As Mediavine publishers know, in-content advertisements have been a major part of our strategy from the day we entered the ad management business. Just a few years ago, the competition focused solely on sidebar ads, and it was borderline blasphemy to consider advertising within websites’ content. However, we stuck to our guns, our original group of content creators agreed to allow ads inside their content, and it paid off handsomely. Why are in-content ads so effective? 1. They’re more engaging When we run an ad, we do so with three “clients” – our publishers, our publishers’ readers, and the advertisers themselves – in mind. The latter, which pays the bills, expects results. What ultimately keeps advertisers coming back to Mediavine publishers to buy more inventory are those results, measured by viewability and engagement. Ensuring viewable ads is fairly simple with our methodology, but the second […]

On our quest to hit 100 percent Ads.txt adoption at Mediavine, we’ve hit some snags along the way with sites on closed, hosted platform systems such as SquareSpace, Shopify and Wix. The issue? The Ads.txt spec requires that you upload a plain text file named ads.txt at the root of your domain. Example: https://thehollywoodgossip.com/ads.txt The issue with closed, hosted platforms like SquareSpace is that you don’t have the ability to upload a document to the root of your site. Luckily, our partners at Google were able to update Blogger to support an ads.txt file, but until other similarly closed systems implement a solution, we needed a workaround. How did we fix it? First, let’s look at a key aspect to the technical specs behind ads.txt. Ads.txt must be implemented at the root domain. Why is that so critical? Because most SquareSpace, Shopify, etc., sites are hosted at […]

Coalition for Better Ads is already kind of a big deal, but it’s about to become an even bigger deal starting tomorrow, February 15, 2018, with the official launch of Chrome Ad Filtering. With this launch, Google will begin to block all ads, including non-Google AdExchange units, within Google Chrome on websites they determine to provide poor ad experiences per the guidelines set by the Coalition for Better Ads. So what does Google Chrome ad blocking mean to Mediavine publishers? We’ve put together a quick guide on what you need to do, what we’ve already done at Mediavine, and how the landscape will change going forward. What do Mediavine publishers need to do? First, verify all versions of your site for Google Search Console if you have not done so already. That includes the https:// URL of your site if you’re running SSL, and be […]