Mediavine Review

I’m going to take a small departure from what I normally write about, which is helping entrepreneurs build their business, and do a deep dive into my experience with Mediavine, and a comparison between Mediavine vs Monumetric. I am writing this blog post because I researched prior to moving from Monumetric ads to Mediavine ads, and I couldn’t really find anything detailed enough to help me assess the pros and cons, so, I’ve written this post to help those of you confused on which ad platform to go with.

Monumetric vs Mediavine

I started my blog in June 2018. The initial intention behind the blog was to support the launch of my book, The Kickass Entrepreneur’s Guide to Investing (free download from that link). By July and August 2018, my book hit number one in both the business and non-fiction sections on Amazon, and as a result, I ended up signing up thousands of email subscribers.

I decided to continue with writing on the blog, and have continued to do so since June 2018. Fast forward to today, and I have now written almost 200 blog posts, and have close to 8,000 email subscribers.

Initially, I had no intention of monetizing this blog, and so, between June 2018, and October 2019, I didn’t have any advertising, or, any other means of collecting revenue from blogging.

Late last summer 2019, I joined a group of fellow bloggers in a networking group and came to realize that all of them were monetizing their blogs in some way and that adding an advertising platform wasn’t much work, wouldn’t detract from the value of the blog and could help defray some of the costs. And so, my research into different advertising platforms began.

First, I needed to increase the volume of traffic to the blog. Outside of writing blog posts, I did very little by way of SEO work, and as a result, my DA (domain authority) was in the high-teens, which isn’t very good. Most of the traffic that was coming to the blog was from the email I was sending to my subscribers. Beyond that, I ranked for under 250 keywords.

Starting in September 2019, I began to research SEO terms, and made my articles much more SEO friendly. I also spent some time working on my site’s DA. By May 2020, this site’s DA is now 43 and ranks for close to 6,000 keywords. As a result, this site receives between 3,000 to 4,000 page views per day.

Based on the research I did last fall, I came to recognize that the best ad platforms, which is quite subjective ( as is this review of course), and the ones that pay the highest RPM, are, in order from highest to lowest:

Adthrive
Mediavine
Monumetric
Ezoic
Google Adsense

Last September, I applied to Ezoic, Monumetric, and Adsense. I was accepted to Ezoic and Monumetric.

What is RPM?

For clarification purposes, and because I am going to reference the term a few times throughout this article, RPM is the metric that is used for comparative purposes to evaluate how much you make from advertising. RPM stands for “Rate per Mille”, which is the same as the rate for every thousand page views.

Applications to the Various Ad Platforms

At the time of my application in September 2019, my site had just passed the minimum Ezoic and Monumetric minimum threshold of 10,000 monthly pageviews. I also applied to Adsense.

I was accepted into Ezoic first, and within days of submitting my application, followed by Monumetric a few weeks later. I wasn’t accepted into Adsense, and I never quite figured out why my site didn’t qualify at that time (it was many months later).

I decided not to pursue Ezoic, but, based on feedback I had received from others, I waited for Monumetric. Also, the process of getting Ezoic ads onboarded to my site didn’t seem that intuitive, and I wasn’t able to get the tech support I needed from Ezoic, so, I skipped that platform altogether.

I was accepted into the Monumetric ad program in mid-September 2019 with the following email below:

By mid-October, my Monumetric dashboard was still showing the following screen below:

Monumetric Income Report:

It wasn’t until the third week of October before Monumetric got in touch with me to begin the ad placements on my site, but, once their team was ready to move forward, I provided their team the credentials to my site, and they oversaw the entire process of getting the ads working.

In the early days with Monumetric ads, my ad dollars were quite small, but, then again, so were the impressions. My first couple of weeks with Monumetric my session RPM was $10.74, which you can see from the screenshot below.

The ad dollars quickly grew with Monumetric ads as my pageviews and RPM increased.

You can see that the ad dollars increased from $5 per day in October to about $14 per day in February, just prior to things taking a hit because of the pandemic. By that point, my sessions RPM was at $14.30, and my daily impressions nearly quadrupled in that time period (my SEO started to work).

The maximum sessions RPM I ever noticed with Monumetric ads during the five months I was with them was $21, and the average seven day RPM was about $15.

Fast forward to March and April, and I noticed that my sessions RPM had declined to about $8 to $10 (maximum), and hovered in that range during that time.

My overall experience with Monumetric ads was quite good, however, their dashboard and user’s control over the ad types is quite limited. Overall, the Monumetric dashboard is quite limited. It’s essentially a glorified earning repository, with no other control mechanisms. For example, with Mediavine, you can control the ad types, and advertisers, and you can control those variables yourself (more on that below).

By mid-April, I grew disillusioned by the low RPM, and decided that it made sense, once again, to explore the possibility of moving to Mediavine, and with my monthly sessions at approx. 45,000, I was much higher than Mediavine’s minimum pageviews and 50,000 session requirements (note, Mediavine changed their minimum requirements on June 15th, 2020 from 25,000 to 50,000 monthly sessions).

Monumetric vs Mediavine – The Transition From One to the Other

I applied to Mediavine in mid-April. By that point, as I said above, my total sessions were at approximately 45,000. Mediavine’s minimum pageviews requirements are 50,000 sessions so I comfortably exceeded that. With Mediavine, you must qualify for Google Adsense’s program, which isn’t the case with Monumetric. I applied to Adsense once again, keeping in mind that my site was rejected last fall, and finally, I was accepted.

Now that I met the minimum Mediavine requirements for sessions, and qualified for Adsense, I qualified for Mediavine. I applied and was accepted.

The transition to Mediavine was quite seamless. I provided their team with a temporary username and password, and their tech team did all of the configurations for me. The entire process took less than an hour, and just like that, my ads were now with Mediavine.

Mediavine Dashboard

The Mediavine dashboard is much more dynamic and customizable than Monumetric’s dashboard.

As you can see from the screenshot below, you can adjust many of the ad attributes yourself, which isn’t possible with Monumetric. You can also make changes to your privacy settings, and overall ad set-up and ad placement through the Mediavine dashboard.

Mediavine Income Report

As you can see from the screenshot below, my sessions RPM with Mediavine ads, after only 2 weeks on the platform, is about 60% higher than it was with Monumetric.

I haven’t added video ads to my site, yet, but, intend to do so shortly, and I fully expect at that point to increase my ad revenue even further. Mediavine ads do offer video ads, and Monumetric does not, so, that’s another revenue source that I have to explore.

My ad RPM vacillated between a low of $13.83, and a high of $17.99 from the sample data I provided above.

In addition, as you can see from the screenshot below, it is also possible to get more granular through the Mediavine dashboard so that you can see which ad types are producing what kind of revenue, impressions, fill rate, and so on.

Now that I’m with Mediavine ads with the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that my RPM is averaging around $16 to $17, and once ad traffic picks up post-pandemic and recession, I expect my RPM to increase to about $25. Add videos, and hopefully, this can be increased to the $30 range.

Mediavine’s support has been excellent. The team has been responsive, and best of all, my ads don’t jump around on the page, which is something that I found particularly frustrating with Monumetric.

I received about a dozen emails from readers who complained that the text on my page jumped around as the ads changed with Monumetric, and when I inquired with them about fixing that problem, they were able to, and here’s the support email received:

“Our team has disabled the refresh setting for the in-content ads and now only the sticky footer and last sidebar ad will be doing this because it will not affect user experience on the site.”

Unfortunately, the above fix decreased the RPM from $9 to about $7.

Fortunately, I haven’t had the jumping ad problem with Mediavine ads.

Overall Impressions, Monumetric vs Mediavine

Overall, I had a very good experience with Monumetric ads, and if your site has fewer than 50,000 monthly sessions, and you do qualify for Monumetric, then I would suggest that they are an excellent ad provider. Their dashboard is limited, the ad revenue is slightly less, but, the team is responsive to email requests, and they always paid promptly on the 10th of every month.

My recommendation to Monumetric, which is something they probably are well aware of, is that they need to improve their email communications, dashboard, and group collaboration, something that Mediavine does an excellent job of, which, in my opinion, makes Mediavine ads a more attractive ad supplier than Monumetric. Net net, Monumetric was very good, Mediavine has been excellent (so far), and I’m quite pleased with the switch.

I know you’re here to better understand and compare the two ad platforms, BUT, I have another somewhat related article to share, and it’s on creating wealth: How Do You Grow Your Wealth in 2020? My 5 Step Plan to Build Wealth

Are you a younger entrepreneur? Here’s another interesting article I wrote:

My Response to an 18-Year-Old Who Wants to Become a Millionaire by the Time He’s 30.

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