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.
Hosted ad serving from under ten dollars
Get paid for recommending other newsletters
AdSpeed | SparkLoop | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | From $9.95 | Not listed |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Paid subscription | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | 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 |
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.
Hosted ad serving from under ten dollars
AdSpeed is a hosted ad server, so there is no software to install and no server of your own to keep patched. It rotates creatives, targets by geography and device, and reports impressions and clicks to whoever bought the slot. The price is the reason to look: this is the cheapest published entry point of any ad server in this directory. Support and reporting are what people say they stay for.
Our note
Ask what the entry tier's impression allowance is before committing, since that is the number the published floor does not carry and it is what decides whether $9.95 is the real price for your traffic. Against AdPlugg's free tier this only makes sense once you are past a hundred thousand impressions a month.
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.
Our note
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.
| Works with | 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 |
|---|
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