Everyone keeps chasing the same “top GEOs of the month”. Which is exactly why they become overpriced as hell and overcrowded with advertisers fighting for the same users. Sometimes with literally identical landing pages too. Because apparently originality died somewhere around 2022.
So let’s stop running after the same shiny objects for a second.
This month we want to talk about GEOs that nobody talks much about right now. GEOs advertisers quietly abandoned because of regulations, seasonality, payment issues, or simply because the market got tired.
And honestly? That is usually where the interesting traffic starts. Especially in popunder. Because popunder traffic has this funny habit of converting on things people swear “should never work there”.
Lower demand means lower bids. Lower competition. More volume. Less auction bloodbath.
This week’s unpopular GEOs:
ITALY & INDIA
Let’s go one by one.
ITALY
Since 2018, Italy has been aggressively tightening advertising regulations. Especially around iGaming and pop traffic. And yes, you can feel it. We already covered part of this mess in one of our previous articles about what the iGaming industry is currently dealing with.
The funny part is that native advertising in Italy is becoming less and less “native”. Because now you are expected to clearly state that this is an ad, what exactly is being promoted, and basically remove any illusion that the user “accidentally discovered” your product.
And then comes the even harder part: indirect gambling advertising restrictions. Meaning you cannot even play too creatively with gambling related visuals anymore. Jackpots, roulettes, bonus mechanics, casino vibes, all of that started becoming toxic from a compliance perspective, even in disguised form.
Which is exactly why Italy changed.
A GEO that used to be almost impossible to buy without insane bids and brutal competition suddenly became more available for other verticals. Dating, mainstream, nutra, sweepstakes, subscriptions, and a bunch of other offers suddenly got more breathing room. Because the Italian user did not disappear.
They are still solvent. Still active. Still willing to spend money.
INDIA
India always suffered from weird misconceptions. For some advertisers it was “cheap traffic”. For others “trash traffic”. For some it was “too difficult to optimize”. Meanwhile people quietly kept making money there for years.
Because India is massive. And if you understand the audience properly, the volume there becomes huge.
The real problem is that India is not lazy marketer friendly. You actually need to understand the users. What do they like? What attracts them? Which language, browser, and region have the most solvent users?
It is easy to analyze users when they behave like markets we already understand. India is different. And that scares a lot of advertisers away.
Then iGaming and financial regulations entered the chat.
A few years ago you probably remember all those ads with some “multimillionaire” teaching ordinary people how to become rich in 3 days from crypto, trading, investments, magical signals, and whatever other financial fantasy was trending that month.
Now platforms started tightening verification requirements for financial advertising much harder. Add restrictions on surrogate advertising, fake urgency, hidden fees, manipulative countdowns, dark patterns, and suddenly a lot of advertisers simply backed off.
Which again creates opportunity.
Because when everyone leaves a GEO, but the users are still there, somebody always ends up buying traffic cheaper than everyone else.
So what is your offer for Italy or India?
Maybe now is exactly the moment to buy those GEOs while everybody else is busy fighting over the same exhausted Tier 1 auctions.
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