Every network review on this site comes from running the network ourselves, with our own traffic, against our own bank statements. This page describes what that process looks like in detail. It exists because too many “best CPA networks” lists are written by people who’ve never logged into half of them.

The testing loop

For every network we cover, we follow the same four-step loop:

  1. Apply, get approved, get an AM. Most adult networks gate the better offers behind affiliate-manager approval. We open the conversation at signup so we have a contact when something goes sideways.
  2. Pick three offers. One cam, one dating, one premium or niche-specific. We keep the offer mix consistent across networks so cross-comparisons are meaningful.
  3. Run thirty days at capped spend. Long enough to see optimization patterns settle but short enough that a bad result doesn’t blow the budget.
  4. Reconcile dashboard against bank. The dashboard is the network’s version of what you earned. The bank statement is reality. The delta is what the review actually measures.

We re-run the loop quarterly for networks we keep in active rotation. Networks we’ve dropped get re-tested annually unless something material changes (new program, new ownership, new payout structure) that warrants a fresh look sooner.

What we actually measure

EPC (earnings per click)
Click-through to confirmed conversion, paid out to bank, divided by clicks. We don’t use the dashboard EPC — that’s what the network reports, which includes pending and reversed conversions.
Time-to-payout
Days from end-of-period to money in our account. Some networks show “paid” in the dashboard before the wire actually arrives; we count from arrival.
Reversal rate
Conversions that pay out then get clawed back later. High reversal rates make EPC unreliable and make a network harder to plan against.
Approval ratio
For networks with approval-based payouts (most adult CPA), the percentage of submitted leads that pay out. Low approval ratios are sometimes legitimate quality signals and sometimes shaving — the four-step loop is what tells us which.
Geo coverage
Which countries the network’s offers actually pay on. A network can list “global” in their inventory and effectively only pay on six geos.

What disqualifies a network

We’ve stopped covering networks for several reasons over the years. Any of these will move a network off the list and into the archive:

  • Late or partial payouts beyond their stated terms, repeatedly, without an explanation we believe.
  • Reversal rates above 30% on a category they explicitly market as their strength.
  • Active affiliate-manager hostility — refusing to discuss optimization, evasive about why offers were paused, threatening to revoke account access for asking the wrong questions.
  • Tracking that breaks under load. If the dashboard can’t keep up with our volume, our optimization can’t either.
  • Material changes to terms after-the-fact. We can live with networks that re-price offers prospectively. We can’t work with ones that re-price retroactively on conversions already in the pipeline.

What we tell you

Reviews are written in the same voice we’d use describing the network to another affiliate over coffee — whether it’s your first program or your fiftieth. We say what we run on each network, which traffic types we’d send and which we wouldn’t, what the program is good for and where its limits are. We try not to use words like “best” without specifying who we mean — “best for cam traffic in Tier 1” is a useful claim, “best CPA network” mostly isn’t.

When numbers appear on the site (EPC, payout figures, monthly earnings) they come from our own runs unless explicitly attributed otherwise. When we cite something a network published, we cite it. When we say a network “is” something, we mean it’s that to us, with the traffic we have, in the period we tested.

Disclosures and conflicts

We’re an affiliate site. Many of the network and offer links on this site are affiliate links — if you sign up through them, we may earn a commission. That’s how we get paid for writing this. It does not change which networks we cover or what we say about them. We’ve turned down sponsored coverage from networks we wouldn’t have endorsed organically; we’ve also written negative reviews of networks whose affiliate links pay us. The decisions are independent.

If you ever spot something on the site that looks like it conflicts with the rules above — a review that reads more glowingly than the data warrants, or a “we use this” claim that doesn’t match what you’d expect — email us and tell us why. We’re a one-operator shop and we take corrections seriously.