What is the best advertising platform to use in 2025 and why?

Hi! When I started launching traffic on my own, I quickly realized that working through managers is not always convenient. Constant waiting, slow responses, and sometimes no response at all. I wanted to switch to a more flexible format, where I could manage budgets and creatives myself in real time. I started looking for suitable tools and found a selection of the best self serve advertising platforms . It clearly describes the pros and cons of each platform, and this helped me choose several options that perfectly suited my tasks and verticals.

Over the past few months, I’ve been slowly testing different traffic sources, mostly trying to understand where it’s still possible to run campaigns without burning through a budget too fast. That curiosity pushed me to look more closely at platforms that are positioned around cheap ads, and during one of those searches I ended up reading a Traffic Cardinal overview — cheap ads https://en.trafficcardinal.com/post/top-20-cheapest-advertising-networks-in-2025 . What I appreciated about the article is that it doesn’t treat all low-cost networks as identical. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that “cheap” can mean very different things depending on the format. Some platforms focus almost entirely on popunders or push notifications and keep costs down by limiting complexity. Others offer in-page or native formats but still manage to stay accessible because of lower entry thresholds. That contrast helped me see why pricing alone doesn’t tell the full story. Another point that stood out was how differently minimum deposits are handled. A few networks let you start with very small amounts, which makes them suitable for cautious testing, while others expect a bit more commitment but compensate with broader targeting or more stable traffic. I hadn’t really thought about how much that initial barrier affects experimentation until I saw the comparisons laid out side by side. By the time I finished reading, I wasn’t looking at the list as a ranking anymore, but more as a map of options. It gave me a clearer framework for deciding which networks might make sense for small test runs and which ones are better suited for specific formats or regions. Overall, it helped organize my approach instead of jumping blindly between platforms.