Mediavine Adds Optional Backfill Donation to Benefit COVID-19 Education

BOCA RATON, Fla. – April 8, 2020 – Mediavine, a Comscore top 25 digital media property and full-service ad management company dedicated to building sustainable businesses for content creators, has added an option for their 6500+ websites to donate unused ad space toward providing educational resources for the COVID-19 pandemic.

With anticipated participation across Mediavine publishers, the website owners are in effect donating a projected 2.4 billion unfilled ad impressions per month, the equivalent of more than $4.6 million in ad revenue.

This initiative, like so many at Mediavine, came directly from a suggestion made by one of the website owners working with the company for ad management. A combined effort from Mediavine’s in-house creative, ad operations and engineering teams allowed the initiative to go from idea to implementation in under 10 days.

Mediavine’s ad technology is designed to automatically collapse ad spaces that are not purchased in the real-time programmatic auction. With this update, every Mediavine publisher now has the option to enable the “Serve COVID-19 Public Service Announcements” feature in their dashboard.

When enabled, this feature will automatically show a COVID-19 public service announcement creative in that site’s unfilled ad inventory. When clicked, the user will be redirected to a COVID-19 landing page with resources for information and charitable organizations worldwide.

Mediavine Co-Founder Amber Bracegirdle collaborated with the U.N. Office for Partnerships to ensure the company’s efforts were in line with their Strategy Hub. “From the moment this project was sparked by our publisher, the entire team has been excited to get to launch. In a time when every day brings harrowing news, the kindness of our content creators is a welcome sight,” said Bracegirdle.

Laurence Norah is a content creator on the travel website “Finding the Universe” and the Mediavine publisher whose suggestion inspired the initiative. “The main driver for me was just that feeling that I wanted to try and do something positive to help, beyond staying at home. I put the idea to Mediavine and the community, and was just overwhelmed by the positive response,” said Norah.

Mediavine CEO and Co-Founder Eric Hochberger added, “One of the best things about answering only to our publishers is being able to move requests like this to the top of our priority queue. We’re so proud and pleased to be able to release features that are important to our publishers quickly, especially now.”