Mediavine Updates with CEO Eric Hochberger: Mediavine On Air Episode 20

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Editor’s Note: Since the airing of this episode, “Grow.me” has been rebranded to “Grow.” Also, this episode and transcript mentions autoplay settings in the Mediavine Dashboard. Autoplay options have been retired as of February 2023. See this article for more information.)

Anyone else need a CliffsNotes version of all the things happening at Mediavine? 

We’re glad it’s not just us!

From ad tech and video innovations to Google bombshells, it’s been a busy few months. So on this episode of Summer of Live, Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger is here with all the latest details. From Grow.me to Trellis to a lot of information covered about universal player, make sure to bring a pen to this episode because you don’t want to miss it!

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Transcript

**The RPM Challenge has been rebranded as the Content Upgrade Challenge**

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello, everyone. We are here. Welcome to another episode of Mediavine’s Summer of Live, our ninth episode this season. I’m your host, Jenny Guy, asking the most important question.

And it’s really the only question that matters on Wednesday, August 4. Have you eaten a chocolate chip cookie today? That’s right. It’s National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day in the United States, which is a holiday I think we can all get behind. Regardless of our many differences, chocolate chip cookies unite us all. Eric, yes?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I ate some raw chocolate chip cookie dough last night, if that counts.

JENNY GUY: Did you? Yes. That is amazing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, so I’ll have it today. OK. I messed up the holiday.

JENNY GUY: That’s OK. I mean, you might not have known it was a holiday. Were you aware of this magical day before just now?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I was not, but that is wonderful news. I was celebrating early.

JENNY GUY: [LAUGHS]

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Celebrate often.

JENNY GUY: Yes. Often and early. I have not eaten a cookie yet today, and I feel like I’ve blown it. It’s like wearing pink on St. Patrick’s Day. It’s wrong. So I’m very fortunate that I happen to know a whole lot of amazing recipe creators plus internet sleuths, so please say hello by sharing your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe in the comments. And maybe, Eric, do you do the– you need some safe-to-consume raw–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, no, it’s not safe to consume. It’s–

JENNY GUY: He’s doing– OK, good. Good. Good.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I live, like, on the edge. It’s raw eggs, everything in there.

JENNY GUY: We have no– he’s not afraid. So just post it all, no holds barred. Say hey. Post your chocolate chip cookie recipe, yours from your grandma, a dear friend. All are welcome. We’ve been doing polls on all of our social media accounts. We have some people that are very firm that it’s chocolate chip cookies only. Like, or chocolate chips only. Then we have on– I believe it’s on Facebook that people are saying no walnuts. Like, no. Where do you stand, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Definitely just chocolate chips.

JENNY GUY: Just chocolate chips. Fair. Fair.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No question.

JENNY GUY: Well, he likes to keep it simple, but also keep it potentially salmonella-y. So it could be either, on the edge. And speaking of cookies that unite us all while you guys are sharing your recipes, how about that departure of third party cookies in Chrome, that cookie-pocalypse? That is still happening. Content creators have been freaking out about this for a while.

So naturally, we’ve been talking about the situation and Mediavine’s multi-pronged solution for what feels like ever. But when we want to make sense of this crazy world that we live in, chocolate chip cookies or cookies disappearing, and get to the heart of all the happenings in the industry and at Mediavine, we head to the source, Mediavine Co-Founder, CEO, and resident pagespeed and Shih Tzu fanatic, Eric Hochberger. Eric, welcome back to the Summer of Live.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thank you. Thank you. Good to be back.

JENNY GUY: It’s good to have you. OK, so what are we going to talk about today? We have a whole lot, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, wow. Besides just chocolate chip cookies?

JENNY GUY: Besides–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK. Got it.

JENNY GUY: We could shoot the breeze for an hour without a problem, but we probably should talk about the thing we’re here to talk about, which are updates, yeah?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. We’ve got some good ones. Real exciting stuff happening.

JENNY GUY: So guys, Eric is going to present. We’ve got chocolate– oh, we’ve got one with M&M’s. Eric is going to present Mediavine updates. He’s going to talk through–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I will have M&M’s, though. That is definitely part of a chocolate–

JENNY GUY: OK. The rules are– OK, I want one with some peanut butter chips, if anyone has one of those. OK. Eric is going to go through the updates. If you have a question on one of the features or products that he is talking about, drop it in the comments. Because he’s my boss, I’m allowed to interrupt him, unlike our other guests. So those are the rules we’re playing by. So please drop your comments. Eric, let’s do this.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, interrupt away. Everyone, please. Much more fun if it’s interactive. Especially on this one, because I think there’s some confusion about this feature we may have launched– is it month ago now? When did the Universal Player come out? Yeah, about a month ago. It was in beta testing for a while, so sometimes I forget when we officially launch things. But this was incredible, our Universal Player.

Our Universal Player, for those who don’t know, is a solution that lets you monetize with video ads, even without your own video content. So if you’ve never created video content before, stop watching this live, run into your dashboard, turn on the Universal Player right now. Publishers are finding resounding success with this. You can see in the Facebook group tons of people screaming from the rooftops how awesome this Universal Player is.

But it’s more than that, because it also– yeah, those are the numbers that are amazing that we’ll go over in a second. But the Universal Player’s also backup if you do run video here at Mediavine. So if there’s a page that doesn’t have a video playing or doesn’t get even an ad in the regular video player, the Universal Player will back up the regular video player.

So even if you are creating video, still turn on the Universal Video player. It’s both a substitute for and a backup too. So that’s why it kind of does it all, hence the name Universal Player. Turn it on today, and let’s go back to those fun stats.

So this is why people are so excited by the Universal Player. Not just that it’s a better user experience because it’s smaller. If you saw it in the bottom left-hand corner, it’s smaller than our regular video player. It also does not appear inside the content. Definitely a better user experience. But beyond that, it gets incredible results. Sites that were not running any video before saw around a 34% RPM lift on average.

And that includes seasonal adjustment. So even if you’re comparing yourself– let’s say you turned it on now and next month is a better month, you will see more than a 34%. This is taking out the variances throughout the year. So 34% is unbelievable. There are few things you can do to make that kind of money with just one click little toggle. So again, if you’re not running video today, turn this on.

Sites that were formerly running our Outstream Adhesion unit, which we are no longer recommending– we’re kind of moving on to this as the replacement– they saw an average increase of 12.9%. So if you were previously running Outstream Adhesion, turn it off. Switch to the Universal Player, and you will make significantly more revenue. And then sites that are running Featured Video today or Autoplay Video today, sites that are well optimized, the best advice we generally give is try it, because on average sites are seeing that 8.9% RPM lift.

If you go the next slide, I have this fun stat that it looks about 80% of sites who switched from using Featured Video to using the Universal Player saw that increase or saw an increase in RPM. So not every site will see it. If you’re incredibly well optimized for video– so you have lots of short-form video, videos created per post, and if you’re incredibly well optimized, there’s a chance you’re not going to make more.

So try it. Even try disabling Autoplay and just seeing how the Universal Player does, and letting your videos go back to what they should be. When a user wants to watch them, they press Play. And the Universal Player will automatically stop if the user presses Play on one of your videos on your page. Very slick. So you can get the best of both worlds.

But again, if your site is one of those 20% that doesn’t make more, you can always go back to Featured Video. You can always go back to turning back on Autoplay. Remember, everything in the Mediavine dashboard is just one checkbox or one toggle away.

And part of why it makes so much more money– let me just quickly go over this– and that’s the impressions per session you see on the left-hand side. So a video player can only play an ad after your content is done or between content. So if you have a video, let’s say, that’s a minute long or a minute and 30 seconds, ads are only 30 seconds long. So it has to wait a minute to a minute and 30 seconds for another ad to play.

Universal Player, the second ad is done, the next one can begin. So that’s why per session Universal Player sees about 2.8 ads per user session. So across all their page use. Versus a video player that averages about half of them.

And also, fewer users even close it, because it’s a better user experience. Again, remember, it’s smaller. So Universal Player may make a little bit less per ad that plays, but because more ads are able to play while that user’s still on your page, it’s going to make you more money.

JENNY GUY: We have got people saying that they love it in the comments. I just want to clarify a couple of things– questions. First off, all publishers should have received a really detailed email from support today from Heather who is telling everyone exactly what to do, where it is, pictures of the settings. We have Vicky Pikes who is saying, how can I tell if I had Outstream Adhesion? I can’t find it in settings video.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It’s a great question. That one is under Ad Settings under Adhesion, to keep things a little bit extra confusing. So if you go to the Ad Settings under your Adhesion, you should probably go turn off the mobile and tablet versions of that.

JENNY GUY: Would it show in her dashboard earnings if she’s had it in the past?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So the way Outstream Adhesion worked, because it competed alongside the same– the Display Adhesion– so it ran instead of, it did not report separately. So it would be lumped in with your adhesion earnings. The Universal Player gets its own recording, because it is its own.

JENNY GUY: OK. Thank you for clarifying that. Another question. Because we’re saying– so basically, the recommendation for all Mediavine publishers is try it. Doesn’t matter. Try it. Just try it. Yes?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Turn it on for everyone, and always leave it on. That would definitely be the recommendation. The thing that you have to experiment with is on your site, try turning off Featured Video. So at the very top, there’s a choice of None if you’re running one. Try it. Try it for a few days. Sometimes it takes a couple of weeks for a new ad, like the Universal Player to ramp up.

And just see. Give yourself a comparison. You can always email in if you have questions about how it’s performing compared to your old solution. But again, if it doesn’t work for you, if you’re one of the 20% of sites that was incredibly well optimized, you’re not making your money, just go back to the Featured Video player.

JENNY GUY: What about placement for the unit?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s a great question. So previously– so this is actually controlled by your same video player settings. So you can choose top left, top right, bottom left, top center. There are six choices of where you can place it. We had previously recommend the top right for the video player, but with this unit we’re actually going to be recommending the bottom left. Part of that is so it can mimic the behavior of where the Adhesion is. And remember, this is a lot smaller.

And we also have some pretty exciting stuff coming in terms of how it’s going to play well in terms of everything else that’s sticky on your site or fixed placements on your site. So where grow.me appears, some other things that we’re going to be launching in the soon-to-be future. So bottom left is really going to be your best placement.

JENNY GUY: OK. We’ve got– Cam Ellen, said my Universal Player is 28% of my total revenue, highest of all ad units. Claudia said, doubled my video income. Shutting off Featured. So we’ve got some really great results here. So then I’ll ask just the– does this mean no more video? I don’t need to make video anymore?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, definitely not. So video still has its place. And there’s certain things that video will always do that universal player or Outstream, which is the underlying ad technology under it that’s powering it, can’t do.

And one of those is SEO. So if you create video content for a post, you upload to Mediavine video player, it outputs what’s called schema or JSON-LD to tell you, hey, there’s a video on this page. This is what the video is about. And that makes you eligible for the video carousel and other special results in Google. So creating video still has an SEO benefit.

And if a user clicks Play– actually clicks Play, doesn’t have an Autoplay Video running, nothing will pay you more money than a video that has a click-to-play, and that’s because audio is able to play and advertisers will pay more money. So if you actually stop doing Autoplay– and that’s what I was saying about turning off Autoplay– let the Universal Player do its thing whenever a user gets to your site.

And then if they want to watch the video, that’s when you’ll make the most money. So there is actually still a balance you can find between the two. But creating your own video can be good for SEO and make you more money.

JENNY GUY: Good for SEO. It’s good for all social. Everyone is prioritizing video. So stopping making video is not the answer. We’re just saying, you don’t need to make those slideshow videos that maybe aren’t applicable or great experiences. Plus, I think all of us kind of like the idea of not having Autoplay anymore, to having a better overall experience for ourselves as site users. I don’t know. We are going to roll forward to a new thing that we have– really, this is just in beta. Yes, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So these are some of the things that we’re also either working on, have worked on, or coming soon. So there’s a lot of things that happened that are not the Universal Player that are not quite as obvious to our publishers that we’re working on here. So I just want to tease some of those fun things, because our ad tech engineers are constantly building some of the coolest stuff. And a lot of it, you don’t get to see.

But here’s one you actually do get to see. It’s in cool gif form. This is the mobile in view that you’re seeing. And what that does, it actually takes out optimize for CLS setting, which created that gray box for the maximum height of which an ad could take up. And it actually uses that as kind of a rail that the ad will stick in as a user scrolls. And you can see it here.

The jumping, by the way, is just the end of the gif looping back to the beginning. That is not the actual behavior. The only behavior you’re seeing is that the app just kind of sticks for a little bit while it’s in there for a split second or two.

That has an unbelievable impact to your site’s viewability. In testing, we’re seeing a 5%-plus increase. And that is going to lead to more than a 5% increase in earnings for almost no change in user experience. The ad box is going to be barely any bigger by turning this feature on, and it’s just a quick little stick. Doesn’t overlap any content. Doesn’t really change the experience of your site at all, but is going to increase your revenue 5%, 10%.

So again, not a lot of things that can do that. That’s currently in beta testing. We’re hoping to have that out in the next few months. And thank you, everyone, who signed up for that beta and it’s helping us test again.

JENNY GUY: Yes. OK. And so explain– I know that we talk about viewability a whole lot, and that viewability is good. We all know viewability, good. [LAUGHS] What does it mean in terms of our bottom line?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So viewability– first off, just the definition, is it means that the ad was in view in the screen for at least one second. And the problem is on mobile when users are thumbing through very quickly, not a lot of your ads will actually stay in view for a full second. That’s an eternity to a user as they’re scrolling quickly through your site. This sticky makes it a lot more likely to happen.

And so advertisers only want to pay if their ad is seen, so they pay based upon viewability. The reason why we earn the highest CPMs anywhere is because Mediavine has the industry-leading viewability. That’s why advertisers continue to buy on your site, and there’s that ramp-up period when you first sign up for Mediavine, why we tell publishers it’s going to take a few months, because we are the only ad management company that does things like lazy loading. So it takes a while for you to build your reputation with these advertisers. And this is what they’re buying based on your viewability.

So improving it by 5%, the reason why I say will earn you 5% or more is because there’s multiple ways in which advertisers buy, one of which is called a vCPM, without getting into too many acronyms, the idea being, if you improve your viewability 5%, they’re willing to pay 5% more. That’s the simplest model.

But a ton of them will only buy on sites that have high viewability. We have high viewability packages and we work directly with advertisers. And for that, you want to hit this magic number of 70%.

And it’s not necessarily the 70% that you’ve seen the dashboard, because we use a metric called Google Active View. That’s Google’s technology of how they measure viewability. But the advertiser might be using Moat or a different vendor. So you want to have above 70% to make sure that any advertiser’s seeing that you are above 70%.

So this is amazing, because we average around a 73% here at Mediavine across the board for mobile, which is already incredible compared to the industry. But this is going to help push that buffer on your site significantly above. So you should be eligible for a lot more premium campaigns if you have that higher viewability. So super important.

JENNY GUY: That’s exciting. And again, I love that it’s not a decreased user experience. Not more ads. We’re not tossing more stuff. It’s just– it’s already there. It’s already there. It’s just– just push the button soon. OK. We had a couple questions circling back on the Universal Player. Michelle said, wait. Did I misunderstand it that I should turn off Featured Video and not just the Featured Playlist? She’s saying she did have an increase in RPM, I think, back when she turned on Featured Video. You’re saying turn off Featured Video. Try it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, try turning off Featured Video and see if you see that RPM decrease. And keep in mind, we’ve also made a lot of tweaks to Universal Player since it’s gone live, and we’re continuing to make more. You’re only going to see improvements to performance with this. So if you didn’t see it maybe three weeks ago, give it a try again. Again, over 80% of sites are seeing the same or higher RPM when they turn off that Featured Video. So I can almost not guarantee it, but overwhelming chance that you’re going to see–

JENNY GUY: Close. He has a beyond super majority. [LAUGHS] We have a great question from Marissa Moore. She says, awesome. Where can we find our site viewability?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So if you go to the Ad Unit Report in the Mediavine dashboard, you should be able to see your viewability. And you can switch it out by device type in there. So you can switch it to break out and so you could see how you’re performing on mobile, desktop, and tablet.

So remember, at first right now, we’re testing this on just mobile. This may come to other device types in the future. But specifically, mobile is where you’re going to have a lower viewability than desktop. And that’s just because it’s a smaller screen, users scroll faster. Phones are not as fast as desktop computers. There’s a variety of reasons. But that’s why we’re introducing this first on mobile, and you’ll probably see when you break that down you have a lower viewability on mobile.

JENNY GUY: We have– Zona actually got the beta welcome email while watching this live. She said, it looks great on my site so far, the mobile end view. So that is exciting. OK, we have one more question. Sarah said, wait. To confirm, we should disable Autoplay First Mobile Video and Autoplay First Desktop Video in our Video setting?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s going to be my recommendation in going more towards click to play. But again, this is going to vary based on your site. Try that. Try turning off Autoplay or try turning off Featured Video. It does the same thing.

Once you turn off Autoplay, there’s not going to be a featured video inserted anyway. Or if you turn off Featured Video, then you’ll only have Autoplay if you manually embedded a video inside one of your posts. So doing both is the same thing. Again, you don’t have to orient more. The Universal Player is going to run on all of those pages.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. Lance said, for those of us who are visual learners, are those settings written out somewhere like a knowledge base article, help center, or blog post? Actually, yes, Lance. They’re written all of those places. Today, Heather sent out an email with screenshots and everything to all Mediavine publishers. We are updating the blog post where it will have all of these there too. We will make sure that’s taken care of as well. And we’re going to make sure that everything is all buttoned up for you as well as help docs, always.

OK. Cathy says, can we have more than one video associated with a post through Mediavine? Like a short one-minute one and a longer how-to demo of the recipe?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So you can do that one of two ways. You can embed two videos inside of the post, or you could make a playlist. But yeah, you should be able to associate two videos with the same URL. And if you’re not, email in. We’ll fix that. That definitely should be able to be done.

JENNY GUY: We’re back to cookies. Cookie, cookie, cookie.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: The other dangerous kind. So yeah, as you guys may have heard, Google actually recently revised their timeline for when they’re phasing out third-party cookies. So the new timeline is basically a multi-phased approach where we’re beginning testing now. At the end of this year, they’re going to be testing things like FLoC again, which they temporarily took down to use all of the feedback that we’ve all given that as an industry. And they’re going to be re-releasing the Privacy Sandbox tools, all the birds.

And then now the hope is end of 2022– so end of next year is when we’re all going to begin migrating. So we’ll be testing this year. Next year, we’re going to begin as an industry to migrate. And it’s not until the end or the mid to end of 2023 that they’re actually going to be getting rid of third-party cookies. So now it has actually been delayed almost a full two years is the way to look at it. So we have until the end of 2023 to get all of our solutions in place and performing well.

So a very welcome change. I don’t want anyone to think that this means that we at Mediavine are resting on our laurels at all as a result of this, and we don’t want our publishers to feel the same way either. This is an amazing sigh of relief. This gives the entire industry now time to build solutions, because it’s not just Mediavine’s grow.me or Mediavine or really any one company’s solution. It’s really about all of us as an industry adapting to this, because otherwise it would be a ripple effect if it were only Mediavine solving for this.

So we’re very glad this is going to give other companies time to build their solutions as well. And of course, it will give us time to further develop grow.me to be an incredible replacement come 2023.

JENNY GUY: And why is it important to have that lead time, beyond just building out the features?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So for a variety of reasons. So first and foremost, grow.me is our user engagement suite. It is designed to encourage readers to log into your site via grow.me. It is about creating a long-term relationship with your readers, and that doesn’t happen overnight. Any of you who have tried to build a newsletter probably know that it takes months or years, same with building a social following.

You’re doing the same thing now with first-party data. You can’t expect to be able to do this overnight. This is a long-term mission. You look at companies like New York Times who have been building their subscriber base. They’ve been doing it for years. Luckily, now we have at least two years.

So if you’re not running grow.me, I hope you will be running it by the end of this presentation, because I have a few fun things to highlight about grow.me, including the Spotlight Subscribe that you see here pictured on this slide that publishers are absolutely loving. So fun fact real quick on Subscribe. Since launching it not too long ago, over 772,000 people have signed up using Subscribe, and that has led to 386,000 people to sign up for grow.me accounts as well and log in.

So keep in mind first, someone signs up on your site. You get them instantly to your newsletter. That’s the first step. And in the second screen we say, hey, would you sign up for a grow.me account as well? So you get this newsletter right at the start, newsletter sign-up, and we get the grow.me, we as in all of us together, on that second step. So that’s why the number doesn’t quite line up. But those are both incredible given how recently we launched Spotlight Subscribe, and it hasn’t even been adopted by everyone.

So right now, run into your Mediavine dashboard. Turn on grow.me if you’re not running it today and enable Spotlight Subscribe. That will help you build your newsletter right now. You can download your subscribers right from the dashboard, or you can use our new Zapier Integration to add automatically to whoever your email– your ESP, your Email Sender Provider. So very exciting stuff out of grow.me.

JENNY GUY: Very exciting.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Other things are coming to Subscribe. We promise, we hear your feedback. Multiple widgets, what we’re calling pop-up describe. It is not a pop-up, so maybe that’s not actually what we’re calling it.

But the idea being if you have a Subscribe button somewhere on your site– maybe in your header. I know that’s really popular now amongst bloggers. When someone clicks Subscribe, it can now open up your grow.me sign-up instead of having to take them to another page. And then of course, we’re going to be asking for name optionally, if you want to add asking your users for their first names so that you can personalize the emails to them. So a lot of really cool things that publishers have been asking for are coming to Subscribe.

JENNY GUY: I mean, in addition to the fact that grow.me is able to take the place of a lot of other things that are costing money and it’s free for Mediavine publishers, plus build up all that first-party data way ahead of the game and make more now on Safari traffic because Apple has already gotten rid of third-party cookies, you also get to help us shape this product and tell us– give us your feedback as a grow.me beta tester and Mediavine publisher on what will make your readers log in, what you think will help so we can build those features out. Right, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, we can’t stress this enough. Grow.me, definitely a beta product and is being developed by you, our publishers, based upon your feedback. So grow.me is meant to be a suite that natively integrates with your site to increase value to the reader.

The only person that knows you’re a reader is you. You’re the one that has to tell us which features work. I cannot tell you how much joy it brings me to see all these suggestions in the Facebook group, people who are asking for things like membership sections. People are thinking about ways that they can incorporate grow.me into other aspects of their site.

That’s what we want and need so that grow.me can become this value add to readers across 8,000 different sites. Why does somebody want to have a grow.me account? Why do they want to log in? That’s what we want everyone answering the question of. And here’s just– Spotlight Subscribe is just one way.

JENNY GUY: And we’re going to keep building them out. OK, Julie said, sorry, late to the party. Please tell Eric and the team that I am loving the Universal Player. Made July my best month ever for ad revenue. Thanks for passing on the message. Grow.me is wonderful, said Tara.

OK, we have a question from Sue. Sue, I think that it’s probably just taking a little bit of time about turning on the Universal Player. Turn off Featured Video. And she went to her site on her phone and is not– there is no video player on her phone and on her desktop. Did she do something wrong?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not necessarily. So the Universal Player’s only going to show if there’s an ad playing. So it’s possible you just did not get an ad. And there’s also a ramp-up period. If you’re new to it, you’ve just turned it on, it’s going to take really honestly a few weeks or months before you start to see the maximum performance of the Universal Player. So don’t freak out. Just check your earnings tomorrow, and you’ll see that you’re making money on the Universal Player, because other readers are seeing the ads.

JENNY GUY: And if you’re worried about it, you can email into support@mediavine. Any time, they can take a look quickly. Michelle said, are their best practices yet that you’ve seen for how to set up the Grow.Me Subscribe button to convert better?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I’ve seen some great feedback inside the Facebook group, and that’s probably the best place to get this. People who have mentioned more colorful photos that pop, more colorful choice, because you’ve got a choice for the brand color in grow.me. You can see here that yellow. Whatever’s going to stick out more on your site. Yeah, I mean, it’s just going to vary for your site. I think individuals will have different advice probably better than I can give them, what we’ve done in Hollywood Gossip.

JENNY GUY: Kelly says, is there a way to see how many people subscribe to you via grow.me?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So how many people have signed up using subscribe, you can see. That’s just right in your dashboard where you go to download. How many users are logged into your site, you cannot see today. We’re working on the best way to be able to show that to you. That will be coming soon-ish, I’m going to say, once we’ve figured out the best way to show that.

Because remember, they don’t necessarily have to create the grow.me account on your site. They can create it anywhere and come to your site and be logged in. So grow.me, that’s why it’s a single sign-on solution, why we’re growing this all together. So figuring out the best way to show that to you. But subscribe, you’ll definitely get directly on your dashboard.

JENNY GUY: And you will still earn that sweet, sweet first-party data revenue regardless, yeah?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, of course. If they signed up somewhere else and came to your site, because that’s the way that grow.me works where they consent to be able to do it everywhere. In the future when third-party cookies go away, they will have to re-log in on your site. But again, it’s going to be incredibly easy, because they already have an account. They’re already familiar with grow.me.

And as Jenny mentioned earlier, Safari already got rid of cookies a while ago, the trendsetters over there. So if you have a lot of US mobile traffic– and I’m guessing you do if you’re a Mediavine blogger– probably about 30% to 40% of your traffic is already cookie-less in coming to your site. So there’s a lot of potential for grow.me to make you a lot more money today.

JENNY GUY: Start now. OK, we have other features as you were saying. Subscribe and Spotlight– the Spotlight feature are just one of the many ways, many tools that grow.me has. Let’s talk about another one.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: This one I am in love with on The Hollywood Gossip. You need to turn this on immediately, and this is Inline Recommended Content. So I know a lot of people are familiar with the carousel at the top, and that’s what brings them to turn on grow.me. That’s the little thing at the very top of the page it will show you.

That actually doesn’t perform that well, especially on mobile. The one that performs incredibly well is the Inline content. So Recommended Content in general with grow.me performs incredibly well way above if you were to pick your own content to show that’s related to a post. Instead what it’s doing, it’s figuring out what a user is most likely to click on. So that means you’re going to get higher clicks to those posts.

On The Hollywood Gossip we get something like 10% to 15% of readers click onto another post from that Inline content. Unbelievable. You can’t– I’ve never even seen a tool this impressive. And I’m not just saying that because we built it. I’m saying this as a publisher that has done that for The Hollywood Gossip. That is unbelievable.

So try it. Try Inline Recommended Content. Not nearly enough people are running this or taking advantage of this. This outperforms the carousel at the top by several multiples. Turn it on. Give it some time. And this is the one that’s going to make a noticeable difference to your RPM and to your traffic right now. And it’s completely free for you to enable.

And Recommended Content is something that gets better over time. So keep in mind, when you first turned it on, you might not love all the content recommendations. But it needs to learn your site and your users. Give it some time. We’ve now added the ability that you can exclude content. So if there’s something you really don’t want it showing, you can go right into your dashboard, find that article, and turn it off. We’ve already turned off most global things such as privacy policies and things that people don’t want recommended.

But there’s something else. You can now turn it off yourself. But again, give it time. It’s going to figure out what a user’s going to click on. And it gets very good, as I mentioned. Hollywood Gossip, 10% plus.

JENNY GUY: So why should I not just go in and exclude a whole bunch– well, first of all, we had a question from somebody who’s asking how to exclude content. We have a post about that. We have help docs about that. We will share that in the comments for you, and then we’ll also share the presentation with the links at the end of the program, so don’t worry about that.

But why should I not just go in and exclude a whole bunch of things and a whole bunch of posts? Like, what is the difference between featured and related? Recommended and related.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, recommend and relate is very different. So related is typically something that WordPress is going to do by default, right? You’re on your baking category. It’s going to recommend your other baking posts. Or maybe you have a travel blog and it’s going to recommend other things inside of whatever tag or category you have it in. That is related content. So content related to the post.

True story. That’s not necessarily what readers want to read next. If you’ve ever seen as you go through– even, I don’t know, your Facebook feed or your news feeds in Google News, however you consume your content and your addiction, it’s not showing you the exact same content over and over again, because that’s not what you want to consume unless you’re crazy obsessed with something at the moment.

Chances are you want to move on to something else, and that’s what recommended content is great at doing, showing your reader what they’re most likely to want to read next based upon what other users have clicked on from your site. So it’s going to be trying a bunch of different stuff using a lot of different machine learning signals to basically say, what is most likely to get a user to click?

And that’s not always going to be related, and that’s actually a good thing. Again, not everyone who’s reading a cookie recipe wants to get another cookie. It’s very possible they want a completely different recipe from your site.

JENNY GUY: So Kathy says, should we use it in sidebar and content?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I don’t personally love the sidebar. I turned it off on The Hollywood Gossip. It doesn’t get great performance either. I think most performance on The Hollywood Gossip overwhelmingly comes from the Inline, the in content ones. That is my strongest recommendation to turn on today. I think you could turn off sidebar and you probably won’t even notice.

JENNY GUY: Michelle says, where do we turn on Inline? Not sure I have it set. Is there a good place to go check that in your grow.me in your dashboard?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If I had it– do we have a help doc for that? We should definitely have a help doc.

JENNY GUY: I’m sure that we do. We’ll share it. And you can also email in. OK. Lia says, how can you find the percentage of your readers that are clicking on the Inline related content?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Great question. So one of the things we do is we integrate with your Google Analytics via events. So you’re going to want to go into your Google Analytics. And we definitely have an article on this. We’ll show you how you can see– it basically will fire an event inside of Google Analytics. And we create a little dashboard. You can pop in to see how many clicks you’re getting via recommended content.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. We will share that as well. OK. Michelle says, is online content going to be placed earlier in the content any time soon by choice? Will there be an option? Or if there is a list and a recipe, the ability to put it before the recipe card the way that’s the default when there isn’t a list in addition to the recipe?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Great question. I know we have tested other placements. I think we have found– wherever we end up finding them is where the default placement’s going to be. So we’re constantly running experiments on grow.me to find the best placement. I believe we are giving the ability to manually place Inline content at some point if we don’t already have that. So coming soon.

JENNY GUY: We’ve got people asking about that. OK. I’m going to scroll down. We’ve got a whole lot of questions here. Sue, Eric talked about that a moment ago. She said if we turn on Inline, should we turn off the top carousel or leave both on? You said for sure the sidebar is easy to ditch. What do you feel about the carousel?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things we actually found in testing is, again, the mobile carousel does not perform well. The desktop carousel does OK. Definitely significantly outperforms the mobile one.

So we’re actually replacing the mobile carousel in the future with what we call What’s Next. That’s going to be in the bottom right-hand corner. It’ll pop out. If you have the Universal Player or a video player, it’ll be a smaller little thumbnail. This is what it looks like. There’s no player next to it. It’s beautiful and it gets incredibly good engagement. So significantly better than the mobile carousel.

So in the future, this I’m going to recommend, that you run both this and Inline. I just don’t think the mobile carousel is worth the space it takes up. It takes up a lot of screen real estate at the top of your page. You have enough other things sticking on your page. It’s just not worth it.

I think people run it because other publishers run it, and therefore we feel this has to be performing well. But that’s not necessarily always the case. I think we’ve got to look at the numbers, and this has significantly higher numbers, and this is what we want to migrate the mobile carousel to in the future.

JENNY GUY: I also think– I don’t know. This is just me. But if I’m thinking about it as a user and as I use content, I’m not going to want to click on– when I’ve just arrived, the top of the post is not where I’m going to be looking for something else. As I get lower down in the post, that’s where I’m going to be looking for it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. I mean, that is the idea of Inline content. It tries to hit them right as they’re looking for the next thing. And then up next, we’ll always be with them and the same way as the carousel. But also, if you look at the way it’s designed, it’s really just giving them one choice, which is a lot easier, I think, for a reader to click that Next button and consume the next piece of content.

Again, 50% to 80% increase in clicks compared to the mobile carousel. So the data agrees. Users prefer What’s Next and the Mobile Carousel. So I think people are going to be very happy with this publisher as we go to roll this out.

JENNY GUY: The data and me. So I think that we should really just hold on to both.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You should focus on Jenny. I agree.

JENNY GUY: We should focus on the fact that as a use– Ellen said something that’s going to make us feel feelings. She says, can I just say you all at Mediavine are brilliant? Thank you for all that you do for us that’s on autopilot so we can create.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Awesome. Thank you, Ellen.

JENNY GUY: Look, you’re making him blush.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I want you to focus on the important stuff.

JENNY GUY: That’s right. Our slogan. OK. Next.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So a little-known feature of grow.me that many people don’t get as excited about is grow.me offers a very powerful search. Previously, this was actually powered by Google search. But many of our publishers did not love the Google search results. It turns out Google may be very good at search across the internet, but when you get to individual site searches, publishers weren’t loving the results it was returning.

So we actually moved things over to our recommendation engine very recently. So if you have not run grow.me’s search in a while, I encourage you to try it again. This is now, again, powered by the same thing that’s powering Recommended Content. It will get better over time based upon what users are searching, what they’re clicking on.

And of course, that means, since it’s using our recommendation engine, it is training our first-party data models. So by running search, you are going to long-term make yourself more money as well. And it’s going to perform really well.

And the fact that we now use our recommendation engine means we can do cool things again like instant search. You can see as they’re typing. The results start happening. We’ll be able to give them auto suggestions. Lots of fun stuff coming soon. So give it a try again.

And remember, it can integrate not only inside of the grow.me widget within quick search, but you can type into search boxes on your site so that grow.me can power your entire site search. So all available in the Mediavine dashboard.

JENNY GUY: And again, all of these things are free for Mediavine publishers. All these different features, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yep. Everything that we mentioned so far in grow.me is completely free to Mediavine publishers. Spotlight Subscribe, Content Recommendation, and search. All free.

JENNY GUY: What the heck? Are we crazy?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We are. But also, third-party cookies, as we may have mentioned, are going away. So the most important thing to Mediavine is that we all as publishers get control of the relationship with our readers, that we own the data and no longer, as they call them, walled gardens in the industry. So places like Facebook and Pinterest. We want to make sure that Mediavine publishers are the ones that control our data.

So it’s incredibly important we get people to adopt this, we build this. So it’s a little insane, but don’t worry. We make money off ads the same as our Mediavine publishers, so we are happy to help our publishers make more money off ads.

JENNY GUY: So many methods behind the madness. All right. Julie says, when will that change to the mobile carousel happen? Do we need to do anything, or will it be automatic?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That will be automatic if you are running the mobile carousel. So you can keep it on, or again, we’ll be sending out emails and social blasts and everything else we do as soon as that’s live. Blog posts. You know it.

JENNY GUY: All right. Kelly says, in the dashboard now, what is the difference between enabling search and enabling site search integration?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Great question, Kelly. So just enabling search is going to put it inside of a widget. So when someone clicks on the widget, there’s now going to be a Search menu button. Site search integration, again, is it’s going to look for any search fields on your site. And so when they click on maybe a search icon or the search bar, it’s going to pull up grow.me rather than going through the WordPress or whatever your CMS says. It’ll use grow.me instead. So that’s the native search.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. OK. Andy says, grow.me search is great, but has the issue with it timing out, particularly late in the day Eastern Time, been fixed?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Andy found our primary motivation for leaving Google. Google limits the number of queries you can do per day. And so that in addition to the fact that publishers didn’t love the results, we also ran out of search queries if too many people were searching. And Google has a hard limit on that.

The good news is our recommendation engine does not, because it is ours. So that will no longer be an issue, is the short answer. Search all the way up till midnight. You are good to go.

JENNY GUY: Yes! Search all hours of the day, 24/7 search. OK, now we’re on to something that’s a little bit more controversial and sneaky. Let’s talk about it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: This one I love, and so I just want to tell everyone it’s coming, because I’ve seen people in the Facebook groups requesting this. We actually already announced this on the “What is Grow.Me” blog post road map, but we’re building something called exclusive content.

And that is the ability for you to mark certain sections of your pages or your site as exclusive content. So exclusive to readers that have grow.me accounts and have subscribed to your site. So this will require them to create a grow.me account, log in, and subscribe to your newsletter in order to unlock this content. This is going to be an incredibly high conversion I think for helping people grow their newsletter.

So you’ll go to use this in front of anything. Within WordPress, it’s going to be basically as simple as creating a Gutenberg block that you can say, mark all this for non-WordPress sites. We have a solution as well. It’s div tags for our HTML fans out there.

And basically, you could put this in front of literally anything on your site, whether it’s a recipe, a printable, a downloadable. You name it, you can mark it as exclusive content that a reader has to log in to get. So start thinking about aspects of your site that you can encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter. And of course, grow.me.

JENNY GUY: Yes. Incentivize all the things. Julie’s saying, can you use it for just sections of a page? Did I hear that correctly?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, sections of a page. You can use it on a whole page. You’re going to have the freedom to put it and use it wherever you want. Again, this is something where it comes down to we need to learn from you as the publishers how you want to use grow.me.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right. We have so many things coming in. Everyone’s saying, I’m going to try to turn search back on. Fantastic. Exclusive content sounds awesome. When will this be out of beta or available to the content creators not quite in Mediavine yet, says Teresa.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That is a great question. So one of the things we’re trying to focus on right now with grow.me is, again, during its beta is building out its feature set for our core audience, which is Mediavine publishers. But the long-term goal is 100% to make grow.me available across the internet. So whether you’re a Mediavine publisher or not.

We just can’t prioritize that at the moment, because I think you would rather us spend our time building features for our Mediavine for publishers, getting this product to where we need it to be over the next two years. Hopefully, before those two years are up, we’ll certainly be able to bring on non-Mediavine publishers. But unfortunately, I can’t tell you it’s anytime soon.

JENNY GUY: Understandable. OK. Adriana says, will adding this exclusive content feature block Google?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So this is actually a very cool aspect of the exclusive content. There’s a Google schema.org markup for basically what’s called a free wall or a paywall where you mark certain parts of your content for only members. We’re going to be doing this in an SEO-friendly way.

Maybe even at Mediavine, started as an SEO-for-hire company. I am making sure that, yes, this will not block Google. This is actually going to be presented to Google in probably the only SEO-friendly way of any exclusive content on the internet, because we like to please our friends at Google. So yeah, this will be very SEO-friendly.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. All right. Marissa said, love exclusive content. We’ve got holy guacamole. We’ve got everybody so excited. OK. Love that. She said, also included without cost with grow.me.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yep. Too good to be true, I know.

JENNY GUY: All right. Let’s talk to the– let’s go to– we have to come down a little bit, talk about some Google stuff, some CWVs.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Like I said, we’re always answering to our good friends at Google here. So core web vitals, the summary page experience. How are we all doing here at Mediavine?

And the good news is pretty darn well compared to the industry as a whole. So 28.1% of Mediavine publishers are passing core web vitals on mobile. So that is pretty incredible. Well done, everyone. Maybe I’ll take partial credit for preaching about pagespeed for so much?

But seriously, I love everyone who’s taking this as seriously as we are. Thank you, everyone. And if you’re not, first thing you should do, go into your ad settings, turn on all the optimize for core web vital features we have. And then, well, get to our blog, because we have plenty of advice to help you pass core web vitals. I have a goal of a majority of sites passing core web vitals here at Mediavine.

I want to mention something real quick. Most industry studies say about 3% to 4% of sites are passing core web vitals. So already at 28%, Mediavine publishers are leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. But of course, we’re crazy. I want to see a majority of publishers here passing. So why settle for only 10 times the average?

JENNY GUY: So right now, everybody, regardless of who they are, go turn– enable all these settings right now. Go to Ad Settings. Do it. Optimize for core web vitals. OK. Now, but the thing about core web vitals is ads are not the only culprit causing issues with core web vitals, correct?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. This just gets your ads out of the way, so it’ll have minimal impact on your core web vitals. And that’s great. But then it’s going to really show you that your site probably needs some work too if you’re not passing.

And chances are, it does. Again, 3% of sites are passing on the internet. And that’s not all because they’re not running Mediavine ads, because a ton of them aren’t even running ads. There are ecommerce sites that don’t pass core web vitals. It is a challenging set of tools to have with or without ads. Extra challenging with ads, but luckily at Mediavine it’s a toggle. We took care of the rest for you.

But you’re still going to have things sell on your site. And that’s where our blog post or blog posts– we have a series of them– give you advice on how to help clean up your site. And of course, we may or may not have a theme framework that can help you as well.

JENNY GUY: Oh, I’m about to hit the button. But before I get there, Carol Anna said, optimize sticky sidebar CLS. This is an experimental feature. Use with caution. Should we turn this on?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We’ve got to keep that scary language on there, just to make you hesitate before you press Enable. But yeah, no, you should turn that one on as well. Basically, what you’re looking for on that one, turn it on. Go to your site on desktop.

And just confirm, is your sidebar still sticking, your sidebar ad? Does your page get crazy as you scroll through it with that sticky ad there? Like, does it go on forever? Most of the issues have been resolved at this point, from early on when we first launched this feature. I would confidently say that most sites should be able to turn this on without an issue.

JENNY GUY: Are you ready for the slide, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right. Phew. This is going to be fun.

JENNY GUY: Here we go.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Let’s do it. All right. So Trellis. We are now basically declaring the easy button for core web vitals. That is because 73.8% of sites running Trellis are passing core web vitals. That number literally grows by the day of the percentage, as more and more publishers have more time with Trellis on their sites.

And I know what you’re thinking. Who cares? I can’t get Trellis on my site. Why are you telling me about it again? And that is because we are going to be releasing Trellis to everyone who signs up to the beta by– well, I should actually say this month. I must have put that in just to give myself a little extra buffer there.

But the goal is to get everyone an invite by the end of this month. So sign up for the Trellis beta right now. We’re going to have that link for you. And if you want to install Trellis this month, you’re going to be able to. That is the goal. We’re trying to get basically our latest version, which is 0.14.– I don’t know, 3, whatever the number is at the end.

That is basically what we’re calling the open beta version, the version that we’re going to be able to release this to everyone. And we’re going to be able to get you access to that if you sign up now this month. So you will be on Trellis if you would want to.

JENNY GUY: You can have it. We’re going to stop– we mean it for real. OK. Sam said my core web vitals are passing for mobile but not desktop. What do I need to do for that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I think that’s actually pretty common, is what we’re seeing. So all the numbers I was giving before are based on mobile. So Google first released this page experience for mobile. They have not officially begun doing desktop yet. And my guess is because they’re going to be tweaking some of those values.

I think the thing to look at is, what are you not passing on? So The Hollywood Gossip does pass on desktop and mobile, so it’s certainly possible. We have a lot of Trellis sites that are passing on desktop and mobile.

But I think that’s the important thing to look at. What are you failing at? If it’s CLS, I think it’s a lot easier to fail on desktop on that first screen view. Make sure you are passing in what’s called the lab data on that desktop first screen if you remember. It’s a lot bigger of a screen than mobile. You’re more likely to have an image there, which is also going to impact your Largest Contentful Paint.

In this particular case, normally I’d say it’s a lot easier to pass pagespeed things on desktop. But given core web vitals, it’s actually a little bit harder on desktop. I think that’s why a lot of sites are not. Good news again. It’s only being released for mobile right now with desktop coming later.

JENNY GUY: I think I made you write a real big, old, long how-to blog post about all the core web vital– how to pass. Like, step by step. Right, Eric? We have one.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, please. Everything we did for The Hollywood Gossip, which is not running Trellis yet. Hopefully, it will be soon. So therefore, I did not have an easy button. I went over all the different solutions that went into passing.

JENNY GUY: We will share that in our final– when we share the presentation, we will make sure that’s linked up. Guys, team, please make sure that is linked up. OK. We are almost out of time. The hour’s flown by. It has been a great hour, but I want to ask one of my questions. We had so many questions from the audience, but I want to hear, what are two to three things publishers need to be doing right now to be ready for Q4? How can we be getting ready? What are the things that they need to go turn on, focus on, do?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well, normally I would say video, but now there’s an even easier solution. Maybe you heard us talk about at the beginning of this presentation. Turn on the Universal Player. Do that as the first thing you do right now. Your Q4 is going to thank you. You can always follow along with– we have our– what is the Q4 challenge called now? We have so many names for them, though Candy Land was the last one.

JENNY GUY: We do have the Sweet Land of Money challenge, which we will share again. We can show that– yes.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Don’t get me sued. Why did I just call it Candy Land? Oh, no.

JENNY GUY: Yes. The not Candy Land challenge.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not Candy Land. Yeah. So follow along with those. I mean, the best thing you can do is basically you’re going to be auditing your top posts. Go through your top posts. Make sure they’re all optimized. And remember, your Q4 posts are probably going to be different than your posts that are popular now. Go back to previous years.

If you’re a new site that maybe has all new content trending in Q4, just make sure you’re writing it all correctly. But the rest of us probably have pretty seasonal content that we know is going to pop back up into our top post Q4. Make sure those are all well optimized.

So video you can now do to the Universal Player. But making sure you have the right font size, making sure you hit that Enter key more often, making sure you have those longer content. Everything that we give you in the RPM challenge, I want to make sure everybody is doing that. Those would be I would say my top advice for what to do this Q4.

JENNY GUY: And we will make sure that Sweet Land of Money is in, and we still have the RPM challenge. There are so many things that we have, so many resources, including the series SEO Like a CEO, including Eric’s Go for Teal series that talks about step by step increasing your font size, increasing your line height, increasing more paragraphs.

All of those things are all spelled out post by post by post. And we have more ways to consume that content coming at you soon. We are working on that as we speak. And as well as this amazing episode will be a podcast episode within the next couple of weeks as well. So we’re giving you as many different ways as you would like, as we can come up with for you to consume this content.

We have a couple more questions. I’m going to tell you that on our next Summer of Live, Wednesday, August 11, at 3:00 PM Eastern, we have Claudia Tavani. We’re talking about you can always write more. The session is aimed at providing publisher tips to find new topics, even when you feel stuck. The key will be finding you can always niche down, finding new topics to write about even when you feel like everything has already been said already. So we have her.

And then the following week, the last week, our grand finale for the Summer of Live– cannot wait– Eric will be back with us. It is Wednesday, August 18. It will be Eric and Mike Pearson of Stupid Simple SEO. We are going to be doing Mythbusters, SEO Edition. So make sure you join us. It’s going to be a very fun, controversial, exciting edition of our show.

OK. Eric, one last question. We got a couple people saying, I need to sign up for Trellis. I filled out the beta form months ago for Trellis. We’ve got the link in your presentation. What do they need to do?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Click on that link. Sign up again if you can’t remember if you signed up. If you already signed up, you’re good to go. We’ll be sending out, again, those invites by the end of the month to everyone to be able to get access to Trellis.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. And finally, should I turn on the Universal Player if I make a video for every post?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Again, this is where I keep coming back to that one caveat. 80% of publishers will see more money by running Universal Player. If you’re incredibly well optimized for video, as in you have an individual video for every post, you might not see more RPM from turning on the– well, you should still turn on the Universal Player. You might not see more if you turn off Featured Video and you turn off Autoplay.

If you’re well optimized, there’s few things that can make you more money. That means you’re doing video incredibly well. You’re OK to leave it on. We will never complain about anyone running the Mediavine video player. We always encourage it. This is really about publishers that are not incredibly well optimized. But again, you can always give it a try. There’s no harm. Turn off Autoplay. Your videos will still be there as click to play. You’ll still get the SEO benefit. And you can do QuickTime and will still make you lots of money. So you can try it and see which one ends up making you more.

JENNY GUY: All right. Eric, it’s been a blast. I think we have a couple more questions that are trickling in, but we’re going to have to cut it off here. If you will maybe check out a couple of them afterwards, we will do what we can to get those answered. And please email in to publishers at any time. They are always there to answer your questions and provide audits for our publishers just upon request. All right, Eric. It’s been a blast. Go eat a cookie. Go eat some cookie dough.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I might even cook mine tonight. Thank you.

JENNY GUY: All right. Thank you guys so much for a great hour. We will see you next week. Have a great rest of your day.

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