I mentioned in a recent article that I moved one of my niche sites to Mediavine. I thought I’d follow up with a quick overview of my experience with them so far.
I’m very happy to be part of the Mediavine family, and that’s what it feels like, a family. Even the CEO is fairly active in the Facebook group, a place just for Mediavine publishers where they can talk tips and strategies. Just be careful not to post anything related directly to your site or it won’t be approved… (oops!)
The whole thing is very hands off, they make it easy for you to just continue creating content while they handle all of the ads and make you the most money possible. Other ad networks require more of your time doing A/B testing and figuring out what works where. If you like those things, then somewhere like Ezoic might be better for you. They have a browser extension that lets you do a crazy amount of testing and their AI does testing automatically for you.
Mediavine takes all of this off of your plate and uses their battle tested ad placements, their own private network of advertisers, as well as ads from Google. The bottom line is that it’s more hands off letting you do other things.
First things first.
Who is Mediavine?
Mediavine is a full service ad management company. Once you reach 25k sessions/month on your website, you can apply to Mediavine here. That does not guarantee you’ll get accepted though, they can be pretty picky with who they accept.
Directly from the Mediavine website:
Mediavine takes on the role of your exclusive ad manager, and lets you focus on what you do best; create amazing content.
We’ve built our ad technology free of the burden of legacy ad networks. It’s future proof and ready to grow with your site. You install a single script and we will optimize all placements on your site.
Getting into Mediavine has been a goal of mine literally since day 1 of my journey with internet marketing.
It’s sort of like an elite club for bloggers. I’m very happy to have been accepted and as you can see from my earnings below things are starting off pretty good.
Just being honest, what they do behind the scenes is kind of like magic to me in that I don’t quite understand everything going on. I just know that they help you place ads on your site, manage them for you, and earn money with your blog.
There are many other options out there such as Adsense by Google, Ezoic, Monumetric, Media.net, and Adthrive to name a few.
In my opinion Mediavine and Adthrive are probably in the top 2 in terms of most sought after. It’s debatable which will earn you more money.
How much can you make with Mediavine?
Well I obviously can’t tell you how much YOU can make, because every site and every niche is different. I can however tell you how much I make, just to give you an idea. You could make a lot more than me with similar traffic, or a lot less.
Here are my earnings for the first 3 weeks of April 2020, 4/1 through 4/21:
$866.49
-64,255 Sessions
-$13.49 RPM
So you can see for the first 2 weeks I was making around $30-$40 per day, but that has moved up to about $50-$60 per day. That’s mostly because my traffic is steadily increasing, which isn’t related to Mediavine, however my RPM has also been going up a little as well.
Based on the way things are going I should easily be in the $1200-$1500 range for April 2020 and be at lease close to 100k sessions on the month. I expect May to be significantly higher.
Having said all of that I’d like to repeat that everyone’s RPM and earnings will be different, this is just an example of what mine is currently. Yours could be anywhere from $5 to $50, it depends on many factors.
What kind of content am I publishing?
I have one site on Mediavine, me and my partner on this site publish mostly informational content in the home and garden niche. There is also some affiliate content that is focused solely on sending people to Amazon, but I remove ads from those posts. So all ad revenue is coming from info articles.
I like to publish low competition how to’s and guides, Q&A posts, and just generally low hanging fruit. You may be familiar with KGR, I don’t do that. It leaves too much on the table and I don’t like to limit myself.
What are my goals for Mediavine earnings?
As you can see, we’re currently earning roughly $50/day with MV, I want to take that to $200/day just from ads. I think that’s very doable within a year or less. Keep in mind RPM’s are way way down right now because of world events, once things normalize I expect ad revenue to go up with my existing content. I will also be adding content the whole time.
The above video has some real life publishers talking about their experience with MV.
How long does it take to get approved to Mediavine?
For me the entire process from applying to having ads on my site was almost exactly 3 weeks. So go in being prepared for it to take a little while.
They pass your application down the line to all of their advertisers, it is looked at by many people before they tell you that you’re approved. Once you’re approved you’ll get a congratulatory email and be instructed on what to do next. There’s someone with you all along the way helping you and telling you exactly what to do.
If your site isn’t compliant with their guidelines, someone from the MV team will reach out to you and offer to help. For instance my sidebar was too small or something. Sure I probably could have fixed it pretty easily being that I’m a web developer and all, but I just gave them temporary admin access and let them do it. Very simple.
From there I just had to install the Mediavine WordPress plugin and do a couple of things and I was up and running. It was a bit of a length process with a lot of trading emails, but it was smooth sailing and there weren’t any snags along the way really except for the sidebar thing.
I’ll also add that once you have one site accepted at the standard 25k sessions, you can apply with additional sites at only 10k sessions.
Tips to maximize earnings
I just wanted to add a few times that can help you get the most ad revenue out of an article, as well as help you avoid some things that will kill your page RPM.
- Keep your paragraphs AND your sentences short – This gives maximum places for in-content ads. Walls of text kill your page RPM.
- Have lots of content enhancers to keep people scrolling and on your site longer – By this I mean images, videos, tables, or infographics. Make your posts tall and long.
- Do proper keyword research and add content that people are already searching for – Don’t just write about things you find interesting.
- Utilize Pinterest, YouTube and other social websites – I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been slacking off here, but me and my partner on the MV website are trying to ramp up our efforts here.
Summary
Mediavine has been nothing short of amazing to work with and I look forward to building a long-lasting relationship with them. Ad revenue is one of the most passive income streams a niche website can produce in my opinion. You don’t have to worry about affiliate links expiring, Amazon slashing their commissions, or new models coming out and the ones you recommended becoming irrelevant.
Just write high-quality, evergreen content and lots of it. The MV team is always happy to answer your questions, they earn more money if you do so it’s in everyone’s best interest to get you earning as much as possible.