Mediavine Review – Why I Switched From Google Adsense?

Mediavine is a Full-Service Ad Management Company. In this article, I’ll be talking about my personal experiences working with Mediavine and how much I’m earning from them at the moment. 

I will be comparing my Mediavine earnings Vs. Google Adsense (Display Ad Networks) and will help you decide on which one seems to be the better choice. But before doing so, a big thank you to all my regular blog readers. You guys are the main reason that I’m here today. Without all of your motivating emails and comments, I wouldn’t be in the place I’m at. 

Is Mediavine seriously the best choice when it comes to blog income and earnings? Almost and every pro blogger out there seems to be recommending Mediavine as soon you hit the 25K session which is the benchmark to be accepted into this program. But should you switch from Adsense or Media.net? Is it worth hassle and time?

Just to give a quick glimpse, Even though I started this blog in 2017, I’ve been on and off with it for the first 2 years. It’s only past 2019 Feb around that I took blogging more seriously. And the reward – getting accepted to one of the best ad networks in the world – “Mediavine”.

Can it get any better than this for a blogger? I guess not. Coz, they are truly the best. Now, Why do I feel so? Read my complete review here to know more.

My Blogging Journey So Far – Adsense To Mediavine

I’ve always wanted to start a blog! I had been planning it. And finally, I’m successful at it! 

Again, there’s no endpoint for success, it can come in any form and the definition is unknown, at least to me. I’ll continue producing good content and making sure everyone is happy while on this blog.

Today this blog gets more than 75,000+ page views per month and continues to grow every single day! Here’ my Google Analytics report for proof and reference: 

 

All it takes is perseverance and passion to make this happen.  If I can do it, you can do it too! Trust me. I had no prior experience in creating blogs and maintaining one. (Yeah, true, my site has been hacked, plugins have broken my site, what not)

My Blog’s Journey from 0-75K page views took almost a year, and once I had over 25K + sessions, I applied to Mediavine and got approved. Thanks to the amazing Mediavine team. So far so good. 

It’s really simple to launch your blog today, 

All it takes is a couple of blog posts (30+ ideally which I did) to get the Adsense approval and start placing the display ads on my website. Over time, as you start publishing more and more content, you’ll start to see an increase in the Google Adsense revenue.

Below is my Google Adsense Revenue for the month of April 2020 before switching over to Mediavine. 

Please note – Google Adsense is only for display advertising or ads,  and I have other sources of affiliate income as well.

Moving on, If you want to, you can also outsource the blog content on Fiverr or Upwork for a nominal fee and continue making more money. That’s something which many bloggers do, hire writers and outsource work.

Remember, more content = more pageviews = more ad views = more ad clicks = more Google Adsense money 🙂 Easy Peasy!

As your domain gets older over time, they tend to rank better on Google’s search engine, driving your blog more traffic and revenue. Google prefers domains that are at least a few years old to start trusting more and for the domain rating to increase over time.

As my blog’s traffic continued to grow over time and once I hit the 25K session limit, I applied to Mediavine and got approved. 

Below is My Mediavine revenue so far (Definitely looks promising)

Blogging Journey So Far

My blogging journey has been nothing short of describing as “wonderful”. My blog’s taught me so many wonderful things, has technically made me more sound and I feel more accomplished than any day before. 

I’ll fall short of words at times to describe how wonderful certain partnerships or experiences can be. One such recent experience is working with the media giants “Mediavine”. I am just being honest and upfront here. They are wonderful!

Up until yesterday, I was only running Google Adsense on my blog (yeah Google Ads), even though I was comfortably hitting more than 60K sessions or almost 90K page views a month.

The reason I was always skeptical about switching to another ad company was simple – I was actually doing pretty good with Adsense in the first place, second of all my overall RPM in Google Adsense was really good.

I was comfortably making the RPM of over $17 to be exact for the past few months

These were the reasons, that was good enough for me to consider sticking on to Google Adsense for almost 1.5 years. After all, who wants to switch when things are just fine. Let it just continue the way it is right?

The Big Plunge – Switch From Google Adsense To Mediavine and the Experience So Far 

First of all, I don’t have any of the affiliate links or display ads on this blog expect “Mediavine display ads”.

No, not even Amazon, yet.

The reason being, I am still trying to increase the blog’s intent – produce more content and write better. This sole mission of mine had lead to the massive growth of this blog over the year and a half. Let me continue doing this for the rest of the year at least before I try to diversify to other revenue sources.

By the way, I never want to do or follow what other bloggers recommend or are doing so, unless it’s truly exciting to me.

For example – Email lists, everybody wants to collect them to market their products, make sure people keep coming back to your blog by clicking the email link or for SEO reason. I’m not against this, we bloggers do all the hard work and need to be compensated as well.

All I am about to say is that I am not yet ready for email lists. Even with this traffic. If I am leaving money on the table, that’s ok with me. I’ll only do this when I feel I have something new to offer my readers. Everything should be done when the time’s right is my “Mantra”

Another thing to note here is that – Whatever design your blog has, font, colours etc, nothing can beat the content you produce.

The content you produce is the real deal-breaker and that’s what companies like Mediavine or Google love about. Folks at Mediavine emphasize two things –

1. Keep shorter paragraphs (easy on eyes, especially on mobile where screens are smaller)

2. Produce high-quality content that is unique and fresh from what’s out there.

You know another setting which I personally like In the Mediavine Dashboard – It is the total number of ads you can place on any given blog post.

Does that hurt your page, having so many ads? No, it does not.

How come?

Simple. Have you browsed Facebook or Instagram newsfeed anytime? You must have.

As you consume more stories on FB/Instagram, you are shown more sponsored stories/ads. Do you get annoyed watching it? Nopes. FB is visited by billions of people every day and the engagement is still so very high.

What does this tell us?

Placing more number of ads will not hurt your visitors/user engagement on your site. Content does, whether you have ads or not. So you have to keep producing high-quality content to retain and engage users and leave the rest to Mediavine to take care of 🙂 i.e number of ads on the given page provided it does not interfere with the content too much. 

Now, tell me, is that hard to do?

I don’t think so. That’s a fair simple task, right?

For the past year or so, I was always been constantly hearing or reading great stories about people moving from Adsense or Ezoic into Mediavine and their earnings increase by almost 4X or 5X times.

In fact, I’ve watched a couple of YouTube videos too, it all sounded great.

But, here I was comfortably making a good regular source of income from Adsense, why should I switch? Why?

I had already optimized my Adsense code, everything looked perfect with 2 sidebar ads.

My monthly RPM was at $17 – $20 and Google is a reputable company to work with.

Then why the switch?

Trying something new, which looks promising is always my “A” game.

I did my initial research, after all its all about the earnings we make by working so hard on the blog for countless hours every day.

Just to pick a WordPress plugin, we spend numerous hours deciding and reading the reviews, then imagine switching ad companies is not an easy task. 

But “Mediavine” stood out from the crowd.

Thanks for 10s of reviews out there from honest people with screenshots, explaining stuff that made me easy to take the plunge.

Getting Started With Mediavine

Next up, I wanted to seriously give them a try. Go ahead, apply and run Mediavine ads on this blog and then see what happens.

It’s just been a day now, and so far it’s been fantastic. I will talk about this in just a bit. So, please hold on for now and continue reading.

Just to let you all know I haven’t even got my first-day results with Mediavine. So hoping I get at least the $15 RPM (which is considerably less than what I used to make with Google Adsense in the first place). But overall, let’s see how this new adventure goes.

Getting Started With Mediavine and the Process

First things first, so far my experience working with the Mediavine’s technical as well publishing team has been overwhelming.

They are the best in the industry, I can vouch for that!

So, the first thing I did was to head over to the Mediavine website and click on the apply button.

Once applied, it took a couple of weeks until the ads are live on my blog.

The first-week after applying to Mediavine was like roaming around in a ghost town.

I did not hear back anything from Mediavine and the team. All they requested was that I provide them with the Google Analytics read access to make sure my blog was legit in terms of the traffic I said.

Next up, after 2 weeks I guess, the series of emails started coming through.

First, it was the request for the Google AdExchange, since I was already running Google Ads on my blog.

Getting the Google Ad Exchange approval was pretty easy and straight forward.

Once that was done, it was more of a technical thing to fix any possible issues on my blog. Luckily I just had one small issue in the sidebar.

Mediavine and their technical support team were just great in fixing it for me within a couple of hours.

Post this, the next step was to install a “WordPress Mediavine plugin” and make a few settings change which was a breeze.

Finally, they ask you to remove the existing ads (not affiliate links, but just the display ads) and they will turn on the Mediavine ads on the backend.

By the way, did you know that There’s no code or anything as such to be pasted at all (like AdSense), Everything is taken care of by the Mediavine WordPress Plugin alone which is fantastic

Also, they work with so many different ad networks to get the best possible ads on your site, so they were also waiting on the approvals from the different ad networks before finally approving my blog.

Then, the next day, I got the “Approved For Mediavine” email. Hurray!

The Mediavine Team

What is so special about the Mediavine Team, that I have an entire section of this post dedicated to the folks.

But, I really had to. Work with them once, and I am sure you will feel the same way as I am now.

They are some of the best bunch of quality people I’ve ever worked with. No jokes or exaggeration here.

It’s been close to three weeks that I have started interacting with the Mediavine’s team – be it for approvals, technical support or how to’s. And guess what, every single person I have dealt with has complete knowledge and is top-notch at the help. They are courteous, genuine, extremely helpful and to the point with great helpful guides.

Every time I have sent an email – be it any issues I am facing, not knowing something or need additional help about something, Mediavine Team has always had the time to support me. I guess that’s why they are so reputed amongst the blogger network and everyone loves them.

Imagine man, I’m not sure of the numbers here, but every single time I send them an email, I can expect the response back within a couple of hours for sure.

I really hope more companies can adopt this. It feels so genuinely good to be quick and fast, instead of having to wait all the time.

Pros Of Working With Mediavine Vs Other Ad Networks – Ezoic and Google Adsense

As I’ve already mentioned earlier, I just started out with Mediavine, still, I have a couple of Pros here.

After all, first impressions do matter and money is not everything at the end of the day. There’s something called reputation and worthiness as well.

1. Excellent Support team 

Oh yeah, I can go on and on about this. These guys are just fantastic to work with.

I’m quite not sure how Mediavine hires them, how they are trained? What really motivates them to be so genuine and helpful.

I love the attitude of the publishing team and support staff at Mediavine. I might have sent close to 20+ emails and every single time, bang on I get a response back with a detailed guide back in a couple of hours, not even a day.

Remember – they have thousands of high-quality website owners they work with, yet top-notch service.

2. Ad Customizer 

From my initial look at the Mediavine Dashboard and settings, I came to know that this feature is so cool.

Common, you can set the number of ads you want to display for desktop and mobile separately and the paragraph counts after every ad placement. Now, how cool is that as a publisher. You have the option to place ads in-between text paragraphs or below the image.

Nothing more to say, it’s beautiful and neat. Love it, coming from Adsense especially. I haven’t really been with Ezoic for long, but Mediavine is great.

3. Tune the ads for Google’s page speed score customization 

In continuation with point #2, you have a feature wherein you can optimize the ads for higher Google page speed scores.

Again, the better the page speed score, the better is the traffic you get.

Coz, Google loves faster page speeds, so does Mediavine, especially on mobile phones.

Also, when opting for this service, Mediavine does warn you that your revenue might get affected slightly if you are going to opt for this. Trust me it won’t. Coz to make sure you get better page speed scores, all Mediavine is doing is showing no ads on the initial page load screen and the rest lazy loads anyways. So you should be good.

4. Desktop, Mobile & Tablet Adhesive Ad unit 

This one’s probably the best setting in the Mediavine Dashboard and Mediavine overall.

Did you notice the banner ad below, which is sticky at the footer, yeah that’s right? That is the adhesive ad units offered by Premium Ad Networks like Mediavine.

With Google Adsense, I couldn’t do that. In case I force did it, Adsense would have banned me.

Based on the numerous reports I’ve read, the adhesive ad unit performs very well, both on desktop and mobile.

Not to forget, you have a close button there to close the unit and also the background colours – Light and Dark.

However, I’ve disabled the close button on this blog to give the maximum exposure of the ads as the user scrolls through the content.

5. Every Ad Spot generates the maximum revenue – There are a ton of articles on how Mediavine optimizes the ad space to increase the revenue for publishers.

I don’t want to repeat the same lines again here.

For every Ad spot on your blog post, Mediavine will bid for the spot with all the Advertisers including Adsense. The more the floor price the spot gets the ad gets displayed or ad space is minimized (lazy load). This way everyone wins. Do remember, there is a base floor price below which no ad will get bid on. This way the revenue of the publisher is taken care of.

All I can say is, they are the best in the market, way better than any other Ad Network Company in terms of revenue generation for the publishers (you and me)

Cons Of Working With Mediavine So Far

To be fair and honest, I cannot find a single con to mention here.

It’s not like there are none, but honestly, Mediavine has been really good so far and I just don’t want to say something negative which makes zero sense and spoil the review.

Here are a few cons which I can think of:

1. Mediavine can definitely show our daily and overall earnings in the local currency of the publisher. This will help us to avoid the exchange rate confusion and see the earnings with more clarity

2. Mediavine Earnings are updated every day at 10.00 AM EST for the previous day. Instead maybe like Adsense if we can have earnings for the day updated once every couple of hours will surely help. Again this is a huge cost on the server resources, still had to mention in the cons. 

3. Last but no the least, Mediavine payments are made after NET 65 days for the particular month, maybe reduce that in the future, will also help the publishers in receiving money sooner

Again these are just improvements that I can think of, but overall the dashboard is just fine and waiting a day to see the earnings is not a big deal.