MCM partners for Indian publishers — the honest picture

1. The India problem

The common belief is that the big US networks are out of reach because their traffic bar is too high. That isn't what their own pages say. Raptive lists its requirement as 25,000 pageviews a month — a bar plenty of Indian sites clear comfortably.

The line underneath it is the one that matters:

That is a geographic requirement, not a volume one. An Indian publisher doing 500,000 pageviews a month fails it just as completely as one doing 5,000. There is no amount of growth that fixes it.

So the real position for a 50k–200k pageview Indian publisher is this: AdSense works and pays, the next tier up is closed for reasons you cannot change, and nobody tells you which doors are actually open.

2. Who is actually present in India

I read the ads.txt file of 123 Indian publisher sites — national news, regional language, tech, sport, entertainment — and counted which management partners appear with a DIRECT relationship. DIRECT matters: a RESELLER line only means inventory reaches them through somebody else, not that they manage anything.

AniView is worth reading carefully — 81 of its appearances are RESELLER lines. It is a video ad server reaching sites through other platforms, not a management partner for most of them.

And the ones that were on zero Indian sites

Across all 123 files, these did not appear once — not DIRECT, not RESELLER:

This is a sample of 123 sites, not a census — absence here means "not found in this sample", not "never works with anyone in India". But when seven well-known names appear zero times in a sample that size, the pattern is doing the talking.

Three of those seven — Mediavine, Ezoic and Raptive — are Google Premier certified partners. The issue is not credibility, it's that their geography requirements exclude Indian traffic.

Corrected 26 Aug 2026: an earlier version of this list included Freestar. That was a scanning error on my side — I had searched for freestar.io, and their registered domain is freestar.com. Rescanned properly, Freestar appears on 11 of the 123 Indian sites (3 DIRECT, 8 RESELLER), so it does not belong in this list.

3. Realistic eCPM for Indian traffic

The $10 and $35 CPM figures that circulate in this niche are real numbers — for Tier-1 video inventory. They are not your numbers, and any partner quoting them at you for Indian display traffic is either careless or selling.

Display inventory on majority-Indian traffic sits at the lower end of the $1–5 band. I am not going to give you a tighter figure than that, because a tighter figure would be made up. What I can tell you is what moves you inside that band:

Anyone who guarantees you a specific eCPM before seeing a month of your data is guessing. Ask them what they think it will be, then ask what they'd do if they're wrong.

4. The reporting question nobody asks

Every company reselling Google demand publishes a sellers.json file listing the publishers it represents. You can check, before signing anything, whether that partner gives publishers their own account or puts them behind a shared one.

How to check it yourself, in about a minute:

Close to 1.00 means one account per publisher — your numbers are yours, and another publisher's problem is less likely to become your problem. Far below, around 0.2, means many publishers sit behind a small number of shared IDs. That model is not fraud and it can pay perfectly well, but it changes what your reporting can show you and what a policy issue elsewhere on that ID does to you.

I ran this for every partner I could reach. The ratios, publisher counts and geography are in the MCM partners directory — including the ones whose files I couldn't read, which are listed as unmeasured rather than guessed at.

If you would rather start from your own site type than from the full list, the segment-by-segment read is here: best MCM partners by segment.

5. What I offer

Disclosure: I'm one of the options here. I run an MCM operation, so this page is a competitor writing about competitors — which is exactly why every number on it is tied to a file you can open yourself: their sellers.json, their requirements page, or an ads.txt you can read in a browser. I'm not a Google Certified Publishing Partner and I don't claim to be; I work through established parent networks and will name the one for your site before you commit.

Before you talk to me or anyone else, the seven questions worth asking any partner are here: what to ask an MCM partner before you sign. Ask me the same seven.

• Google MCM: Manage Account vs Manage Inventory
• How to check if a Google MCM partner is genuine
• Google MCM for Android apps in India

Start with whether your site qualifies

If it won't pass Google's policy review, no partner on this page can change that. The check takes a minute and tells you where you stand.