Both sell advertising on your website. They work in opposite directions: Google AdSense brings advertisers to your slot, and Perch lets your own readers buy it.
| Network | Minimum to join | Publisher share | Payout threshold | Self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google AdSense | No published traffic minimum, but every site goes through an approval review | 68% | $100 (£60) | Yes |
| Perch | None | 75% | $65.00 | Yes |
Sources, checked 2026-08-26: Revenue share (support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195) · Payment threshold (support.google.com/adsense/answer/1709871)
Your traffic is large, international, or not tied to a place or a niche community — AdSense will fill slots you could never sell yourself.
You are below the level where a $100 payout threshold is reachable, you want to know the price before the ad runs, or you would rather not add a consent banner.
Fill rate and scale. AdSense will put an ad in essentially every slot on essentially every page, in almost every country, without you ever finding an advertiser. Nothing here matches that, and for a site with large international traffic it is very hard to beat.
Nobody finds your advertiser for you. There is no demand pool to fall back on — the slot fills when one of your own readers, or a business you approach, buys it. On a site with no local or niche connection to its audience, that is a real disadvantage against a matched network.
On Google AdSense the rate is an outcome — set by an auction, a matched advertiser, or a managed partner, and reported to you afterwards. On Perch you type a number: what one advertiser pays for one day in your slot. Nothing sells below it.
On Google AdSense they come from a pool you do not choose. On Perch the slot itself carries an invitation, so the buyer is usually someone already reading the page — a local business, or another site in the same niche.
Cookies and personalised advertising by default; a consent banner is required in the UK and EU. Perch's embed sets no cookies and writes nothing to the visitor's device, so it does not itself create a consent-banner requirement. The full detail is on the security page, including the exact byte size the script adds to your page.
Google AdSense pays out at $100 (£60). Perch pays out at $65.00, into your own Stripe account. For a site earning a few dollars a month, that gap is the difference between money arriving and a balance that only ever grows on a screen.
Usually yes, and plenty of sites should. They are not the same slot: a direct-sold space in a prominent position alongside network fill elsewhere on the page is a normal arrangement, and it is worth checking Google AdSense's own terms about what may run beside their units.
$5,000+ in annual ad revenue for the main programme; the Journey tier starts at 1,000 sessions
The full comparison table covers every network here with sources, or work out the numbers for your own site with the earnings calculator.