The Top 5 Native Advertising Platforms in 2023

One of the best and most effective ways to reach your desired audiences is through native ads. Carefully and discreetly placed in articles all across the internet, they simultaneously do not disturb a potential customer’s experience, and at the same time present them with an appealing offer. The best way to secure these coveted spots is through Native Advertising Platforms. In this article, we’ll go over the Top 5 Native Ads Platforms you can work with in 2023.

Taboola

Starting off with one of the major names in the world of native advertising, Taboola. Each month Taboola reaches around 1.4 Billion unique visitors; quite a large chunk of the world’s internet population. It partners with more than 10k+ premium publishers and brands, such as USA Today, NBC, MSN, Business Insider and Bloomberg to name a few. A large part of its traffic comes from geos such as the US, UK, Japan and France.

What Taboola does really well (applicable to all the networks in this list), is connecting you as a performance marketer, with audiences that are likely to positively respond to your messaging, products and offers. By placing your ads in strategic places on the publishers’ sites, and through features and targeting mechanisms that increase your conversion chances.

Take for example its Headline Analyzer Tools, which tells you which of your ad titles are likelier to have a higher CTR. Read our article on 6 Useful Taboola Details You Should Know About to learn more about it and other features.

Some of the best-performing verticals for this year in Taboola have been: software, holidays, fashion, gadgets, health & fitness and search arbitrage.

We’re soon gonna release an article in which we go more in-depth into some of the top-performing verticals of each of the platforms in this article, with actual examples and more – make sure not to miss it out!

Outbrain

If we talk about major Native Advertising Platforms, we have to talk about Outbrain as well. Outbrain reaches more than 1.3 Billion people worldwide, coming from more than 55 countries (half of them from Tier 1 geos).

Outbrain too is well-known for its excellent list of premium publishers, which includes the likes of Hearst, CNN, MSN, Sky News, The Washington Post and more. Besides leading publishers, Outbrain also has a quite extensive list of leading niche sites. Combined they generate for Outbrain’s users, more than 9 Billion conversions each year.

Like other Native Advertising Platforms, Outbrain provides quite a few targeting options for its users, enabling performance marketers to reach the exact audiences they desire to target.

One of the things you should know about Outbrain that can really become quite useful, is the ability to expand its block limits. By default in Outbrain you can block 30 publishers and 100 sections per campaign, you can easily expand that to being able to ban 1000 publishers and 1500 sections per campaign. For more details, check our article on 7 Useful Outbrain Details You Should Know About.

Some of the best-performing vertices in Outbrain for 2023 so far are: celebrities, auto, health & fitness, housing and dental implants.

Yahoo

Yahoo is another of the big players in the Native Advertising game, with more than 1 Billion monthly active users and reaching 2 Billion Ad Impressions per day (with more than half of that traffic coming from the US, UK and France). In Yahoo’s list of top publishers, you’ll find names such as ESPN, ABC News, Apple News (in certain locations) and MSN.

Yahoo supports a large variety of ad formats, from Image Ads and Video Ads, to Yahoo Mail Ads and Moments Ads, and some of the most extensive targeting capabilities of any Traffic Source in the world.

You can learn more about them in our article: 5 Useful Yahoo DSP Details You Should Know About. As well as how to work with lookalike audiences, best practices in Yahoo and how you can use TheOptmizer with Yahoo to increase your revenues.

As for some of the best-performing verticals in Yahoo, they are: gaming, beauty, house solutions, trading and dental implants.

RevContent

Continuing with RevContent, a Native Ads Platform that has significantly improved its list of publishers in recent times and created a nice premium pool of them. RevContent reaches up to 500 Million Daily Impressions, with the largest part of its traffic coming from the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Portugal, Germany, Brazil and France. Some of those premium publishers include: Forbes, Los Angeles Times, CBS Interactive, USA Today Sports, Tribune Media and Nasdaq.

As expected, RevContent has all the features you might need to optimize your targeting accordingly.

Among the features it offers, RevContent has built a great space for split testing inside its system. So you’re encouraged to play and compare your headlines, images, CTAs, and every other element on a landing page, to eventually find those offers that will be most successful for you.

For more on other details such as targeting tips and best practices in RevContent, check our full article on 5 Useful RevContent Details You Should Know About.

Top performing verticals in RevContent to get you inspired are: house gadgets, auto, traveling, diets and trading. We’ll explore some of these fantastical and highly-converting offers in our article about verticals.

MGID

Last but not least, we’ve got MGID. MGID reaches around 850 Million unique visitors per month, and serves them 185 Billion content recommendations. MGID partners with more than 30,000 publishers, unlike other Native Advertising Platforms, its primary market is Europe, but it also has a significant presence in the US and the Asia-Pacific region. Some of their top publishers include International Business Times, MSN, The Week, Newsweek, HITC, and Inquisitr.

Something important to know about MGID, is that it receives most of its traffic from smartphones. If you’re optimizing especially for mobile campaigns, it can be a great place to start. Additionally, MGID isn’t as strict with its ad policies as other networks, allowing for more freedom in what you can potentially advertise. As expected, it also has quite a large list of targeting options.

From our article on 5 Useful MGID Details You Should Know About, among other points, you can see which are MGID’s top three performing widgets: the under-article widgets (which traditionally generates the highest CTRs), in-article widget (a perfect fit for long-form articles that is highly preferred by marketers for its adaptability in multiple device formats) and the smart-widget (for those that receive a higher percentage of their traffic from desktop devices).

As for the best-performing verticals in MGID, we have: dental, health & food, celebrities, investing and auto.

Which is the Right Native Platform for You?

We get asked this question quite a lot on a daily basis through our interactions with both new and old customers, and the best answer we can still give is that the best-performing performance marketers use a few of them at the same time or even all of them. 

There’s no single platform that is significantly better than the rest. It all depends on the types of offers you want to promote, the publishers you want to work with, and just a bit of trial and error until you get everything right.

But how can you run all your campaigns, at the same time across multiple traffic sources? Learn more about TheOptimizer below.

Get the Most out of your Campaigns with TheOptimizer

TheOptimizer has an integration with all the Native Advertising Platforms mentioned in this list. It is the most complete tool in the market and offers performance marketers all the features they might need to optimize, run and scale all their campaigns on autopilot. Forget about changing budgets and bids manually, thanks to its condition-based rules TheOptimizer can do that for you. To learn more about TheOptimizer, click here.