How UVP+ Delivered a 29% Revenue Lift

The Publisher

Cooking for My Soul is run by Tania Lau, a recipe developer and photographer based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She started the site in 2018 as a creative outlet while working in a corporate job she didn’t love. Three years later, she left marketing to run it full-time.

Her connection to food started much earlier. Tania grew up around professional cooks and spent time in her family’s restaurant with her father, who was the head chef. That experience shaped the kind of recipes she shares today: tested, comforting, and made with home cooks in mind.

That’s also the standard Tania brings to the rest of the site. Her goal is to give readers recipes they can trust, with clear instructions and practical advice they can actually use in the kitchen.

That includes how the site makes money.

“We run the site with care and intention, which means prioritizing usability for our readers,” Tania says. “Monetization is an essential part of keeping the site going, and that is why we value our partnership with Mediavine. They help us find the right balance between growing our business and keeping the site clean, comfortable, and easy to navigate.”

The Challenge

Video already accounted for over a third of Cooking for My Soul’s total ad revenue, making video inventory a direct lever on the site’s bottom line. Tania needed a way to capture stronger advertiser demand and unlock new inventory, without adding ad placements or disrupting the reader experience she’d built the site around.

The Solution

Mediavine’s Universal Player Plus unlocks Accompanying Content ads, a higher-value ad type that requires a publisher video to be present in the player. Because Universal Player Plus works with a site’s existing video content, Tania didn’t need to produce anything new to activate it.

“It was simple to set up, and we could immediately repurpose existing video content from our social channels,” Tania says. Her primary video, a roundup of her top recipes, adds direct value for readers rather than existing purely as ad inventory.

The Results

• Video CPMs: Consistently over 20% higher
• Universal Player Plus CPM vs. standard Universal Player: Up 38%
• Total video revenue: Up more than 33%
• Overall ad revenue: Up 29% year-over-year
• Share of overall revenue from Universal Player Plus: 22%
• Q2 2026: Second-highest sitewide RPM quarter ever, performing on par with or better than several historical Q4s

“With Universal Player Plus enabled, our video CPMs have been consistently over 20% higher, which was a major factor in making Q2 our second-best RPM quarter ever and delivering a 29% YoY lift in overall ad revenue,” Tania says.

The growth came with no tradeoff for readers. Universal Player Plus appears within existing post content, stays unobtrusive as the reader scrolls, and requires no new placements on the page.

The Bottom Line

Cooking for My Soul turned existing video content into a stronger revenue stream by activating a higher-value ad type already built into its Mediavine setup. The result: double-digit CPM gains, a record-setting quarter, and zero compromise on the reader experience Tania built her business around.

See the recipes behind the results. Visit Cooking for My Soul for Tania’s full library of tested comfort food recipes.

Ready to activate Universal Player Plus on your own site? Visit the Universal Player Plus help article for step-by-step setup instructions.