Smith Jones on Buying Cheap Adult Traffic
Last updated: 3 August 2026
Popunder, in-page push, classic push and pre-roll buying. Source-level bidding, blacklist construction, S2S postback setup and adult creative moderation.
I research and write everything published on this site. The pages here deal with money that readers are about to spend, so it matters that the person behind the figures is nameable, reachable and specific about the limits of what he knows. This page sets out where my experience comes from, which parts of the adult traffic market I can speak to directly, and which claims on this site rest on documentation rather than on my own campaigns.
How I ended up buying adult traffic
I started in performance media eleven years ago on mainstream arbitrage, mostly sweepstakes and mobile content offers where the margin lived or died on source-level optimisation. Adult came four years later, the way it usually does: a dating offer that would not clear on Facebook and a pop budget that had to work somewhere else. Seven of my eleven years have been spent inside adult and dating inventory since then, buying popunder, in-page push, classic push and pre-roll across Tier 1 through Tier 3.
The work has never been glamorous. Most of a working day in this vertical is reading source-level reports, cutting zones that deliver impressions and no conversions, rebuilding whitelists after a network refreshes its supply, and arguing with moderation about a landing page. That is the perspective this site is written from.
What I can speak to directly
Format economics. I know why popunder is the cheapest entry into adult and why it is the least forgiving: there is no creative to pre-qualify anyone, so the landing page absorbs the entire job of filtering traffic, and a pre-lander stops being optional the moment you leave Tier 3. I know why in-page push beats classic push on iOS-heavy geos and why a subscription base three years old converts worse than a smaller fresh one regardless of bid.
Source-level bidding. Setting a separate bid per traffic source is the single technique that separates a profitable pop campaign from a break-even one, and I have built the lists by hand often enough to know what it costs in hours. It is why our main page treats the absence of a CPA-goal autobidder as a genuine drawback rather than a footnote.
Tracking. Postbacks, click ID macros and the specific ways a campaign silently stops reporting conversions. Source-level bidding without a working postback is guesswork dressed as method, and most of the campaigns I have been asked to diagnose were broken at the tracking layer rather than the media layer.
Moderation. What gets a creative rejected in this vertical is rarely explicitness. It is direct links to creator profiles without a compliant page in between, incentivised click language, fake system alerts, and anything that touches the three absolute prohibitions every network shares.
How I verify the figures on this site
I read platform documentation directly and record the date. For the current Buy Cheap Adult Traffic that meant ExoClick's advertiser payments page, ClickAdilla's help centre articles on minimum funds and reserved balance, and each network's own published format list, all checked on 31 July 2026. Where a platform publishes nothing, I say the platform publishes nothing rather than borrowing a figure from a directory.
One finding from that pass is worth repeating because it shows why the method matters. ClickAdilla's help article on minimum funds no longer states an amount and redirects the reader to the account panel. Three affiliate directories checked the same day still listed $50. A figure can outlive its own source indefinitely if nobody goes back to look.
What I do not claim
I have not run a full campaign cycle on all six networks in the comparison within the last quarter, and I do not pretend otherwise. Where a number comes from documentation rather than from my own account, the text says so. Where practitioners report something I have not measured myself, such as the multiple of daily spend to keep on a ClickAdilla balance, it is attributed as a practitioner report rather than presented as a measurement.
I also do not publish exact CPM figures pulled from any network's internal bid tool as though they were public. The ranges on the main page are orientation, assembled from published benchmarks that do not separate adult from mainstream inventory, and the text says that plainly. Anyone who needs exact numbers can register free on a self-serve platform and read them in the bid tool, which is the honest answer.
Standards I work to
Everything I write for this site follows the sourcing hierarchy and correction rules in our editorial policy. The commercial arrangement behind the site is disclosed in full in the affiliate disclosure, and it does not reach the copy: the drawbacks named on the main page about the featured network are ones I would name in a conversation with a colleague.
Reach me
If a figure here is wrong, if a network has changed its terms, or if you want to argue with a conclusion, write to [email protected] and name the page and the number. I answer editorial mail myself. Other routes, including partnership and privacy enquiries, are listed on the contact page, and background on the wider project is on the about page. Mail you send me is processed under the privacy policy, and the site stores nothing on your device beyond what the cookie policy describes.