AdSense alternatives for UK websites

Why people look for an alternative

Three complaints come up again and again. The split: Google keeps 32% of display revenue. The payout: £60 minimum, paid around the 21st of the following month — a small UK site can wait months to see anything. And the opacity: you can't see what an impression actually sold for, or negotiate any of it. Add the cookie consent banner AdSense obliges you to run for UK visitors, and switching starts to look sensible.

The realistic options

Premium managed networks (Mediavine, Raptive)

If you qualify, take this seriously — header bidding across many demand sources genuinely can pay several times AdSense. The catch is the door: roughly 50,000 sessions a month for Mediavine, 100,000 page views for Raptive, mostly tier-one traffic. Most UK independent sites simply aren't eligible, and the ad stacks are heavy.

Ezoic and similar optimisation platforms

No traffic minimum and often a real uplift over AdSense. Trade-offs: page-speed impact you'll need to watch, revenue that swings month to month, and a dashboard-heavy experience that some love and some find exhausting. Worth testing if maximum yield is your only goal.

Direct sponsorship

No network at all: sell a slot straight to a business your readers care about. Highest rate per visitor of anything on this page, at the cost of doing sales, invoicing and renewals yourself. Realistic for local and niche sites with an engaged audience; exhausting at any scale.

dijitul ads — ours

A UK-only network with direct advertisers and no ad-tech chain in between. You keep 80%; payouts are £25 minimum on the 5th of every month by bank transfer; the tag is under 1KB, sets zero cookies (so it needs no consent banner of its own), and ads can inherit your site's own fonts and colours. There's no minimum traffic and every site is human-reviewed.

Where we're honest about losing: we're new and UK-only, so fill isn't wall-to-wall yet — a giant network will serve more of your impressions today. Our bet is a fairer split on quality UK demand beats a worse split on everything, and unfilled slots simply collapse rather than showing junk.

How to actually compare

Run any two options for 30 days each and compare net RPM — what actually lands in your account per thousand views after every deduction — alongside your Core Web Vitals before and after. Headline CPMs are marketing; net RPM and page speed are what you keep. And nothing stops you running more than one network in different slots.