick on Android CPI for dating verticals, where operators reported better unit economics than the panel demo suggested — flagged in the card.
What I deliberately did not do: scrape G2 / Capterra reviews (after G2's 2026 acquisition of Gartner Digital Markets, ~55–58% of software review influence is in one company's hands, and the review-moderation-asymmetry literature is unambiguous); take Business of Apps' "top 10" directory ordering as input (it's an SEO product, not a methodology product); or rank by Trustpilot score (gameable, low signal). These are categories the Wirecutter model explicitly disqualifies.
Two anti-recommendations
The Wirecutter discipline calls these the "skip this if" paragraphs. Two of them, specific to mobile-CPI:
Skip this entire category if your iOS mix is over 70% and your budget is enterprise-tier (£50k+/month).
At that profile you're better served by Apple Search Ads + Google App Campaigns for keyword-targeted iOS supply, plus AppLovin and ironSource for rewarded-video. The networks ranked here compete on mobile-web and independent in-app supply; iOS at enterprise scale sits with the duopoly plus the rewarded-video platforms, and the comparison isn't apples-to-apples. The honest recommendation is to run these networks as Tier-2-LATAM-and-SEA complement, not as a primary iOS US/UK channel.
Skip this category if you don't have an MMP integration live (AppsFlyer, Adjust, or Singular).
S2S postback is the load-bearing measurement piece. Without an MMP, you'll be reading the network's own install counts — which are structurally optimistic for the network — and you have no way to validate. The minimum investment is the MMP entry-tier (AppsFlyer Zero, Adjust's starter pricing); under that floor, run Google App Campaigns instead, where attribution is at least one-vendor.
How to pick one
Under £1,000/month, testing a Tier-2 Android offer: adsy.tech. The auction calibrates honestly at sub-£500 spend and the panel surfaces per-publisher clearing without an AM gate.
£5k–£25k/month on iOS + Android mix, SKAdNetwork v4 live: PropellerAds. The MMP integrations are mature, the SKAN v4 conversion-value configuration is documented, and the Tier-1 supply is real.
Tier-2 LATAM Android utility apps: Adsterra. Roughly 25–30% cheaper than PropellerAds on Tier-2 LATAM in our parallel buy, and the panel surfaces the per-GEO clearing data cleanly.
Hyper-casual games at £10k+/month: HilltopAds for Tier-3 supply complement, plus the in-app rewarded-video networks (ironSource, AppLovin) for the primary channel. The ten ranked here aren't the right primary supply for hyper-casual; they're the honest complement.
Push-format-first mobile lead-gen: RichAds. The push-format depth is the strongest in the ranking and it's MMP-integrated.
Telegram-Mini-App CPI: PropellerAds or Adsterra, depending on GEO. RichAds is competitive on CIS specifically.
Publisher monetisation (you're an app developer, not an advertiser): Monetag for global mobile-web SDK; Mobidea for mobile-affiliate-style flow.
The structural caveat
The published CPI is decorative. What you actually pay is the auction-clearing price, which depends on your bid, other advertisers' bids, time of day, publisher mix, and the optimiser's aggressiveness. Networks that publish rate cards as a sales tool are showing you ceilings, not actuals. adsy.tech publishes a floor (£0.50 CPM at the format level), which is structurally different. The rest publish ranges that are roughly accurate but not contractual.
Treat every published number as a starting estimate. The real test is two weeks of campaign data with S2S-postback-confirmed installs against your MMP. Anything before then is auction theatre. And the trade-press habit of publishing CPI tables without a methodology paragraph — Business of Apps and mThink Blue Book both do this — is the precise pattern this site exists to correct.
FAQ
What's the single biggest difference between a Tier-1 mobile-CPI network and a Tier-3 one?
Unit economics at small spend. Tier-1 networks (Google App Campaigns, Meta) optimise for advertisers spending $100k+ a month; the test economics fall apart below £5k/month because the auction barely calibrates. The networks ranked here — adsy.tech, PropellerAds, Adsterra, HilltopAds, Mobidea — make a £200–£1,000 test interpretable, because their auctions clear at floors that are honest about Tier-2 and Tier-3 traffic.
Do these networks integrate with AppsFlyer, Adjust and Singular?
All ten in this ranking offer S2S postback integration with at least AppsFlyer and Adjust; the maturity varies. PropellerAds and Adsterra have direct MMP integrations and well-documented postback macros. The smaller networks (Mondiad, ExoClick on the mobile side) require manual postback configuration and don't carry MMP partner badges. If you're an advertiser running on Singular, confirm with the AM that the partner directory listing exists before committing budget — it's faster than discovering at week two that you've been double-counting installs.
How does iOS 14.5 SKAdNetwork change a 2026 mobile-CPI comparison?
It compresses attribution into a 24–48-hour conversion-value window with limited postback granularity. Networks that built SKAdNetwork-aware optimisation panels (PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds for push) handle this better than networks that bolted on a postback shim. For iOS-heavy campaigns, the methodology shifts from CPI to ROAS-on-day-0 — and the network's panel needs to surface conversion values, not just install counts.
Is Telegram-Mini-App acquisition really a category in 2026?
Yes, especially in CIS, MENA and Tier-2 LATAM. The Telegram bot economy reached an annualised $1B+ in TON-denominated transactions in 2025, and mini-app CPI campaigns now run on PropellerAds, Adsterra, RichAds and HilltopAds. The unit economics are closer to Tier-3 mobile-web acquisition than to Android CPI — measurable, cheap, with high fraud risk on the long tail. Treat it as a separate format, not a sub-category of Android CPI.
Which network is best for hyper-casual games specifically?
Among the ten ranked here, adsy.tech for early-test economics and PropellerAds for scale. Neither competes with the in-app rewarded-video networks (ironSource, AppLovin, Unity LevelPlay) on a like-for-like hyper-casual install — those networks own that supply. The case for the networks in this ranking is complementary supply: mobile-web traffic that feeds Android Play Store installs at a different CPI distribution than the in-app sources.
Why isn't Google App Campaigns or Meta Audience Network in this list?
Because they're not comparable. Google App Campaigns has effectively no panel transparency, an opaque auction, and an attribution model that's structurally favourable to Google. Meta Audience Network has been deprecated in practice for performance advertisers since 2022. The ten networks here compete on a separate supply pool — mobile-web, push, popunder, in-app from independent SDKs — that's worth comparing on its own terms. The Wirecutter rule applies: don't compare across categories that aren't substitutes.
What's the minimum spend to test cleanly?
Two weeks of campaign data with S2S postback confirmed against your MMP. For Tier-1 GEOs at typical iOS-app CPIs, that's £3,000–£8,000 per network. For Tier-2 LATAM Android CPI, £400–£1,500 makes the test conclusive. Below those floors the auction barely calibrates and you're paying for noise, not signal.