Nearly a year in the making, Mediavine’s new ad tech, or Script Wrapper 2.0, is officially live! Uh… What the Heck is the Script Wrapper? The script wrapper is our core piece of advertising technology, allowing us to deliver billions of ad impressions across thousands of websites and continually optimize them. In the simplest of terms, it’s what optimizes placements on your page, runs real-time auctions, and ultimately tells our ad server, Google Ad Manager, what ad to serve and where. Mediavine’s Script Wrapper also does a lot more behind the scenes. We won’t divulge (or bore you with) the details of the secret sauce, but it lets us simultaneously optimize ads on individual site, placement, and user levels. In short, it’s a pretty complex and important piece of code, and after three years of serving ads, we determined that our old Script Wrapper, 1.0, […]

If you’ve been following my recent articles on how to improve your RPM, then hopefully by now you have a nice large, mobile-friendly font size and line height. Now that your increased font size and spacing have optimized your text for readability and earning potential, it’s time to do the same for the content itself. What do we mean by that? Writing for the web is not the same as writing for print, and so unless you’re really, really young, that means it’s a lot different than what you were taught in school. You may be surprised to learn that according to usability studies, when presented with a 500-word article, users will read at most 28 percent, but more likely 20 percent. So what do you do if audiences are skimming and only reading 20 percent of your content? You write and design your content for an […]

A frequent question we’re asked by Mediavine publishers is how many images you should run in a particular post. Short answer: As many as you possibly can. Okay, that was lame. We can do better: As many as your content will justify. Okay, still lame, but the takeaway is that we can’t tell you a one-size-fits-all number. Every site is different and each type of content is going to justify a different number of images. What we can tell you is that as long as you’re providing the best user experience, there is no limit to the number of photos you should run. The final total should be determined by the content you’re creating and the images you’re producing or licensing. So aim big. While we generally recommend a minimum of 4-6 images for long-form content, the goal should always be as many as you […]