Even in an era where most industries and businesses rely on too many acronyms, digital advertising may take the cake. CPM, eCPM, RPM, CTR, KPI … what does it all mean? Today we’re breaking down the most basic of ad tech acronyms. The one that lays out how you earn money, how partners value your inventory, and how we optimize that inventory: CPM. What is CPM? The definition of CPM is simple. CPM stands for cost per mille (cost per thousand), or the unit used to define the price of 1,000 ad impressions. For example, if an advertiser pays a $2.25 CPM, that means they’re willing to pay $2.25 for every 1,000 times an ad is shown. “Why isn’t the price per ad? Why per 1,000?” If we use the same $2.25 CPM example, this would mean each of those 1,000 impressions would have cost […]

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 […]

Of all the feedback we receive from prospective publishers, this question is among the most common: “Mediavine is mostly food bloggers, right? My site’s content is about much more than food. Will your advertisers still value my inventory?” The fact of the matter is that yes, food-related sites represent a huge portion of our ad inventory. About 47 percent of our publishers currently fall into the advertising category of Food & Drink. A few years ago, this niche was our bread and butter (pun intended), and as such, we considered only working with publishers who provided food-related content. We knew that advertisers loved the engagement of these sites’ audiences and realized that potential, and we knew how to optimize ad placements to maximize their market value. This worked well in the short-term, but we soon realized the sheer number of publishers who weren’t writing exclusively […]