Every publisher faces this once traffic becomes meaningful. The answer depends on two numbers and one temperament question.
What a network gives you
Immediate revenue. Paste a tag, money starts. No selling, no invoicing, no relationships.
Infinite fill. There is always an ad. You never have unsold inventory.
Scale indifference. A network does not care whether you have 5,000 or 500,000 pageviews.
What it costs you
Most of the money. Networks take a substantial cut, and what reaches you is what remains after several intermediaries.
Control. You choose broad categories at best. What appears next to your writing is not really up to you.
Your reader's experience. Network creative is optimised for click rate, not for looking acceptable on your page.
What direct gives you
Two to four times the revenue on identical inventory, because a direct sponsor buys relevance rather than eyeballs.
Control over what appears. You approve every creative.
A relationship. A sponsor who renews for a year is worth more than any CPM.
What it costs
Hours. Building a media kit once. Finding and pitching each sponsor. Reporting monthly. Invoicing.
Unsold inventory. When a sponsorship ends and nothing replaces it, the slot earns nothing unless you run a house ad.
Willingness to sell. This is the one people underestimate.
The threshold
Take your best slot's monthly impressions, divide by 1,000, multiply by $5. That is roughly what a network would pay for it.
- Under $75 — stay on the network. Direct sales are not worth your hours yet.
- $75–150 — worth one experiment. Sell one slot, keep the rest on the network.
- Above $150 — direct is very likely worth it, assuming your audience is specific enough that a sponsor can see themselves in it.
The temperament question
Direct sales mean emailing strangers, being ignored, following up, and occasionally being told no. If that prospect makes you not want to open your laptop, $300 of network revenue you never think about genuinely beats $700 you resent earning.
That is not a failure of nerve. It is a legitimate reading of what your time and attention are for.
The answer for most people is both
Run a network across your inventory. Pull out your single best slot and sell it directly. Your revenue floor is protected while you find out whether you can and want to sell.
If the direct slot outperforms, take a second one. If it sits empty for two months, you have learned something cheap and you can put it back on the network in five minutes.
What makes direct work
Specificity. A general-interest site has little to offer a direct sponsor beyond volume, and volume is what networks are for.
A site about one narrow thing — a particular craft, a particular profession, a particular piece of equipment — has something no network can sell: an audience that is hard to reach any other way. That is where the multiple comes from, and it is why niche sites do disproportionately well selling direct.