We built an ad marketplace from scratch. 51 purchases/month, 3.6% conversion rate, and almost zero organic traffic. Here's where we are.

Hey IH — I've been working with a small digital advertising marketplace called Adbassador, helping them figure out growth. I wanted to share where things stand because I think the honest version is more useful than a polished one.

What Adbassador is

It's a marketplace connecting advertisers with publishers for guest posts, link insertions, banner ads, and press releases. Publishers list their sites. Advertisers browse real metrics — Domain Authority, Domain Rating, traffic, spam score, link type — and buy placements directly. Starting at $5.

No account managers taking a cut. No opaque pricing. No mystery about what you're actually buying.

The problem it solves

If you've ever tried to buy a guest post or a link insertion, you know the landscape is rough. The big players have tens of thousands of sites listed, which sounds great until you realize a huge chunk of them are private blog networks, scraped content farms, or domains with fabricated traffic numbers. You pay $80 for a "DA 50" placement and end up on a site that exists solely to sell links to people like you.

The team kept running into this themselves. They'd buy placements, check the sites afterward, and find garbage. PBNs dressed up to look legitimate. Sites with no real audience. Domains that would get deindexed within six months, taking their links with them.

So they started vetting publishers themselves. Every single one. Manual review. Real traffic, real content, real editorial standards. If a site doesn't pass, it doesn't get listed. They'd rather have 100 good publishers than 100,000 questionable ones.

Where we are right now (the real numbers)

Just over 100 vetted publishers on the platform. Roughly 51 purchases per month with a 3.6% conversion rate. Daily sessions sit around 48.

Those are small numbers. I know.

But here's what's encouraging: almost all of that traffic is direct. People who know about Adbassador come back and buy. The conversion rate is solid for a marketplace. And there are repeat purchases, which tells me the product works once people find it.

The glaring problem is discovery. Organic search traffic is close to zero. The team was so focused on building the product and vetting publishers that SEO fell to the bottom of the priority list. That's starting to change.

What we're doing about growth

A few things we're experimenting with right now:

• SEO content. We published a comparison piece covering the best guest post marketplaces in 2026. Not a fluff piece — it genuinely compares Adbassador against Adsy, The HOTH, FatJoe, and others, including where they beat us. More content like this is in the pipeline: practical, honest, targeting the queries buyers are already searching.

• Email onboarding. We've been leaving a lot on the table with new signups. Building out a proper onboarding sequence to get new users to their first purchase faster.

• Community engagement. Posts like this one. Showing up in the places where buyers and publishers already hang out — not with ads, but with real information about what we're building and learning.

None of this is revolutionary. But the team spent too long building in a vacuum, so even basic distribution work feels like progress.

Lessons learned so far

Vetting is a moat, but it's a slow one. Manually reviewing every publisher means the supply side grows slowly. That's the tradeoff. You can't just open the floodgates and list 10,000 sites overnight. But the buyers who find us trust what they're getting, and that trust converts.

Starting at $5 gets people in the door. A lot of competitors start at $50 or $100 minimum. Having a low entry point lets people test the platform without much risk. Many come back for bigger placements once they see the quality.

Organic search is not optional, and we waited too long. If I could go back, I'd push for content from month one. Direct traffic is great, but it doesn't scale without a discovery channel feeding it.

Conversion rate matters more than traffic when you're small. We obsessed over the funnel before obsessing over traffic, and I think that was actually the right call. Getting 3.6% conversion with 48 sessions/day means every improvement to traffic has a meaningful impact on revenue.

What's next

More publishers. More content. Better onboarding. Nothing glamorous. We're trying to get organic traffic from near-zero to something meaningful over the next few months while maintaining vetting standards on the supply side.

If you've built a marketplace and figured out the cold start problem or cracked SEO for a niche B2B product, I'd genuinely love to hear how you did it.

Happy to answer any questions about the business, the numbers, or what we've tried that didn't work.