In recent years, significant industry changes have led us to prioritize website quality and carefully evaluate the publishers we accept for monetization through Freestar. These shifts have underscored the importance of maintaining high standards in our network, ensuring that only reputable sites that align with our values and industry best practices become part of our ecosystem
Freestar partners with many of the world’s largest publishers, a success made possible through strong, strategic relationships with top SSPs, DSPs, agencies, and advertisers. In the past year alone, we’ve seen over 200% growth in deal-based revenue. By raising our standards for publisher quality, we provide advertisers with greater confidence in the value and integrity of our network, reinforcing trust as they invest across our portfolio of sites.
With traffic from major referral sources of the past decade—such as Google organic search, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest—declining, it’s crucial for publishers to focus on UX and content quality. These elements are now essential in building brand reputation and attracting premium advertisers who prioritize engaging, high-quality sites for their campaigns.
Freestar’s Publisher Acceptance Requirements
1. As a publisher you must be able to show 6 months of historical traffic data. It’s hard to establish the amount of traffic it takes to accumulate meaningful ad revenue in anything less, and even 6 months seems short. It’s safe to say that if you are, paid traffic is a significant part of the strategy.
2. Content must be unique to the publisher, and meant for human consumption, with the majority of traffic being unpaid. A healthy diversification of traffic is safest. We do require access to Google Analytics (or equivalent) to verify that pageviews are from legitimate sources. A diversified traffic makeup commonly comes from a mix of organic search (Google, Bing, Yahoo), social (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram), Google News, Google Discover, Google Images, YouTube, Reddit, and news syndication sources (Smart News, Flipboard, News360, Newsbreak). We use internal testing tools to identify paid traffic, MFA and AI-generated websites.
3. Content must be brand safe. We do not monetize websites that publish, utilize or condone:
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- Piracy
- Violence
- Hate-speech
- Adult content / NSFW
4. Publishers must be in good standing with all major ad providers. If you’ve had issues in the past with demand flags, penalties or rejections, we may not be able to work with you.
Related: Publisher Services
In order to provide publishers the high CPMs we do today, we are committed to upholding high quality standards.. As a part of this, we may request access to GA4, and ask for insights into your website traffic, revenue historicals and the relationship status with current demand partners.
Rules Around Content
We pride ourselves on being content agnostic, with publishers representing 18 different content verticals. As long as you meet all the guidelines we just listed above, it doesn’t particularly matter the niche. Some of our largest content categories are sports, news, finance, automotive, gaming and entertainment.
Content should either be original to the publisher, or using content syndication best practices with proper permissions. The most successful monetization comes in the form of engaged website users. Content strategies that will not be accepted: stolen/scrapped, fully AI-generated, clickbait headlines for the purpose of paid media, and content with potential copyright issues.
Additional Considerations
We don’t have a hard pageview requirement for acceptance, but in order to bring you meaningful revenue, the average pageviews for our publishers are typically at least a million per month. Once accepted, we have a team of audience development experts ready to work with you on traffic growth strategies!
If you’re ready to monetize with Freestar, meeting our publisher acceptance requirements is the first step toward unlocking new revenue potential. By partnering with us, you’ll join a network that prioritizes quality, transparency, and value, offering a seamless path to higher CPMs and premium demand
Are you ready for the next steps? Click the link below to get started. We can’t wait to meet you!
