Native advertising is the ad format that sits inside editorial content: the "recommended for you" rows under a news article, the sponsored cards on MSN, the in-feed units on a publisher's homepage. It is one of the biggest sources of reach outside search and social, and for many performance teams it is the least familiar one.
Two rebrands in 2025 made the landscape harder to read. Taboola renamed its performance platform Realize, and Outbrain merged with Teads and took the Teads name. Buyers still search for "Taboola pricing" and "Outbrain alternatives", and land on pages that describe platforms under names they no longer use. This guide maps the four native platforms we run most, explains what they cost, and covers the one question that decides most native tests: whether to open a self-serve account or run on an agency account.
The four native platforms worth knowing
The short answer: Realize and Teads are the two premium recommendation networks, MediaGo is a direct route onto MSN, and MGID is a broad open network. Many native buyers end up running two of them.
Realize (formerly Taboola)
Taboola launched Realize in February 2025 as the new name for its performance advertising platform. The publisher network is the same one Taboola built over a decade: MSN, Yahoo, major news brands and OEM placements on phones from manufacturers such as Samsung and Xiaomi. If you have a Taboola account, you have a Realize account; nothing about the inventory changed except the label.
Realize is the usual first platform for native buyers because of its premium publisher reach and its automated bidding. Two automated modes, Smart Bid and Maximize Conversions, optimise toward a CPA target, and a placement-level guard pauses publishers that are not converting. Our Realize account page covers the account itself.
Teads (formerly Outbrain)
Outbrain completed its acquisition of Teads in 2025 and the combined company trades under the Teads name. In practice two things sit under that brand: the Outbrain native recommendation network, with the same premium editorial placements Outbrain always had, and Teads' video and display inventory. Native buyers mostly still buy the recommendation inventory, and that is what an agency account on Teads (ex Outbrain) gives you.
If you are trying to work out where Outbrain ends and its programmatic offering begins, our older comparison of Outbrain and Outbrain DSP still describes the split, under the pre-merger names.
MediaGo
MediaGo is Baidu's international programmatic platform. Its standout placement is direct access to MSN desktop native inventory without the bulk commitments that MSN usually requires, plus a large network of publisher and exchange partnerships across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. It is a practical way to put a native test in front of an MSN audience.
MGID
MGID runs one of the broadest open native networks, with inventory across thousands of publisher sites in many geographies. It is less exclusive than Realize or Teads and correspondingly easier to scale into new markets. Teams that need volume in tier-2 and tier-3 geos, or a second native platform to diversify a Realize-heavy plan, usually add MGID next. Revcontent fills a similar role on a smaller network.
Taboola pricing: what native traffic really costs
Realize does not charge advertisers a platform fee. You pay for media, bought on a cost-per-click basis, and the price per click comes out of an auction set by your bid, your creative's click-through rate and the competition on each placement. There is no published rate card for media because there is no fixed price.
What you control is the floor and the overhead:
- The minimum starting budget. Native algorithms need volume to learn. On a Realize agency account the minimum starting budget is $1,000, because native bidding needs that much traffic to learn and a smaller test rarely produces a usable result.
- The account cost. On a self-serve account that is zero, plus whatever the platform's review process costs you in time. On an agency account it is a commission on actual ad spend.
Our commission works the same way on every platform we run. It is a percentage of what you actually spend, across S, M, L and XL tiers, and each tier carries a minimum monthly spend: a bigger minimum buys a lower rate. In a month where you spend below your tier's minimum, you are billed as if you had reached it. There is no setup fee, everything runs month to month with no lock-in, and unspent budget is covered by a 30-day refund guarantee. Current Realize rates, and the separate high-risk rate card, are on the Realize page and the pricing page.
Teads, MediaGo and MGID follow the same media model: an auction-priced click, an automated bidder toward a conversion goal, no platform fee. The differences between them show up in the inventory and the review process, not in the billing.
Self-serve or agency account?
The short answer: self-serve works for compliant offers at small budgets in mainstream verticals; an agency account pays for itself as soon as review speed, account stability or a restricted vertical matters.
Native platforms review every campaign before it serves, and new self-serve accounts get the slowest and strictest end of that process. Three things change on an agency account:
Trust and inventory. Accounts that have run clean volume for a long time carry a higher internal trust status. On native that matters more than on social, because the premium publishers, the placements most worth buying, are gated behind it. A fresh self-serve account often cannot reach them at all.
Review speed. Campaign review on high-trust accounts is faster and more consistent. For a team that rotates creative weekly, review latency is a direct cost.
An escalation path. When an automated review flags a clean campaign, a self-serve advertiser files a ticket and waits. An agency raises it through its platform relationship. That path is also why the refund question looks different: Realize's own policy keeps budgets on accounts it flags, while our 30-day guarantee refunds unspent budget anyway.
What does not change is the policy itself. Platform policies apply in full on an agency account. What changes is over-enforcement, access to the better inventory, and having someone to escalate to.
The billing side also changes. An agency account runs on a credit line held by the agency, funded from a prepaid wallet, so you are not putting a corporate card on a platform account and waiting for a spending limit to grow. Accounts are typically live in 2 to 3 days, fastest same-day.
Restricted verticals on native
Native has long carried offers that search and social handle badly: crypto, nutra, forex and finance, iGaming, sweepstakes and dating all run on native. They are supported on high-trust accounts, with offer pre-approval.
Pre-approval is the step that keeps a cleared account alive. Before an account is assigned, the offer and the funnel are reviewed against the platform's policy for that vertical. If it clears, it runs on an account matched to that risk level. If it cannot clear, we say so before you spend, rather than letting the account find out for you. High-risk accounts sit on a separate rate card.
How to run your first native test
Native rewards patience more than any other channel. Four rules cover most of what goes wrong in a first test:
- Budget for learning. Plan the first two weeks as data collection, at or above the platform's minimum starting budget. Judging a native campaign on day three is judging the learning phase.
- Lead with an advertorial. Native users clicked on what looked like content. Sending them to a hard product page loses most of them; a content-led landing page that explains the offer keeps them.
- Test headlines and images, not formats. On native the thumbnail and headline do most of the work. Rotate several of each and let the bidder find the winners.
- Prune placements weekly. Every native network has a long tail of publishers that send clicks and no conversions. Block them on a fixed schedule rather than waiting for the automated guard.
If your offer is already working on Meta or Google, native is usually the next channel to add rather than a replacement. Our buyer's guide covers what to check before choosing where your accounts come from.
Frequently asked questions
Is Realize the same as Taboola?
Yes. Taboola renamed its performance platform Realize in 2025. The publisher network, the bidding and the account structure are the same; existing Taboola accounts became Realize accounts.
How much does Taboola cost?
There is no platform fee. You pay for media on a cost-per-click basis, priced by auction, so the cost per click depends on your bid, your click-through rate and the placement. On an agency account you add a commission on actual spend; the current tiers are on the pricing page.
What is the minimum budget for Taboola (Realize)?
On our Realize agency accounts the minimum starting budget is $1,000. Native bidding needs that volume to exit its learning phase, and a smaller test rarely produces a usable result.
What happened to Outbrain?
Outbrain acquired Teads in 2025 and the combined company now operates as Teads. The Outbrain native recommendation network still exists under the Teads name, and agency accounts on it are still available.
Which native platform should I start with?
For most offers, Realize: its premium publisher network and automated bidding make it the usual first test. MediaGo is a direct route onto MSN, Teads is the natural second premium platform, and MGID is the choice for broad geographic volume.
Can I run crypto, nutra or finance offers on native?
Yes, on high-trust accounts, after offer pre-approval. Pre-approval checks the offer and funnel against the platform's policy before an account is assigned, and it is also where offers that cannot clear are refused.
Do I need a business manager like on Meta?
No. Native platforms use one advertiser account with campaigns inside it. There is no business manager layer, no pages and no profiles to maintain.
How fast is a native agency account live?
Typically 2 to 3 days, fastest same-day.
The bottom line
Native advertising is two platforms most buyers already know under old names, Realize (Taboola) and Teads (Outbrain), plus MediaGo and MGID for MSN reach and broad volume. The media is auction-priced on every one of them; what you choose is the account it runs on. For compliant offers at test budgets, self-serve can work. Once inventory quality, review speed or a restricted vertical matters, an agency account is what gets the campaign onto the placements worth buying.