“What good is a page view if you can’t monetize it?” A wise man once said this when we started out in the web publishing world, and I’ve never forgotten it. An even wiser man told me years later that if we wanted our website to be successful, it would require a shift in approach, namely: “Focus on increasing revenue instead of traffic.” The point of these memorable quotes isn’t that traffic doesn’t matter. Obviously, it does. Content needs an audience, and we’re still trying to grow ours, year after year. But there isn’t necessarily a correlation between increased traffic and increased revenue. The first of these quotes illustrates the basic fact that advertisers only want to be associated with certain content and audiences. The second drives home the idea that even if your traffic is very desirable to advertisers, it may not be reaching […]

Mediavine is constantly and strategically evolving to bolster our technological innovation and meet our customers’ needs. In order to better serve publishers in an ever-changing landscape that reinvents itself with great frequency, our ad partners must remain equally agile.  Our largest and most important ad partner, Google, announced that it has unified its two DoubleClick publisher platforms into a single platform, Google Ad Manager, reflecting how Google’s own ad tech strategies have evolved in recent years. Google Ad Manager brings together DoubleClick for Publishers and DoubleClick Ad Exchange together into a single, integrated platform that should work even more efficiently and lucratively to increase revenue and guarantee brand safety. Ad Exchange (AdX) has been the premiere online marketplace to help publishers earn more with real-time auction demand and pricing for the past decade, while DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) has proven vital as an application, not […]

Amazon quietly announced last month that it is retiring CPM Ads, a product it launched almost as quietly in 2014, at the end of September. For those unaware, Amazon CPM Ads was designed to allow smaller publishers that were a part of Amazon Associates affiliate program to run additional ad units. CPM Ads, which appear in website banners along with other placements, operate on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis, but their days are officially numbered. Amazon Associates members were notified, and a help topic for affiliates also confirmed, the end of CPM Ads as of September 30 of this year. The company did not elaborate on why it is sunsetting CPM Ads, but its elimination leaves a void for many publishers, especially smaller ones. Amazon’s other offerings in this area, such as Unified Ad Marketplace, seem engineered for larger websites, rather than smaller publishers, as Amazon […]

What’s the difference between Mediavine and Google AdSense? A whole lot. These two ad solutions are like night and day, although many times, you’ll see very similar looking ads coming from both. How does that happen? Let’s back up a bit. If you’re reading this, you’re obviously familiar with Google AdSense, perhaps the longest-running ad solution for publishers still in existence today. The premise of AdSense is simple: You copy and paste a short line of code where you want the ad to appear. Google serves the ads there, working as the intermediary so you don’t have to work with advertisers, or think about the process hardly at all. Google finds relevant ads based on your content, and sends you payment for the earnings once you reach a certain threshold. For many small publishers, AdSense makes sense as a simple, secure, introductory option to the […]

Mediavine has always prided itself on inclusivity. If you’re a publisher with great, original content who’s looking to grow your site with a holistic approach to advertising, we welcome you. Whether you have our minimum traffic requirement of just 25,000 sessions per month, or 10-20 times that, you can expect the same innovative technology, resources and attention from Mediavine’s unparalleled publisher support and engineering teams. But just because we’re all-inclusive doesn’t mean we aren’t also exclusive, too. Our exclusivity comes in the form of serving the best and most engaging content creators, regardless of traffic numbers. We’ve helped countless small-to-medium-sized publishers sustainably grow their businesses while doing the same for those with much larger audiences. How do we do this? When it comes to programmatic advertising, more is more. The more ad impressions pooled together among all Mediavine publishers, the better the impressions perform individually […]