What's on this page
- Where to buy native ads and what it costs to start
- How to run a native campaign on AdsCompass
- Native ad network or DSP for your first campaign
- How programmatic native buying works
- Native ad formats the IAB recognizes
- Native ads vs display ads
- Native traffic quality and landing pages
- Native ad disclosure rules for advertisers
- First native campaign checklist
- How this page was researched
Where to Buy Native Ads and What It Costs to Start
Buy native ads on AdsCompass, MGID, Outbrain Amplify or Taboola without a sales call. Their entry conditions, though, measure different things. AdsCompass and MGID ask for a minimum deposit of $50 and $100, while Outbrain Amplify sets a $20 minimum daily budget and Taboola recommends at least $50 a day.
Run the math over a 14-day test and those daily figures reach $280 on Outbrain Amplify and $700 on Taboola, before a single source has been cut. A deposit is spent only as fast as your bids allow. Treat the table as a list of starting conditions, since traffic quality also depends on vertical and GEO.
| Native ads platform | Entry condition | Pricing | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| AdsCompass | $50 minimum deposit (the Terms say it can depend on the payment method) | CPM for native; CPC for pop, push and in-page | Separate bids per traffic source, Auto Rules and CPA Goal; RTB links over oRTB, XML and JSON; 8 billion impressions and 60 million clicks a day across all formats |
| MGID | $100 minimum deposit | CPC; Target CPA bidding still bills per click | MGID itself recommends starting with at least $650 |
| Outbrain Amplify (Teads) | $20 minimum daily budget | CPC, with Target CPA and Target ROAS bid strategies | Outbrain closed its $900 million Teads acquisition on 3 February 2025 and took the Teads name on 9 June 2025 |
| Taboola | 50$ day recommended (10 a day possible) | CPC or CPM; Maximize Conversions bidding with optional target CPA | About 14,000 digital property partners (Taboola 10-K, FY2025); the budget guide suggests 10 times your CPA goal per day |
Entry conditions from each platform's own help center or terms, checked 20 October 2026: Outbrain Amplify budget and pricing help pages, Taboola budget and bidding guides and its pricing blog, MGID pricing page, AdsCompass Terms section 6.4.1.
Some affiliate buyers add a spy tool such as Anstrex, which tracks native and push campaigns, to see which creatives competitors keep running long enough to suggest they pay.
How to Run a Native Campaign on AdsCompass
Five steps take an AdsCompass campaign live, and current bids are visible from step two.
Register. The AdsCompass sign-up asks for an email address, contact details and a password.
Check bids first. The Estimation tools section of the AdsCompass advertiser account shows current bids, top GEOs and traffic volumes. According to the FAQ, the section opens after registration, and account managers can quote the same figures on request.
Fund the account. The minimum deposit is $50. Section 6.4.1 of the AdsCompass Terms adds that the threshold depends on the payment method, and section 6.4.3 allows a processing fee at top-up. Payment options listed in the FAQ include Capitalist, cryptocurrency, Stripe card payments, PayPal, Paxum, WebMoney and wire transfer.
Launch native on CPM. On AdsCompass, native ads are priced per thousand impressions, and the company's blog puts the minimum native bid at $0.1 CPM. On top of geo, device, OS and carrier filters, AdsCompass offers language targeting, retargeting audiences and site whitelists or blacklists.
Optimize by source. Source ID bidding, added in October 2024, sets a separate bid for each traffic source. Auto Rules, introduced in March 2026, blocks sources that meet conditions you define, such as spend above $5 with no conversion. Since September 2026, CPA Goal has checked sources against conditions you set, such as spend, conversions or ROI, and collected the matches into a separate list.
Refunds are the weak spot. AdsCompass returns unspent balance only on written request within 180 days of payment, minus operational expenses and a fee of 3% to 10% with a $10 minimum (Terms, section 10). Deposit only what a two-week test will burn.
Native Ad Network or DSP for Your First Campaign
A native ad network sells its own publishers' inventory, while a native DSP buys across many exchanges through one interface. AdsCompass does both. Its FAQ says the platform connects to partners as an SSP or a DSP over oRTB, XML or JSON. On the supply side, AdsCompass publishers monetize push, in-page and native traffic directly.
How volume splits between those two sources is not published. Ask your AdsCompass manager what share of native traffic in your GEO comes from RTB partners before you scale a winning campaign. AdsCompass has been an IAB member since 2019 and states that its own anti-fraud platform analyzes incoming traffic.
How Programmatic Native Buying Works
Programmatic native ads travel as asset bundles. IAB Tech Lab's OpenRTB Dynamic Native Ads specification defines the format. The publisher's request lists the assets it wants. Each asset object carries only one element (a title, an image, a video or a data field) and its own ID, so the bid response maps back to the right slot.
Version 1.0 of the specification appeared in early 2015. Version 1.2, announced in 2017, added event trackers, support for third-party and dynamic creative, and a flag for buyer-specific privacy notices.
Write every headline in three lengths. For bidders on the dynamic-creative path, the spec recommends three title objects capped at 25, 90 and 140 characters, plus an image in every recommended aspect ratio. The publisher's template decides how much room a headline gets, so the short version should be yours rather than a truncation.
On the buy side, a native DSP answers the asset request in the bid stream with a bundle, and the publisher's template renders it. One campaign can therefore run on thousands of differently designed sites.
Native Ad Formats the IAB Recognizes
The IAB recognizes three native ad types: in-feed and in-content units, content recommendation ads, and branded or native content. That list dates from the IAB Native Advertising Playbook 2.0, published in May 2019. It cut the 2013 framework from six types to three. Promoted listings moved into in-feed, and paid search left the taxonomy because the industry treats search as its own category.
In-feed and in-content native ads. Units placed inside a stream of content, such as a social feed, an article listing or a product feed, or between the paragraphs of an article. App and social feeds are built on this card pattern.
Content recommendation ads. Widgets under or beside an article, usually labeled "You may also like" or "Around the web", that link out to a sponsor's page. Native ad networks such as Taboola, MGID and the Outbrain business now trading as Teads built themselves on this unit.
Branded and native content. A full article, video or interactive piece published on the publisher's own domain, often produced by the publisher's studio and carrying a paid-post label. Because it lives on the publisher's domain, it can stay readable after a campaign flight ends.
Video counts as an execution inside any of the three types.
Native Ads vs Display Ads
Display ads arrive as finished files, and native ads arrive as parts. A 300x250 banner looks the same on every site. A native ad is a list: headline, image URL, brand name, call-to-action label, sometimes a star rating. None of those fields names a font or a color. The publisher's template supplies both.
That trade costs you layout control. The same headline wraps one way on a news site and another in an app feed, and nothing in the buy lets you fix it. In return, the unit reads as part of the page.
Native Traffic Quality and Landing Pages
Many readers never notice that a native unit is an ad, so some clicks come from people who did not expect an advertiser's page. Factor that into early conversion rates.
Research from the University of Georgia shows the scale. In Wojdynski and Evans's study in the Journal of Advertising, only 17 of 242 viewers, or 7%, identified a sponsored article as advertising; in a companion eye-tracking experiment, 17% did. Amazeen and Wojdynski later tested a representative sample of 800 US adults and again found that fewer than one in ten recognized native advertising. Their study also showed that well-designed disclosure labels improve recognition.
Plan the funnel around that gap. Native traffic usually needs a warming step, such as a review or a comparison article, before any offer that asks for money. Keep the landing page in the tone the ad started, because a hard sales page breaks the editorial promise the ad made.
Native Ad Disclosure Rules for Advertisers
Disclosure is mandatory in both the US and the EU. In the US, the FTC holds the advertiser and those who help make the ad responsible. The EU adds a platform-level duty through the Digital Services Act, on top of consumer-protection rules that already bind advertisers.
In the United States, the FTC judges native ads by net impression. The FTC issued its Enforcement Policy Statement and its business guide, Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses, on 22 December 2015. Both treat an ad as deceptive when the format makes a reasonable consumer read it as editorial. Every product claim inside can be true and the ad still fails. The guide adds that the FTC has acted against ad agencies and affiliate network operators who helped create deceptive content.
Article 26 of the EU Digital Services Act puts the labeling duty on platforms. Users must be able to see, clearly and in real time, that an item is an ad and on whose behalf it runs. They must also see who paid for it, if that is a different party, and the main parameters used to target them.
Build the disclosure into your own creative. A label written into your copy survives every rendering environment, while a label supplied by the publisher's template depends on that template.
First Native Campaign Checklist
Start on a platform whose minimum lets you fail cheaply. Taboola's help center recommends a daily budget of at least 10 times your CPA goal and advises aiming for at least 10 conversions a day. Below that volume, read early results with caution.
Check the bid level next. In AdsCompass, Estimation tools shows current bids by GEO, so you can size a two-week test against real numbers before committing more than the minimum.
Write three headline lengths for every concept, supply both a wide image and a square icon, and turn on source-level reporting from day one. Native inventory is a long tail of individual placements. On AdsCompass, CPA Goal can help you to collect sources that spend without converting, while Source ID bidding keeps borderline sources running at a lower price.
How This Page Was Researched
Every figure on this page traces to a primary document or a named, dated source. Format definitions rest on the IAB Native Advertising Playbook 2.0 and the OpenRTB Dynamic Native Ads specification. Regulatory statements rely on the FTC's 2015 business guidance and the text of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065, while the recognition figures come from two peer-reviewed studies cited above.
The AdsCompass links are partner links and may earn this site a commission at no cost to you. That commission played no part in the table order. Treat the review date, 21 October 2026, as the expiry stamp on every figure here.