PPV means Pay Per View: traffic where you pay for impressions of a target page.
In this post, I will write about a subject that is not new but is still hot: PPV traffic.
In 2026, the toolbars and adware that carried this traffic back then are dead. The mechanics are not: you still buy an impression rather than a click, and you still decide which URLs trigger it. The closest thing to 2011 PPV today is popup and popunder traffic.
What Is PPV?
Technically, it worked like this: the user had an application installed, usually a toolbar, that showed a popup or popunder with your banner or landing page when its targeting conditions matched. In effect, PPV traffic was adware traffic. One impression was the unit you paid for.
The size of the opened window depended on the company selling PPV traffic. It could be 1024×768, 800×600, 740×400, or another size. Full-page versions also appeared sometimes. They did not open a separate window, but were shown to the user while browsing, during transitions between pages.
Today, this category is much broader and no longer about adware.
PPV Today Means Popup and Popunder Traffic in 2026
Toolbars, screensavers, and other adware died out. The format remained, but moved and changed its name. Here is what became what:
- Toolbar -> a script on the publisher’s site, often an adult site. In 2011, software installed on the user’s device knew where they went. Now the pop tag sits on the webmaster’s site and knows only about that site.
- Popup / popunder, also known as OnClick, ClickUnder, or simply pops. In the interface of PropellerAds, for example, the format is called exactly that: OnClick (Popunder).
- Opened by itself -> opens on click. Browsers have blocked popups for a long time, hence OnClick: the window usually goes behind the tab. There are also back-button tricks that replace browser history. You still pay for an impression of your landing page.
- Keyword targeting -> died with the toolbars. The script knows the context, but it does not know the search.
- Targeting. The network sees its own placements. Instead of a list of two hundred URLs, you now run RON, collect statistics by zone ID / site ID, and build a whitelist manually while cutting out trash.
- Domain redirect is the same thing, but not quite. It is a separate story, but a very similar one: traffic from parked domains and typos. The user mistypes an address and lands on your offer.
Targeting in PPV
Targeting in PPV was a wonderful thing. You could target keywords or URLs. I will not dwell on keyword targeting now, but I will explain URL targeting in more detail.
In effect, we fed the system a list of URLs that would trigger a popup when the user visited them. This created excellent opportunities for unusual targeting angles. Here is the simplest example: I bought PPV traffic for some anime MMORPG. For targeting, I chose two URL lists: sites that gamers in general might visit, including competing game sites, and anime fan sites. Because I could not get serious volume from the offer, I abandoned its optimization, although later I will describe several successful examples of working with PPV traffic.
Options for this kind of targeting are now almost gone. Targeting in pay-per-view traffic today looks more like any other paid traffic.
Working with PPV has quite a few nuances:
- how to choose URLs correctly;
- how to draw a landing page (in Russian);
- how to choose an offer for PPV;
- how to track weak URLs, and so on.
In any case, if you work and make money online or want to start, PPV is one niche that deserves your attention right now. The next post about PPV.
More on the subject: five tips for working with Pay Per View traffic (in Russian) and a historical PPV case study with 334% ROI (in Russian).