Direct ad space is priced per day by you, so this does not need a traffic figure or an estimated RPM. Set the price you would charge, how many slots you would run, and how much of the month you expect them to sell.
Days-sold is the honest variable. A new space may sell a handful of days in its first month; an established local slot may sell every day. Nothing is owed on a day that does not sell.
Statement, per month
Gross is price per day × number of spaces × days sold. The service fee is 25% of that,
covering card processing, payouts, hosting and support, and you keep the remaining 75%. The annual
figure is the monthly one times twelve. Nothing here is adjusted for anything else — there is no hidden
assumption about traffic, click-through or seasonality, because per-day pricing does not depend on them.
On an impression-priced network your income is pageviews × RPM, and RPM is an outcome you
discover afterwards. Selling a day of display is a different transaction: the advertiser is buying a
period on a specific site, so the number that matters is what that period is worth to them. A local
business deciding whether a week on the town's cycling blog is worth $40 is not doing arithmetic about
thousands of impressions.
That said, traffic is not irrelevant — it is what determines whether an advertiser thinks your price is fair, and whether they renew. It just is not what the billing is made of.
Start by asking what a local business would happily pay for a week of visibility to your readers, and divide by seven. Most small sites open somewhere between $2 and $10 a day per slot. You can change the price at any time; it affects new purchases, and existing advertisers keep the rate they agreed until they change it themselves.
More on this in how to price ad space on a small website and in how pricing works.
| Network | Minimum to join | Publisher share | Payout threshold | Self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Perch | None | 75% | $65.00 | Yes |
| TinyAdz | None stated — explicitly open to small and niche sites | Not published | $100 | Yes |
| Ezoic | Not published | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Google AdSense | No published traffic minimum, but every site goes through an approval review | 68% | $100 (£60) | Yes |
| EthicalAds | 50,000 monthly pageviews, and developer-focused sites only | 70% | $50 | No |
| Mediavine | $5,000+ in annual ad revenue for the main programme; the Journey tier starts at 1,000 sessions | Not published | Not published | No |
| Raptive | 25,000 monthly pageviews | Not published | Not published | No |
| BuySellAds | No published minimum — publishers must contact sales | Not published | Not published | No |
| Carbon Ads | Invite only — around 350 hand-picked sites worldwide | Not published | Not published | No |
Every figure above is taken from the named company's own published pages, or marked Not published where they do not state one. Checked 2026-08-26 — thresholds change, and a dated table is the only kind worth reading. Sources and the full comparison.
A site with 500 visits a month earns single-digit dollars on a network paying by impression. AdSense does not pay out below $100, and that balance simply carries forward — so a genuinely small site can run ads for years and be paid nothing at all. Perch's threshold is $65.00, and the money comes from a price you set rather than from a rate you find out about afterwards.
Ready to try it? Create an ad space — it is free, takes about a minute, and there is no minimum traffic.