Open an account

How We Check Every Figure

Last updated: 31 July 2026

Almost every comparison of Adult Traffic networks in search results shares the same defect: the numbers were copied from another comparison, which copied them from a third, and nobody re-opened the source. Deposit floors move, payout methods get added and removed, and market access can change in a single week when a regulator acts. This page sets out exactly where each class of figure on this site comes from, in what order sources are trusted, and what we do when the data simply is not there. It is written so that a reader can repeat the work and get the same answer.

Three source tiers, applied in order

Tier one is the platform’s own documentation. Payment pages, terms and conditions, publisher help centres and advertiser docs. Deposit minimums, payout floors, payment schedules, refund clauses and daily-spend minimums come from here and nowhere else. When a platform states a figure in two places and the two disagree, we record both and treat the terms document as controlling, because that is the version that binds the account.

Tier two is named regulators and first-party company statements. Ofcom’s Online Nation report, European Commission announcements, statutory instruments and the newsrooms of the companies that own the inventory. Anything about market access, geoblocks and enforcement comes from this tier, with the date of the statement recorded alongside the claim. A press summary of a regulator’s action is not a substitute for the action itself.

Tier three is third-party estimates, always labelled as estimates. CPM ranges are the clearest case: no network in our comparison publishes a rate card, so any price band is somebody’s aggregation. We name whose it is, mark it an estimate, and never let it sit in a column next to first-party figures as though it had the same standing.

The seven steps behind one row of the table

  1. Open the platform’s payment page for advertisers. We record the minimum deposit, whether the platform is prepayment-only, and any minimum daily spend that sits on top of the deposit. TrafficJunky is the standing example of why this matters: a five-dollar daily minimum is invisible if you only read the hundred-dollar deposit figure.
  2. Open the publisher payments page. We record every payout floor separately by method, because a single platform can range from twenty euros on an e-wallet to five hundred by bank transfer, and quoting only the lowest is how comparison articles mislead people.
  3. Read the payout schedule, not the marketing line. Net7, Net20, Net30, on-request and twice-weekly are different products. We record the wording the platform uses, including whether the clock starts at the invoice or the impression.
  4. Read the terms document for the clauses nobody quotes. Refund conditions, processing fees, reserve mechanics on push and pop, and the platform’s right to withhold. ExoClick’s ten per cent refund fee after a second deposit came from this step, not from any review.
  5. Check what the platform sells rather than what it says it is. Owned tube inventory, exclusive representation, open exchange or mixed aggregation. This is the column that explains why two networks reacted differently to the same law.
  6. Date-stamp every figure. A number without a read date is a rumour with formatting. Ours were read on 31 July 2026, and the page says so at the bottom.
  7. Record the gaps. If a platform does not publish something, that fact goes into the table as “not published” rather than being filled from a secondary source.

The four labels we use

Units, and the comparison trap we refuse

The most common way to mislead with true numbers is to compare two different units as though they were one. A buy-side CPM and a publisher payout per thousand visits are not two ends of the same trade, and dividing one by the other produces a take rate no exchange charges. We keep each source’s unit as published, say plainly when two figures are not comparable, and tell readers to ask a platform for a buy price and a payout on the same placement ID if they want a real margin. Converting a unit silently to make a comparison work would be the cleanest possible way to lie with accurate data, and it is the specific thing this method exists to prevent.

How the regulatory timeline was assembled

The 2025 and 2026 access changes are the part of this site most likely to be wrong if it is treated casually, so each event was taken from a primary statement rather than from coverage of it. The United Kingdom entries rest on Ofcom’s own visitor figures and on Aylo’s newsroom statements of 27 January and 5 May 2026, which is why the page can say what was restricted and what was later restored without hedging. The Australian entry rests on the commencement date of the second tranche of the Age-Restricted Material Codes and the penalty ceiling attached to them. The French sequence needed three separate checks, because the block, the court suspension and the eventual partial return each reversed the previous position, and a page that stopped at the first event would have been confidently out of date by a year.

When a figure gets re-checked

Three triggers, plus a calendar. A reader correction, a public change announced by the platform, or a regulatory event that alters market access sends us back to the source documents the same week. Absent any of those, the whole comparison is re-read on a fixed cycle and the last-checked date at the foot of the page moves only when the re-read actually happens. We do not refresh the date to look current, which is a well-known trick and an easy one to catch.

What we never do

We do not copy figures from other comparison articles, we do not treat a network’s blog post as evidence about a competitor, and we do not publish first-person performance claims that cannot be evidenced. Those rules are enforced by the editorial policy, and the commercial relationship that funds the site is kept away from them by design, as described in the affiliate disclosure. If you find a figure that breaks one of these rules, tell us and it will be corrected or removed.

For the rest of the site: who publishes this and why is on the about page, the background of the person writing it is on the author page, what can and cannot be bought is in the advertising policy. Beyond that, use of the site is governed by the terms and conditions, data handling is described in the privacy policy, cookie practice is described in the cookie policy.