Through Shine PSAs, Mediavine gives publishers the opportunity to put otherwise unfilled inventory to work, supporting nonprofit organizations that make a real difference in communities around the world. Rather than leaving ad impressions unfilled, Shine PSAs deliver public service announcements that help trusted organizations raise awareness, connect with new audiences, and amplify causes that matter.

It’s a simple concept with meaningful impact: when an ad can’t or shouldn’t be monetized, it can still do good. This summer, our ongoing partnership with No Kid Hungry helps turn those impressions into action by connecting families with resources to find meals for their children when they need them most.

Why Summer Break Can Mean Food Insecurity

For many children, school is more than a place to learn; it’s where they receive dependable, nutritious meals each day. 

When summer arrives and school cafeterias close, that support can disappear almost overnight. Millions of families suddenly face the challenge of replacing breakfast and lunch while balancing already stretched household budgets.

That’s where No Kid Hungry steps in.

Their Summer Meals initiative helps families locate free meal sites, access summer grocery benefits, and connect with community programs that ensure children continue receiving the nutrition they need throughout the break. Whether through neighborhood meal sites, grab-and-go options, or rural meal distribution, these latest efforts could help as many as 31 million children in the United States. No Kid Hungry’s ongoing programs work to make healthy meals available wherever families need them most. 

Amplifying a Mission That Matters

Awareness is often one of the biggest barriers to accessing available resources.

Families may not know that free summer meal programs exist in their communities or aren’t sure where to find them. By serving No Kid Hungry public service announcements through Shine PSAs, publishers help those messages reach more parents and caregivers at exactly the right time.

Each donated impression becomes another opportunity for someone to discover resources that can make a meaningful difference during the summer months.

No Kid Hungry has felt that impact directly. As Allison Ruta, Senior Manager of National Consumer Media & Champion Engagement for the No Kid Hungry campaign, put it: “Awareness is one of the biggest barriers in our work to end hunger, so we’re so grateful for the support and visibility from Mediavine and your incredible network who are helping us make a difference.”

The Opportunity Behind Unfilled Inventory

Because no advertising platform fills every available impression, Shine PSAs put that space to work for good.

Every ad opportunity is evaluated against advertiser targeting, available campaign budgets, user consent settings, geography, brand suitability, and real-time demand. When there isn’t a qualifying advertiser for a particular impression, that inventory intentionally goes unfilled to maintain the highest quality of monetization.

This is exactly the opportunity Shine PSAs were built to address.

Instead of displaying an empty space, eligible unfilled inventory can be used to serve public service announcements from trusted nonprofit organizations, like No Kid Hungry. Because these impressions wouldn’t have been monetized otherwise, publishers can support important causes without replacing paid advertising opportunities.

It’s an effortless way to make every impression count, even when it isn’t an eligible monetizable ad.

Making an Impact Beyond Advertising

At Mediavine, we’re always focused on helping publishers maximize the value of their inventory. Sometimes that value is measured in revenue. Other times, it’s measured in impact.

Shine PSAs make it possible to use eligible unfilled impressions to support nonprofit organizations tackling some of today’s most important challenges. Over the past few years, publishers have helped amplify campaigns focused on environmental stewardship, disaster relief, inclusion and more. Through our partnership with No Kid Hungry, those same impressions are helping to shine a light on childhood hunger during one of the most challenging seasons of the year.

Ready to join the Mediavine publishers making a difference? Follow these quick steps to start running Shine PSA campaigns:

• Go to Settings in your Mediavine Dashboard
• Open the Shine section
• Enable No Kid Hungry or any additional nonprofit partners you’d like to support

Thank You to Our Publisher Community

Shine PSAs are only possible through the partnership of our participating publishers.

By donating eligible unfilled impressions, you’re helping trusted nonprofit organizations reach new audiences, raise awareness and connect people with life-changing resources. This summer, those impressions are helping No Kid Hungry ensure more families know where to find free meals for their children while school is out.

Thank you for helping make every eligible impression count.

Q4 is the highest-earning quarter in digital advertising. Advertiser budgets peak, demand goes up, and CPM spikes significantly. The publishers who earn the most in Q4 are the ones who made moves in Q3, getting onboarded, optimized, and ready before the season that drives a significant portion of annual revenue.

The publishers who win Q4 aren’t just lucky with traffic. They’re with the right network. Here’s what that looks like.

What Makes Mediavine Different

Technology built and owned in-house.

Most ad networks rely on a patchwork of outside tools. Mediavine builds and maintains our own technology, including server-to-server bidding (a faster, more secure way to run ad auctions), page speed optimization, and ad placements designed to load quickly without slowing your site down. When Mediavine improves our technology, that improvement goes directly to your revenue. There is no middleman taking a cut.

99.5% human-verified inventory, independently validated by IAS, Jounce, and The Trade Desk. Zero MFA.

MFA stands for “Made for Advertising,” low-quality sites built purely to generate ad clicks, not to serve real readers. Mediavine has none of that. Every site in the network is a real publisher with real content and a real audience. That matters to advertisers, and when advertisers trust the inventory they are buying, more of them compete for your ad space. More competition means higher rates for you.

Publishers come first. Actually.

Every product decision Mediavine makes is measured against one question: does this improve publisher performance? Not advertiser convenience and definitely not the priorities of a private equity firm. We’re prioritizing publishers.

Lower ad density, better placements, faster pages.

More ads on a page does not mean more money. It usually means slower load times, a worse experience for your readers, and lower rates because advertisers pay less for cluttered inventory. Mediavine deliberately runs fewer, better ads because that is what drives revenue over the long term.

Hands-on account management.

Not a support ticket system and not a tiered response queue. Every publisher above Mediavine Official is assigned a dedicated account manager who is accountable to how your site performs.

Why Q3 Is the Right Window

During Q3, traffic is more predictable and the pressure is lower. You have time to get onboarded with a new network, get comfortable, and get your setup optimized before the season that drives a huge portion of your annual revenue.

Mediavine’s onboarding is built to get publishers up and running fast. From the moment you are approved, you have access to Mediavine’s full ad technology, a dashboard that shows you exactly what your revenue is doing and why, and for all publishers above Mediavine Official, a dedicated account manager who actually knows your site.

“Good Enough” Often Masks Real Upside

Most publishers who switch to Mediavine say the same thing: they had no idea how much money they were leaving on the table until they saw what their site could actually earn.

That is not a knock on your current ad solution. Ad management is complicated. A setup that’s been left alone for a while may seem fine, until you compare it with the results that a fully optimized setup can deliver. The difference shows up in your RPM, how often ads actually load on your pages, and how your revenue holds up when your traffic fluctuates.

If your RPM has been flat for a while, or your performance guarantee looks great for the first 90 days and a lot less great after that, those are signs something is off.

The Real Cost of Staying with the Wrong Network

Performance guarantees are one of the most common tactics competing ad networks use to attract publishers. On the surface, the offer sounds compelling. What often gets overlooked is what happens after the guarantee period ends.

The key factor is revenue share, the percentage of ad revenue you actually keep. Mediavine Premiere publishers retain 90% of the revenue their sites generate. Many competing networks retain 25%, leaving publishers with just 75%.

Consider a site earning $500,000 annually. Even with an aggressive guarantee promising a 30% revenue lift for six months, switching ad management would cost that publisher more than $112,000 over two years compared to staying with Mediavine. With a more typical guarantee, the two-year cost exceeds $135,000.

Short-term guarantees can create an initial boost, but long-term revenue share has a far greater impact on publisher earnings over time. The guarantee period is temporary. The revenue share you are left with is not.

Q3 Is the Window and Q4 Is the Payoff.

If you have been wondering whether it is time to switch, the answer is yes, and the time is now. You still have the runway to do it right, get set up, get optimized, and go into Q4 ready.

Apply to Mediavine and find out what your site could actually be earning.

Apply Now at mediavine.com/apply.

This Month’s Featured Organization: PFLAG

As we celebrate Pride Month, we’re proud to highlight our partnership with PFLAG, the nation’s largest organization dedicated to supporting, educating, and advocating for LGBTQIA+ people, their families, and allies.

Founded in 1973, PFLAG has spent more than five decades helping create a world where diversity is celebrated, every person is respected, valued, and affirmed, and LGBTQIA+ people have the support they need to thrive. Through a network of hundreds of chapters across the United States, PFLAG provides peer support, educational resources, advocacy tools, and community connections that help individuals and families navigate their journeys with confidence and understanding.

While Pride Month shines an important spotlight on LGBTQ+ communities, PFLAG’s work continues every day of the year. From supporting parents seeking resources for a newly out child to advocating for safer, more inclusive communities, PFLAG serves as a trusted source of education, acceptance, and empowerment for millions of people nationwide.

By selecting PFLAG as a Shine PSA partner, your unsold inventory can help raise awareness of these resources, amplify messages of inclusion, and connect more people with the support networks they need.

For Branden Harvey, founder of Good Good Good, choosing PFLAG as a Shine PSA partner was a natural extension of how his entire business operates. His team voted on it, a decision that reflects the values at the core of everything Good Good Good publishes.

Why Pride Month Matters And Why It Can’t Stop There

Branden puts it plainly: “Sterling Graves, an artist (and fellow former Nashvillian) has this iconic quote you’ve probably seen on Instagram: “Pride is important because someone tonight still believes they’re better off dead than being themselves.” It takes so much courage and inner strength to acknowledge your true self and live that truth out loud. It’s scary, risky, and — historically and currently — often dangerous. 

Pride Month is important because it honors and acknowledges the heartbreaking history of the LGBTQ+ community and celebrates the work of so many brave queer folks who fought for the rights and norms we have today. And when we celebrate the progress we’ve made, it reminds each and every one of us that we’ve made progress before… and we can do it again.”

Impressions To Build a More Inclusive Future

At Mediavine, we prioritize premium, high-quality advertising demand over filling every available ad space at any cost.

In programmatic advertising, not every ad request results in a paid ad being served. While some platforms chase a 100% fill rate by accepting lower-quality ads, Mediavine intentionally takes a different approach. By maintaining high standards for ad quality and advertiser demand, we protect your revenue, preserve user experience, and maximize the long-term value of your inventory.

Occasionally, ad space will go unfilled. Rather than letting those impressions sit empty, Shine PSAs turn them into opportunities to support organizations making a meaningful impact in communities around the world.

What Are Shine PSAs?

Shine PSAs automatically fill unsold ad inventory with campaigns from nonprofit organizations selected by Mediavine publishers. Instead of serving low-value fallback ads or leaving space blank, your site helps amplify causes that matter.

Best of all:

• Shine PSAs only serve when paid ads aren’t available
• Shine PSAs do not impact your revenue opportunities
• Easy to enable directly from your Mediavine Dashboard
• Once activated, everything runs automatically behind the scenes

It’s a simple way to ensure every impression on your site contributes to something positive.

Support Beyond Pride Month

Pride Month brings important visibility to LGBTQIA+ communities, but meaningful representation shouldn’t be limited to a single month on the calendar.

Through Shine PSAs, publishers can amplify messages of inclusion, acceptance, and belonging visible throughout the year. When unsold inventory serves PFLAG campaigns, those impressions meaningfully support the work of an organization dedicated to creating a more affirming world for LGBTQIA+ people and the individuals in their lives.

Branden frames it this way: “One thing I immediately came to love about Mediavine was their Shine PSA program, which allows Good Good Good to essentially donate ad space on our website to nonprofits… These PSA ads are my absolute favorite ads I see on our site, and I love knowing how impactful they are for organizations and the people they serve. It’s such a cool and simple program, and I love that it exists.”

By choosing PFLAG as a Shine PSA partner, you’re helping ensure that every impression has the potential to foster understanding, spark connection, and reinforce the belief that LGBTQIA+ communities deserve support and visibility year-round.

Why Publishers Choose Shine PSAs

Make Unfilled Inventory Meaningful

Unsold impressions are a natural part of a healthy advertising strategy. Shine PSAs ensure those opportunities continue creating value instead of going unused.

Support Causes That Reflect Your Values

The messages that appear on your site help shape your brand. By choosing Shine PSAs, you can align your inventory with organizations working to create positive change and support communities that matter to you.

Maintain a High-Quality User Experience

Ads that aren’t worth serving shouldn’t be served. Shine PSAs replace the fallback ads and low-quality fill that degrade page performance and reader trust. They’re brand-safe, thoughtfully designed, and built to the same quality standards as the premium demand Mediavine prioritizes. Your readers get a cleaner, more intentional experience, and your site’s performance stays protected.

Set It Up Once and Forget About It

Enabling Shine PSAs takes less than a minute, and Mediavine handles everything else automatically.

How to Get Started

Opting into Shine PSAs is simple:

1. Go to Settings in your Mediavine Dashboard
2. Open the Shine section
3. Select PFLAG and any additional nonprofit partners you’d like to support
4. Save your preferences

Your unsold inventory will automatically begin supporting the causes you’ve chosen. Every impression on your site has the potential to do more. With Shine PSAs, those moments can raise awareness, inspire action, and support organizations creating meaningful change all year long.

👉 Learn more about Shine PSAs: help.mediavine.com/fill-your-unused-ad-inventory-with-a-psa

👉 Explore PFLAG’s mission: https://pflag.org/

👉 Interested in other nonprofit partners? Read more about our partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation and World Central Kitchen.

At Mediavine, smarter inventory means a stronger, more inclusive future.

Your RPM data just got more accurate, and that changes how you optimize.

Monetized RPM (mRPM) is now live in your Mediavine dashboard. It’s an improved way to measure revenue that excludes traffic unable to generate earnings, so the result more accurately reflects your site’s performance.

Why Standard RPM Falls Short (And What It Misses About Your Revenue)

RPM stands for revenue per mille, which is just a technical way of saying revenue per thousand sessions. It is one of the most important numbers in your dashboard. The catch is that standard RPM has always counted every session in its calculation, including ones where no ad was ever served.

That includes visits from bots, users with ad blockers, even traffic from regions where advertisers simply do not bid. None of those sessions can generate revenue, but they all count against your RPM, pulling the number down and making your monetization appear lower than reality. 

Imagine a coffee shop measuring daily revenue by counting everyone who walks past the window, rather than the customers who order something. The math adds up, but the insight is wrong.

That’s how standard RPM has always worked. It’s an industry-wide limitation, not something unique to Mediavine. But there is now a more accurate way to look at your revenue.

What Monetized RPM Actually Measures

Monetized RPM only includes sessions where at least one ad was actually served. No bots, no ad blockers, and no unmonetizable traffic dragging the number down.

A session counts as monetizable when at least one ad is successfully served during that visit. Everything else gets filtered out, including bot and invalid traffic (yes, AI crawlers count here), visitors using ad blockers, sessions affected by privacy consent restrictions, traffic from regions with low or no advertiser demand, and visits blocked by advertiser content restrictions.

 These factors are a normal part of digital publishing and affect every site to some degree.

Why Your RPM May Increase (And Why That’s a Better Reflection of Reality)

When you switch to Monetized Traffic in your dashboard, your RPM may look higher than you are used to seeing. Don’t be alarmed!

The number is not changing because your site is performing differently. It’s changing because you are no longer measuring your revenue against sessions that were never going to earn anything. What you are seeing now is a more honest reflection of what your monetizable traffic is actually worth.

Both views are always available. The Traffic Type toggle in your dashboard lets you switch between Monetized Traffic (mRPM) and All Traffic (traditional RPM). Monetized Traffic is the default, and your data goes back to January 1, 2025.

Use the gap between the two numbers as information. If RPM is notably lower than mRPM, your monetization is working well, but a chunk of your traffic is not ad-eligible. If both numbers are lower than you want, that signals you to look at your ad strategy, content performance, or audience engagement rather than raw traffic volume.

How to Put mRPM to Work

Content strategy
High traffic does not always mean high revenue. mRPM helps you see which pages are actually driving earnings, not just clicks. Double down on pages with strong mRPM and healthy monetizable session volume. Pages with big traffic numbers but low monetizable sessions may be less valuable than they look.

Traffic sources
Some channels bring in a lot of sessions, but very few that are monetizable. Knowing that helps you prioritize the sources that actually contribute to your bottom line.

Geographic traffic
Traffic from regions where advertisers do not bid heavily will lower your monetizable session percentage. That context helps you make smarter decisions about where to focus your content and SEO efforts over time.

Understanding performance shifts
When your RPM changes and you are not sure why, mRPM helps you figure it out. A drop caused by a shift in traffic quality looks different from a drop caused by a monetization issue. With both metrics in view, you can diagnose the right problem.

What Can You Do About Unmonetizable Sessions?

Honestly, not much, and that’s okay.

Most unmonetizable traffic is simply a reality of the internet. Bots, ad blockers, consent restrictions, and low-demand regions affect every publisher and do not indicate that anything is wrong with your site. It’s not something that can or needs to be fixed by an account manager, but rather something to account for when evaluating performance. 

AI crawlers are worth thinking about more carefully, though. The instinct is often to block all of them, but that has trade-offs. If major AI platforms cannot access your content, they train on your competitors instead, and those competitors end up being treated as the authority in your niche. A smarter approach is to block the smaller, unknown crawlers that are not sending you any traffic or brand value. For everything else, your hosting provider is your best resource. They can handle bot filtering at the infrastructure level, which is far more effective than trying to manage it manually.

If your traditional RPM drops after switching views and stays lower than expected, that could point to a GA setup issue or a problem with your consent management platform (CMP) setup. That is worth a conversation with your account manager. Unmonetizable session volume on its own is not.

Find It in Your Dashboard Now

Monetized RPM and Monetizable Sessions are all live in the new Mediavine dashboard at publishers.mediavine.com. Monetizable Pageviews is available within Page Reports, where performance breaks down by individual page.

These metrics are only available in the new dashboard, so if you have not made the switch yet, now is a good time.

Monetized Traffic is your default view. Use the Traffic Type toggle to flip between mRPM and traditional RPM whenever you want a comparison. Data goes back to January 1, 2025.

Log in today and see what your revenue picture actually looks like. Your performance has not changed, but your read on it just got a lot sharper.