Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover ad networks. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Ad serving that starts free and bills by impression
Get paid for recommending other newsletters
AdPlugg | SparkLoop | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $10 | Not listed |
| Pricing model | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | Not stated | Not stated |
| Runs on | Web | Web |
| Covers | Ad Networks | Ad Networks, Giveaways & Referrals, Newsletter & Email |
| Works with |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Ad serving that starts free and bills by impression
AdPlugg serves and reports on ads you sold yourself, with a WordPress plugin for sites that live there and tags for everything else. The free tier runs a hundred thousand impressions a month, which covers a small site outright. Above that the monthly fee is small and the real cost is metered per thousand impressions, published as a table rather than quoted. Nobody here is finding you advertisers.
Our note
Work out your monthly impressions before comparing this against AdButler or Broadstreet, because the flat-fee servers cost more at the bottom and stop surprising you at the top. AdPlugg wins for a site under a hundred thousand impressions by a distance, and the arithmetic reverses somewhere in the millions.
Get paid for recommending other newsletters
SparkLoop turns a newsletter's own audience into revenue by paying it to recommend other newsletters, either inside the email or on the page somebody lands on after subscribing. The same network runs the other way, so a publisher can buy subscribers from it as well as sell them. Both sides sit on the free plan. It works with the mainstream sending platforms rather than replacing one.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Nothing in particular |
| Substack |
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
|---|
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
|---|
| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
|---|
Our note
Treat the free tier as the whole product and the $2,000 add-on as a separate decision for a newsletter already growing fast enough to reward referrers. Read the per-subscriber rates before planning revenue around this, because they are the number the pricing page leaves out.
Only on this side