We have had extensive experience with HillTopAds and right off the bat I can say that it is a great network for fallbacks.
The cpm rate is not competitive at all, the statistics are janky, lag like hell and don’t really have a geo-breakdown. So it’s very difficult to tell what countries are performing well. The adcode options are non-existent and they don’t really have inventory for anything but popups.
With all that being said, we still highly recommend this network because it has a very large inventory of ads and can be used as a fallback, their support is outstanding as well. You can register here for a publisher account.
General information
Overview
| Minimum payout | $20 Weekly Payouts |
| Payout options | Paypal, USDT TRC20/ERC20, BTC, Capitalist, Webmoney, Credit/Debit, Wire, Paxum |
| Ad Formats | Popup, popunder, VAST, in-page, video slider, banners, |
| Referral comission | 5% |
The minimum withdrawal amount for crypto is $100, BTC is $200 and wire is $1000
Their payouts also have confused many webmasters whom I introduced into the network, they will only payout if you reached the minimum threshold the previous week, for us it would be tuesday. That means if it is tuesday today and you have not reached the minimum ($100 USDT TRC20 in our example) before tuesday last week, you will not be paid. You will receive your income next tuesday. Makes sense? It’s a system built to the advantage of the network to make sure that there would be more time to detect fraudulent traffic for users who are unable to reach the minimum per week. Now, of course, if you choose something like paypal which is only $20, then it’s less of an issue as making less than $3 per day is not the same as making $14 per day.
Earning rates
What’s the CPM?!
From our personal experience, hilltop has been relatively reliable, their rates were never impressive
The last year on this network; columns – Impressions, clicks, revenue, cpm
We dabbled with all formats, but mainly popups. The realistic popup/under cpm would be around $0.6 for world-wide traffic. Unfortunately they do not have a breakdown of geos to show you what countries are good and bad, which is a shame.
This high cpm is due to us capping it and falling back to another network. That being said, their fillrate is outstanding, they will basically buy all your traffic! Unfortunately the rates would be low.
Ad setup
It’s not easy to work with
Whilst I can say that the HillTopAds support and affiliate manager team is great and is always very understanding and helpful, they do too much manual work, their platform has basically no customization of adcodes at all, you setup a zone and get a code – that’s it…
No one who is serious and not just looking for spam ads would use the default code, I always have to contact the network managers to adjust the ad refresh rate (cooldown, how often an ad is shown) and often min cpm. with a fallback, which often they don’t accept as well.
The network does offer direct link of popup codes, even though they say popunder, they don’t really serve any, at least I haven’t seen any on many different geos that I’ve experimented with.
This code can ideally be used as fallback code for other networks, also being able to setup a min. cpm and fallback to another network makes hilltopads a perfect partner for daisy-chaining ad networks.
Conclusion
HillTopAds is ideal for fallback traffic
In conclusion, there is a lot of work that has to be done to make HillTopAds more competitive, mainly the user-experience. We have recommended many improvements to the system last year, we were told they are going to be all implemented soon, well it’s been a year and nothing has happened yet, from personal experience: developing SaaS or any web-based project takes forever and it seems they are right on schedule.
The second improvement that needs to be made is the CPM. It’s way too low to be competitive with other adnetworks, of course this is much harder to do as it would require to attract more clients with deep pockets, though at the current state of the publisher experience, the limited options turn off a lot of serious webmasters.
All in all from our educated opinion, HillTopAds should definitely be in your rotation.
