July 2, 2020

How Much Does Mediavine Pay & How to Qualify w/ Amber Bracegirdle

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I had been wondering how much you can earn from Mediavine ads and what it takes to qualify as a partner. So I had a chat with Amber Bracegirdle, one of the founders, and here's what she said...

The average RPM (revenue per thousand impressions) for the last 7 days has been $21.60, which is up from $12-$13 for the beginning of the month. That means that a website with 50,000 sessions can expect to earn around $850 per month from using Mediavine ads. 

We also chat about:

  • How to qualify for Mediavine & why the requirements have changed
  • How Mediavine helps you to improve your load time and website speed
  • The ideal type of content that Mediavine looks for
  • And much more...

What it Takes to Make Money from ad Networks

Amber Bracegirdle 

From Mediavine

Amber Bracegirdle Mediavine podcast

Make Time Online Podcast on iTunes - Online Entrepreneur Tips

Listen to the full Mediavine podcast episode

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How much does Mediavine pay?

I have analysed a ton of blog income reports to find out how bloggers make money in the early stages

I found over 20 income reports that shared their ad income from Mediavine and pageviews, which came out to an average of $12.77 RPM.

It's important to note these were all "beginner bloggers" in the study either earning less than $2k a month or within 2 years of starting their blog. Amber made it clear that some members earn $75 RMP in winter months and even some people had a $40 RPM in June, despite the COVID-19 issues. 

This is in line with what Amber said on the podcast too. However, she did also point out that there is a trend that ads tend to follow at different times of the year (check out ad revenue by the seasons for more on this).

It is safe to say that bloggers can expect an RPM of between $12-$25 for the majority of the year if they work with Mediavine.

How to qualify for Mediavine

Publishers now need to reach the minimum requirement of 50,000 monthly sessions as of June 2020 (up from 25,000 monthly sessions before this). Mediavine are also ending their unofficial policy of accepting second sites from publishers that are below this traffic requirement. Any websites changing ownership must also re-apply. 

The type of content you produce can also play a role.

Amber digs into this in more detail in the podcast and there is some more info about this below...

Links and tips mentioned in the podcast

Amber didn't only share what Mediavine offers, but there were a ton of little tips in there to actually improve your content.

Such as, tips on how to improve your site speed, writing style and length of content. 

Here are some of the main ones and links mentioned in the chat.

Mediavine supports bloggers with site speed...

  • Uses "asynchronous" script (allows content to load first)
  • Lazy loading ads (option to enable ads to load only when the user scrolls)
  • Encourages site speed tips- use caching, CDN, image optimised, lazy loading (check out my chat with Matt Giovascini for more on improving your page speed. Or see how I improved my site speed by 63% with WP Rocket here.)

Where are ads placed with Mediavine?...

  • 2 in the side bar (desktop only- 1 above the fold, the other last on the side bar)
  • Adhesion at the bottom (mobile & desktop)
  • In content ads dynamically placed (uses the settings in the dashboard that you can change for mobile and desktop- max of 70:30 ratio of content to ads)

What Mediavine is looking for ideally from content creators...

  • Lifestyle blogs (travel, finance, food, parenting, cars, gaming etc.)
  • These tend to attract a certain audience (typically female, affluent, 20-45 years old, makes spending decisions, countries such as USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand etc.)
  • Write short paragraphs (around 1-3 sentences) so that the ads can be slotted into appropraite positions (they use <p> and </p> html to know where to place adds)
  • Use clear, helpful and easy to see headlines
  • Write long form content

WordPress plugins created by Mediavine...

  • Create (schema plugin for recipes, how-to's and lists) Recipes [see example] and how-to's are types of "cards" that hold "most valuable content", while lists [see example] can be a great way to do round ups of your amazing content to build cornerstone content on your site.
  • Trellis (WordPress Theme framework)
  • Grow  (social sharing plugin)

Other links mentioned in the chat...

Full Mediavine podcast transcript

Amber 0:00
Average RPM for the last seven days has been $21 and 60 cents. And that’s up from 12 to $13 at the beginning of the month now that’s keeping in mind that June is the end of the quarter. It’s still the end of q2. But people are you know, now that things are coming back a little bit in terms of the the economy. Across the globe, people are spending a little bit more money, which is why you’ve seen that giant jump of almost $10. But typically in June, a site with 50,000 sessions would see about $850

Mike Beatty 0:33
Hey guys, it’s Mike from Make Time Online. And today we’re joined by Amber Bracegirdle from Mediavine.

So in case you don’t know, media vine is basically an ad network which can really help bloggers to get a bit of income when they reach a certain threshold. We’re going to talk about that a bit more in the podcast. But it has changed with 25,000 monthly sessions to 50,000 monthly sessions recently and has been this whole hoopla about it if you’re follow or if you’re in any Facebook group, you would probably have seen everyone talking about this exact topic recently. So I find this is a really timely episode. And in case you didn’t know media vine actually started as an SEO company back in 2004. So this chat today is with Amber. And she’s one of the founders, there was three others Steve Martin Eric, who actually founded media vine. And they’ve kind of changed it from what it you know, pivoted from where it first was as an SEO company talking all SEO knowledge and things like that. And they’ve ended up becoming this ad network to actually give bloggers quite often small bloggers this opportunity to monetize their website using ads on their site. Amber is going to explain all this and way more Explain how much you can expect to earn if you actually can become a partner with media vine she explains what to what’s like the ideal client for them, or what’s the ideal blogger what what kind of content that would be perfect for you to put out and also the audience that you’re attracting. And just some other general really useful tips there’s site speed tips in there and it also how media vine actually can help with your site speed rather than lots of other ad companies or reducing it by quite a lot. All this is covered more so I really do hope this helps is a long chat. So if you just want to get like the main bit summarise if you’re in a rush, you can skip to the end and find out the main things from me. Enjoy it guys. So Amber, can you explain why media vine changed the required sessions from 25,000 to 50,000 sessions per month?

Unknown Speaker 2:58
Sure. So the idea had been on the roadmap for a while, actually, you know, we’ve we’ve been growing at a clip. And we knew that at some point, we’re going to reach saturation, where we just can’t hire enough people to give the support level that we like to keep things out. But what really fast tracked that decision was COVID. With everyone being online, from the start of countries locking down, we found that we were getting more and more and more applications, which on the surface seems like a great thing, right. But the benchmarks of what makes a really good, good partnership to make sort of moved right, the the things that were benchmarking a site at 25,000 weren’t really making sense anymore because a lot of sites were spinning up like right at the beginning of the lockdown They only have two months of history, but they were well over the traffic threshold. Technically, their traffic looked okay. But there was no history to the domain, which can be a real problem for advertisers, that kind of thing. And so basically, at the end of the day COVID caused the landscape to change. And we looked at a lot of different ways to attack the problem, including hiring more people, we were we were actually very close to just hiring, you know, 15 more hands, but the advertisers weren’t buying in the same way because everyone had pulled back their their money, right for when the lockdown started. And so advertisers weren’t buying in the same way. And a 25,000 k 25,000 site wasn’t earning in the way that it had before COVID. And so it really wasn’t we’ve always been the people to say like, don’t put advertising on your site until it makes sense to you. Right? Because No matter how you run the ads, there’s going to be a small loss of user experience. Even if you’re falling, following all the best practices, well, the thing is when we evaluated that five years ago, 25,000 is where it started to seem worth it, right. But now with the recession and everything like that, it didn’t seem worth it. And so we were locking all these people into contracts and spending all this time on applications that were ultimately getting rejected. And really, it just didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that we were spending time our hours rejecting new sites when we could be helping the sites that we already work with. And so raising the minimum was kind of the quickest way to make sure that those hours went back to support and that the benchmarks for the sites are where we need them to earn the best possible income for the site.

Mike Beatty 5:57
Well, yeah, actually, I’ve that heard this before as well about media vine about their support and things like that. Right? Can you just kind of explain like why media vine? Or how how it kind of works? Because I’m guessing like, really the answer is that media vine wants to provide support as much as possible and weren’t able to do that by getting a influx of people. Yeah. You know, applying and then ultimately, like you say, getting getting rejected. I think I even saw a stat on something like 72% of applicants, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 6:31
get rejected. We reject 70. And I think it rose a little bit during during all of this. So I don’t know if you know, the history of media vine. But you know, well, let me let me talk a little bit about that. So we comment ad management from a very different place to anyone else in the market. I am a blogger. My fellow co founders, I don’t know if they would qualify themselves as bloggers but they call themselves content creators. But the difference being that they were three guys that knew SEO really well and created websites that they knew they could capture terms on and traffic on, mostly in the entertainment space. So before I joined them, they had The Hollywood Gossip TV fanatic and movie fanatic and they wanted they wanted to add food fanatic to their roster, like create that site. Because their advertising company at the time they were working with an ad manager, just like people work with media vine. And they kept saying, you know, our CPM is not great or RPM is not great. What can we do to make it better? And as someone who’s been around for a long time and experienced this exact same thing, I will tell you they got the exact answer that we were all getting back then and this is like 2011 2012 is hands up in the air and you’re in the wrong space. If you had a lifestyle website you would make more money because their audiences More money. And so the guys, you know, we’re trying to figure out what sort of lifestyle website they would start. And they weren’t parents yet. They didn’t know anything about fashion.

Unknown Speaker 8:14
They didn’t know anything about

Unknown Speaker 8:18
finance. And so it was like, food. We all like food. And, and so Eric and I met at a food blogging conference. He’s one of my co founders and the CEO of the company. And quite famously, I’m known for being a bit of a loud mouth when it comes to people giving out bad information. And one of the things that happened during that conference is that there was a Google Plus person there. And there was a bit of drama because Google Plus at the time was requiring like, if you uploaded a photo, the terms and conditions stated that you were transferring them copyright. And so I asked her that question. I was like, why? blogger because she was there to encourage people to use Google Plus, instead of Facebook. And I was like, why should people use your platform, you’re taking their copyright from them. And famously, he was there with my old podcasting partner, Josh and leaned back and said, That’s her. And what’s really crazy is that I wasn’t even supposed to be at that conference, the dates moved in, and I was able to go. But, um, so the four of us started food fanatic together, basically, they let me run with what I thought they, you know, they just wanted content content content, they were like, the more content we have on site, the better. And I said, well, the best way I know of to do that is to hire food bloggers, and allow them to find a new audience, right. So like there were people like Christina from dessert for two, who at the time was not doing savoury recipes on her site, but we hired her to be our dinner for two years. fanatic. And so she was able to sort of introduce her audience and a new audience to her to her recipes. And provide context for this is why I’m doing dinners for two. And this is why it makes sense for the dessert for to brand that ultimately allowed her to show, even cookbook, like agencies that she was able to do more than desserts, and she’s now on her fourth cookbook, I think. We had another fanatic that was a sandwich fanatic, that ended up getting a sandwich cookbook, based on her work for food fanatic. Like it’s, it’s really cool to see that stuff, right. But that’s sort of the reason I’m talking about that is that when ad management came like when we decided to do our own ad management, what happened was basically our ad company fell apart. And it was right after the guys had taken me on full time. I just had a baby and I had left my six figure job and stuff. To them, I want to come and work for you so that I’m like, I don’t want to not work. But I want to be home with my baby that I thought for 10 years to have. And so they hired me. And and I will say I took a $70,000 pay cut to do that. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made. Yeah, but the the thing was that they had never worked with other content creators the way that we I introduced them to these food bloggers. And our ad company fell apart. And Eric being the programmer among us, and at this time, all he was doing was building and running the websites like that was his job was to build and run the websites, because we don’t run on WordPress. And he started researching programmatic advertising. And he said, I think I can build something that will allow us to at least take back some of our backfill money. And so he built the first version of the media vine script wrapper. And when he built it right, he was extremely opinionated about how he was going to run these ads, because he had built our websites. And he had built them for speed, because that was one of the main ways that we were owning all of the topics. Like all the keywords that we were owning is that we were the fastest website. And so he built lazy loading into that very first script. It’s not something we came to later that was literally him being like, I’m not going to allow ads to screw up our SEO. I’m going to lazy load them. We didn’t realise like, we were too dumb to know that nobody else was doing that. That kind of thing, right. And so he built it for us. Just our four websites. And then I happened to mention to my best friend who’s also a food blogger that Eric was doing this and she wrote for food fanatic as well. And she was like, Well, my company sucks. Can you guys help me too.

Unknown Speaker 12:55
So Samus, you weren’t?

Mike Beatty 12:57
You weren’t basically just provided In the ads, you’re actually helping more. You don’t have a whole user experience and everything.

Unknown Speaker 13:06
Right? So like one of the, I guess, from how we were approaching food fanatic, right, like we couldn’t pay these food bloggers a lot. And so one of the things that the guys did was they gave SEO advice, because they had been the very first iteration of the company was an SEO firm for hire. And they kept getting fired after they did really good jobs, because big companies would be like, Oh, we don’t need SEO anymore. Now we have number one rankings. And so they’re like, that’s not how SEO works. But you can’t you can’t convince people that right kind of like site speed is an ongoing thing. SEO is an ongoing thing. And companies couldn’t be convinced of that. So the guys were like, screw this, we’re gonna go and build our own websites. We’re, you know, we we can do this for ourselves. And so that’s what they did, right? And they made a much more sustainable company by by doing it themselves and Using all of their SEO knowledge to create these giant websites, I mean, The Hollywood Gossip gets between 30 and 60 million page views a month. It’s the largest hollywood gossip website on the internet. So they the relationship that they have with the bloggers that wrote for food fanatic was very, very indicative of how we’ve gone on, right as media vine, because the guys were very much like let’s do what we can for these contributors that are in the same content boat that we are like that they’re struggling with SEO and they’re struggling with site speed, and they’re struggling with all these things. And so when we decided to do the ads, like, literally our thought process for support and what we would help with and what we wouldn’t was, what did we hate about all of the ad companies that have come before us? Right, and so it was like you not having communication having to wait days for an hour. Sir or never getting one and having to email five times. All of those types of things like out of the gate, we intentionally said no one will ever have to do that.

Mike Beatty 15:11
Yeah, we’re free. So communication waiting for emails, I guess slowing up the speed of the

Unknown Speaker 15:18
website without going down the website. Yeah, very, very much. So like, Eric, from the very beginning has been like if we’re going to do this, like I want to do this in a way that does not that we’re not the cause of someone’s SEO done. And so that’s why we’ve lazy loaded ads from the very beginning. It’s why we talk about site speed all the time. And it turns out that if you care about site speed, you actually improve your ad performance. Because the ads load faster, and are in view for longer, and so you make the advertisers happier to and that means you make more money

Mike Beatty 15:59
makes total sense. I’ve got loads of questions from that. So they do remind me to come back to, like the ideal blogger and like the ideal content and stuff like that, because you sort of touched on some things there. But I definitely think this is a good, good time to sort of dig into site speed and like, what exactly is that? media vine? Does? You know that is it? If you ask me as a blogger, if I you know, join a partnership with media vine, do I need to be worried about my site speed? Do I need to do lots of things myself? Because I hate site speed. Drive is like the bane of my life.

Unknown Speaker 16:39
Right?

Mike Beatty 16:40
I try my hardest, but it’s always something that, you know, it’s, you know, got WP rocket as a plugin and things like that and try to get support as much as possible from other places. But, you know, how does it work with media vine?

Unknown Speaker 16:54
So it’s really hard. We totally understand that. From the media vine perspective, like the actual ads Tech, we do everything we can to get out of the way. Right? So from from day one, our script was asynchronous, meaning that it allows other things to load. And it waits. Until it’s it can write, which is why we we harped on site speed and like image optimization from the start, because with an asynchronous script, if you have stuff that’s taking too long, people are halfway down the page before an ad even loads. And so we we encourage people to optimise their images, you know, things that we know they can do have a caching plugin in place. Consider having a CDN in place. optimise all your images with a plugin and like those are things I think that are pretty low bar that someone can do or can if you’re with a managed host, you can make sure that they’re handling the caching and the CDN, half of it and then you can make sure your images are optimised and you’re not like putting five gifts on every page and things like that. And then on our side If the script is asynchronous, and then also we’re lazy loading ads, so there’s actually an option in your dashboard that you can enable that says, Don’t even load my ad script until the first time to interactive, meaning the firt. When someone when they load the page, right, they aren’t interactive right away, because they’re reading what’s at the top of the page. And then they start to scroll, when they start to scroll is the first time that they’re interactive. And so you can have it there’s a setting in your dashboard that you can enable that says don’t even load my ad script until they start to scroll. Now, on top of that, the ads are lazy loaded. So really what that affects is any ads that might have been above the fold, which is usually just the the first sidebar ad and also the sticky ad at the bottom of the browser, we call that the adhesion. Those are what would be affected by that setting. And they would load after someone starts to scroll and then all of the rest of the ads are lazy, loaded. They do not exist, no auction runs, no ad slot forums nothing until a reader starts to scroll near them. Now that does a couple of things that helps your site speed because none of those ads exist when during your first bite load time, which is what the search engines look at to know if your site is fast. But it also helps with your viewability score. Now viewability is one of these made up words, but it’s a metric that advertisers use to buy. And what they’re looking for is a site that has somewhere between 65 to 80% viewability. Now 80% is really hard to get medium and runs somewhere between 70 and 72%. Network wide, because

Mike Beatty 19:47
65 to 80%

Unknown Speaker 19:49
viewability. What does that mean exactly? So what it means exactly, is it takes how to it needs 50% of the ad In the viewable screen for at least one second, it changes a little bit based on the size of the ad or where it’s loading. And I think the IV they oh shoot international ad Bureau, something like that. We always say IB and I forget what it stands for. But they have like, they basically set out the metrics for this. And they and they have something on your website that tells you like, exactly how long something needs, how much of it how long it needs to be in the screen, for viewability score to start capturing. Right? So yeah,

Mike Beatty 20:36
65 to 80% or someone’s experience when your website you need to have an ad on there, right?

Unknown Speaker 20:44
Well, no. So what you’re looking for is you’re looking for that ad to be 50% of that ad to be in the viewable screen for at least one second. And as it’s been in that screen for one second. The score starts to to count And how how exactly it counts is, I think proprietary out there depending on the ad server that you’re using, but

Unknown Speaker 21:11
but it’s

Unknown Speaker 21:13
basically, the longer you can keep an ad and view the higher you viewability score is, but and also the idea that you’re loading, you’re not loading ads that are being seen. Yeah. Does that make sense?

Mike Beatty 21:28
Yeah. Yeah. Same is like lazy loading images, I guess. It doesn’t even it doesn’t even count until the user actually gets to that area, and then it will note, so it doesn’t affect your page load speed or anything.

Unknown Speaker 21:39
It doesn’t affect your page load speed. But the other aspect of that is that you’re not asking an advertiser to pay for an ad that nobody saw. Right? Yeah. Which that drags down your viewability score. And so you have these other ad companies that they load all ads on site load, right? So hello, 12 ad positions as the site loads, so First that’s slowing down your website. But also, if a reader only ever scrolls halfway down the page, because they’ve already got the information that they need, and you loaded five more ads below where they scroll to all of those ads have terrible viewability scores because no one saw them. Yeah. And that drags down your whole site’s average. And advertisers use that information to buy inventory on your website.

Mike Beatty 22:28
Right? Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. So you kind of touched on as well, though, with even with the lazy load, there probably would be two positions. I think you said the first sidebar and then the sticky at the bottom. Are there any other like requirement or like where do Where are ads placed with media vine? No, each ad network kind of has their own thing.

Unknown Speaker 22:51
Right. So we have to in the sidebar, and only two. So the first one is above the fold, and sidebar. The second one is the last thing in your sidebar. And it scrolls with the reader as they scroll down the page. Obviously, those are both only desktop positions, because there’s no sidebar on mobile. Then there’s the adhesion at the bottom, which there’s one on mobile, and there’s one on desktop. And then there’s in content ads. And those are dynamically placed our script figures out how tall your content is, and pixels, and uses what settings you have in your dashboard. So I’ll touch on this a little bit. We operate to the Coalition for better ads guidelines with regards to advertising density, which says that readers don’t start to be intolerant of advertising until you go over a ratio of 70% content to 30% advertising. So it’s, it’s not that readers are sitting there and counting every ad position that you have in your content. It’s the density of it, right and that makes complete sense because if you think about it in terms of like Facebook or Instagram, they don’t stop loading ads. If you keep scrolling, you keep getting ads. Right? But did you count how many you had? So that’s actually how media vine ads work, right? If people keep scrolling and they’re still content, and we’re not operating over that 30% Mark, we will keep loading ads, right? So

Mike Beatty 24:24
long, it’s not like it’s a set place. It just kind of depends on how much content is on that page and things like that.

Unknown Speaker 24:31
Right? a 2000 word post is going to get more ads than a 300 word post. Cool, for sure. And I think the you know, there are important things to that is the only people that count your ads are bloggers. And they’re just not thinking of your website in the same way that people think of Facebook or Instagram, but why not? Like it doesn’t make sense. If the contents there and the reader is still engaged. Why are we not serving them in You know, and so what we have in our dashboard is some settings that you can change around, that allows you to change the density. And it’s done by desktop or by mobile, like you have the option to change the density between them. So say, for example, you are on your desktop a lot. And you know that you only have 10% or 15% desktop traffic. If you want to keep a lower density there where it’s, you know, it’s 23%, instead of 27%. Do that all your traffic is on mobile and mobile readers are more sort of looking for tolerant of in content advertising, because that’s really other than the footer, that’s the only place that you can advertise. So they’re just more tolerant of it on a mobile device. And so you can sort of amp up that percentage that density to a higher number and not have reductions. planes, no way. So on mobile, you can actually have a higher density than

Mike Beatty 26:04
desktop. That surprised me.

Unknown Speaker 26:06
Yeah. All of our our settings like that are separated out by desktop and

Mike Beatty 26:12
mobile. Cool. So obviously, those ones in content there, I’m guessing those are the ones that would be lazy loaded. So it shouldn’t really impact your website very No,

Unknown Speaker 26:23
not at all the ones.

Mike Beatty 26:25
That’s funny, because there was actually someone in, in, in my facebook group who asked that exact question. I sort of asked some people, anyone want to get some stuff out there. And that was one of the things that they asked was kind of, well, why do they require in content surely that’s going to damage your, you know, user experience and things like that. And

Unknown Speaker 26:45
so yeah, that’s something that a lot of website owners think. And it doesn’t actually bear out in the data. Again, because mobile readers are so used to being served ads that way with Instagram and Facebook, and whatever That is happening on your website doesn’t even make them blink. And because it’s lazy loaded, like it’s not impacting your site speed the way that it would if all of the site, all of the ads were being loaded. And on mobile, that’s so important, right? Because data connections are terrible. Not everybody’s on Wi Fi. We’re very aware that Google is looking for its next billion users, and they’re in places that don’t have nationwide Wi Fi coverage. So you know, we do a lot of like, basically, we listen to Google. And when Google says site speed is important, because we’re judging you based on someone in Bangladesh, being able to load your website in not point two seconds on a data connection. Like, that’s what we’re going with. And so that’s actually also why we’ve because there’s one more opposition we didn’t talk about and that is the moment valuable content card, add position and there’s a couple of them now like there, we can place more than one of them. But so if you’re a recipe blogger, you’d have a recipe card. If you’re a DIY or craft blogger, you can now have a how to card. If you’re a travel blogger, you could potentially use a how to card for like a packing list. Or you can we even have marketing bloggers that use how to cards for things like cheap how to choose the best email provider, like between MailChimp and whatever and it has like steps of how to evaluate like it’s really cool. But we we made, we started out making create, which is our WordPress plugin for most valuable content. It offers recipe cards, how to cards and lists, which a lot of bloggers would refer to as a roundup. But most people don’t realise that there’s a schema type for that. And so we we created it in create Makes roundups an absolute breeze. And if you rank for say, for example, someone was like searching the best hotels in Bali, and you had a list, and your list was links to reviews of hotels on your own website, you would most likely rank and take over the mobile carousel where every entry of your list is one of the items in the carousel. No way. Yeah, it’s really cool to see.

Mike Beatty 29:35
So when you say like the schema is that, yes, are they different two snippets, they are different are they you know, like the snippet.

Unknown Speaker 29:44
schema is what tells the snippet is on your website. So like, you know, in a rich snippet you’ve got if say you’re looking at a recipe, you’ve got a star rating, you’ve got prep time, cook time and that kind of stuff. All of that comes from the schema. Right? So in a recipe card, right, it’s got all of those items. And behind the scenes, what that recipe card plugin is doing is it’s not just it’s one, it’s making it pretty on the front end and making it printable. But it’s also providing it’s marking up each of those items that you enter into the the entry fields. It’s marking each of those up with schema. So part of the reason that we even decided to go into making a WordPress plugin is that our DIY and craft bloggers were using recipe cards to make printable cards for their craft sites. And because they were using recipe card plugins, they weren’t differentiating their craft supplies. With the right schema. They were marking those things up as ingredients, right, which is telling Google these are edible. If you marked popsicle sticks and cotton balls up as edible. I mean, Google has an entire army of people that is reviewing websites all day every day. That’s how you get a manual action. Because some look at your website and say, cotton balls aren’t edible. And so, you know, we were like how at first the idea was, well, we’re going to make a recipe card plugin. That’s faster. That was the initial idea. Then we realised that craft bloggers were doing this. And we’re like, well, now we have to add something. And at first, the idea was, well, we’ll just add, we’ll just add a card that’s a bit more generic and doesn’t have any schema markup. But then we started looking, there’s a website called schema.org, which is what all of these basically it’s another coalition where everyone is agreed to use schema.org and what’s written there and, and they devote developer time to it and stuff like that, and realised that there was actually a house To schema that works perfectly for crafters but no one was using it no one was offering it there was literally no how to card in the WordPress repository. And so we added that to create and I will kid you not Mike so we released create in October of 2018 with the idea we added how to schema like right like it released with that it was you could have a recipe card or how to card and crafted DIY bloggers hopped on it because that was another place to add advertising. The thing about the way that we started with food bloggers is we realised very quickly that the most valuable place on the page was actually the add in the recipe card. Because no matter how a reader came into your website, all roads lead to the recipe. They’re always going to see that Yeah, they’re always going to go to the recipe card. And so we felt we feel and we still feel this way that it’s the same like if you can train your readers on a craft bloggers Dry blog that you have that at the end of your post, they’re going to start doing that. Right. And so then that becomes the most valuable place. And that’s why we call it most valuable content. So we released create in October 2018, Google was not parsing how to schema at all. By February of 2019, Google was parsing how to schema. And to this day, there’s still nobody offering how to schema other than create. And so it’s just one of those things where it’s like, if you build it, they will come. Yeah,

Mike Beatty 33:35
well, I’ve actually even noticed I don’t know if you use Gutenberg, you know, the new press. I’m sure they have. I don’t know if that is how to schema but they have a there is a box on you know, one of those things there now. It definitely is a how to box and you know, you can list it out and things like that. I don’t know if that schema that they’re actually doing or what but I hadn’t noticed that. while ago, I actually hardly use it anymore. Obviously mainly use thrive but ya know, I noticed that I don’t know if that’s the same thing.

Unknown Speaker 34:10
Any Do you have Yoast? Yeah, it might be something that’s coming for me, because I know yes to started doing some schema markup too, right? Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it’s one of these things where like, you can really stop and look at your website and say, How are my readers interacting with the page and understanding how they interact, interact with the page can help you decide where to put the advertising so that it actually makes you more money. And that’s how we came to the recipe card app. Because when media vine started, literally no one was putting ads in recipe cards. And in fact, one of our competitors dragged us for it. and was like, why would you put Why would you put this below the fold? Why are you wasting people’s time bla bla bla bla, but we knew from our own testing on our own websites and putting that out on food recipe card that it blew every other ad out of the water.

Mike Beatty 35:04
Yeah. Right. It totally

Unknown Speaker 35:06
Yeah, it makes complete sense. And so it’s like one of those things where, you know, everyone else was focusing on above the fold and I need a leaderboard next to, you know, the masthead and all these things. And we’re like, No, do not run a leaderboard. People scroll right past that the viewability is terrible. We don’t want you to run one. And people are like, what? So it’s just one of those things. We’ve always kind of let the data guide us to what the ad positions are. And there are definitely ones that we’ve rolled out and rolled them back. As soon as they stopped working. Like for a while on mobile, we had a read more ad unit, where if we, if you enabled it, it automatically gave you one of those read more buttons on mobile, and people always over scrolled. So they would see that ad and then they would hit read more. But after a while, readers got savvy to that and they were Just hit the button and they wouldn’t over scroll. And so it stopped being a highly viewable place. So we took it away. We’re like, this doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t make sense to have it.

Mike Beatty 36:09
So just keep always to kind of start seeing what works. So yeah,

Unknown Speaker 36:13
we have a data analyst named Cynthia. She’s our Director of Business Intelligence. She looks at numbers and see stories the way are you and I read a blog post and see a store. Like it’s crazy. She can look at a number and be like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I’m like, huh? How do you know? Yeah, no, she’s incredibly smart. And she works her tail off to find like, She’s literally all she does all day long is look at numbers and pulls out these little anecdotes that are like, I think if we do this to the ad tech, it’s going to do this. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re doing that 1000 times a day. Trying to pull out more money for people that isn’t just let’s put another ad on the page.

Mike Beatty 37:06
Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. And you kind of touched on it again a couple of times there, you know, sort of different types of websites and things like that. So I would love to know if what would be like the ideal blogger collaboration, you know, if someone is applying to media vine, what is like the ideal? Well, we’ve kind of touched on requirements, so the 50,000 sessions, but yeah, what would you want them to sort of be like, what would you like their type of content to be about? What audience would you like them to have? Like what are some of the ideal things that you’d love to see?

Unknown Speaker 37:42
So content doesn’t matter nearly so much as people think it does, in terms of which part of lifestyle you’re in lifestyle is really where we’ve we’ve made our home so but that covers so many things, right? That covers travel and finance and parenting Even cars and gaming and food and you know a lot for a long time we were known as as of only dealing in food. And the reason for that is literally just because we started with people who wrote for food fanatic, right, and that’s where word spread. But we work with so many different websites that are all in the lifestyle space, it really doesn’t matter because what we’re looking for there is actually your audience. people that read lifestyle websites are very similar in terms of audience. So it’s typically women, it’s typically women that are fluent in the 20 to 45 range. They have most of the spending decisions like that is the valuable audience to most advertisers. Obviously, there are different ones so like, if it’s a car manufacturer, there may be more looking for a male audience and stuff like that. It really just kind of depends, but if you’re in the lifestyle space, you’re getting the audience. That’s most valuable to advertisers at this point in time. So we’re looking for websites that have really the most important aspect is long form content that has good paragraph breaks. And what I mean by that is that when it comes to web reading, a bunch of different people have done studies Microsoft, Apple, Google, about how people read on a mobile device, which is where all of your traffic is, right? And if you have paragraphs that are longer than two sentences, on a mobile device, it looks like a wall of text. And so they disengage. Right, and so we’re looking for someone that has well formatted text has a decent amount of headings that are keeping people engaged. The reason that those paragraph breaks are important not only to readability and user experience is that they provide our advertisements places to go. And they use open and closed paragraph tags to understand where they can insert themselves so that they don’t break up your content in unnatural ways. And so if you have a, I was literally just talking with someone on Reddit this weekend that has a restaurant website, and he has all these really great restaurant reviews. But there’s literally not a paragraph break to be found. And I said to him, I was like, Listen, man, you will have to go through and format these things. So that every two sentences you’ve got a hard return, not a shift return a hard return. He’s like, what does that matter to advertising? I was like, You can’t even possibly understand how much that is for advertising. You know, we’re looking for someone that their website they thought about it from a mobile first way, right. It’s not just enough to have a responsive theme like, really at this point in the game, you should be thinking the world First whenever you’re designing website, and I know that’s hard for bloggers, because they’re always on their desktop. Yeah, exactly. But you really you have to do it from a mobile first standpoint, or you’re going to lose readers. And so we’re looking for that we’re looking for and we’re looking for audiences that are located in countries we know will monetize well, because the way that our ads work is that we run an auction for every single position. And so if you imagine that each of your ad positions is an eBay auction, we have a reserve price set because we don’t do backfill. And we also don’t keep the reserve price low because we are very committed to add quality. We do not run want to run toe fungus ads next to a recipe. facility but that’s just kind of where we’ve always been with that. We are very much there’s even a blog post on our blog called

Unknown Speaker 41:59
why us Hundred percent fail sucks.

Unknown Speaker 42:03
I would encourage anybody that thinks you have to have 100% fail to go and read that post. What we’ve found is that if you raise your reserve price, and you just collapse the ad, if someone’s not going to fill it, for what what it’s worth, the impact to your income is pretty insignificant like one to 2%. But your ad quality and your reader engagement shoots through the roof.

Mike Beatty 42:34
So if that reserve price doesn’t get hit, who just means that ad spot just wouldn’t get anything in it?

Unknown Speaker 42:40
Yeah, it was it wouldn’t exist at all. We do have a new thing that we just in the last couple of months we’ve released. They’re called psats. And it started with COVID. So we designed and we actually just added a bunch of creatives from the UN has created a collaboration with artists around the world that have provided their their imagery. And it can be used any number of ways. And so we added a bunch of those. But basically, you can enable those in your dashboard if you want to and so instead of the ad collapsing if it doesn’t feel you’ll get a PSA about COVID that’s like, you know, wear a mask or stay inside or alone together those types of things. And then also in the last couple of weeks, with George Floyd being murdered, we enabled Black Lives Matter. PSS, it’s cool.

Mike Beatty 43:37
So So current affairs

Unknown Speaker 43:40
careers, you know, we’re looking at it now that we decided this is the thing we’re doing we’re looking at lots of ways that we can add things like we’re looking at you know, maybe a child hunger campaign, things like that. No Kid Hungry is a big entities in the US. I can’t remember if they’re in Europe or not. But we’re looking at differently. means that we can offer people ways to support causes that they care about. Instead of collapsing the ad, and we’re covering the cost of running the ad server for those and things like that, but we just kind of felt like it’s a thing. bloggers wanted something that they could do to help with their website. And we, we’ve always kind of been the the people to say, you know, what would we want? And this is something that we would want. And so that’s why we decided to create it. So you have the option of doing that. Or if you don’t, then the ad just collapses, right? But, um, but again, the the audience is important, right? So if, if you’re a blogger that has 90% of your traffic in India, unfortunately, we don’t have enough partners in that country that are going to meet our floor, our reserve price that you wouldn’t make any money you just literally even if the scripts there, you wouldn’t be running any ads.

Mike Beatty 45:04
So I’m guessing it’s mainly us. Maybe it’s UK, Australia,

Unknown Speaker 45:12
New Zealand,

Unknown Speaker 45:14
Canada. Surprisingly, Switzerland is is a decent one to have, but it’s typically the top four. What we’re looking for is like US, UK, New Zealand, Canada, Australia. And if you’ve got like China in there, Japan or something like that, like it’s not a deal breaker, but we have to make sure that the ad partners that we have are actually going to bid on the inventory that you have. And so we’re looking for that we’re looking for brand safe content. We’re looking for nothing that’s like, gone viral and is going to die in a month. So like if you have a million pageviews to your Christmas cookie post in November. And we know that come January, you’re back to having 5000 sessions a month, you know, and so we’re looking for stuff like that, because it’s not just about it’s not just about how much money you’ll make. It’s about having that long term sustainable business. And if you haven’t gotten to a place where you are turning over content during all seasons, then you’re not in a place of sustainability yet. And that can be hard on your buying history with advertisers. And they always buy on history. So one of the things that we’re trying to do is protect your history. Right? It’s better. Like, we’re definitely of the opinion that you should not advertise until you’ve built up a loyal audience or a loyal Google following basically, you know, you’ve got different audiences, right. You’ve got your SEO audience, and your Interest audience in your actual loyal audience that cares what you say. And so we’re we’ve definitely always been of the opinion that you should not put ads on your site until it’s worthwhile to you monetarily. And if you are in a place where you only get traffic, two months of the year, you’re just not going to make a lot of money. So that’s, that’s the kind of stuff that we’re looking for. We’re looking to make sure that this is a long term partnership that’s going to work for both of us. And then we’re not locking you into a contract that makes no sense two months from now.

Mike Beatty 47:38
Yeah, I mean, just from what you’ve kind of been saying through this, it just it just shows like how media vine is not just this elusive company. It’s real people. You know, they’re real bloggers. And they’re like you’re saying, I’ve never in my head, to be totally honest, the whole time. It’s just been our media, Vine, this like ad network that you need to get these matters. sessions and it’s like this big company, you know, is the way to speak spoken about is like, you know, is is tiny and is very personable as well and, you know, really thinking about people.

Unknown Speaker 48:13
The first thousand sites that that were on media vine were launched by myself, Eric and Brad, our Director of ad ops like the three of us did it. I handled the support. Brad handled the launches and Eric handled the tech. Now we’re now we’re in 86 person company five years later,

Unknown Speaker 48:32
which is bananas in and of itself.

Unknown Speaker 48:35
36 of those are support people, like actual support people and then another 25 are engineers. We have half of our engineers working on the ad tech and the other half work on our WordPress solutions. So in addition to create we have a sharing plugin called bro. And then we have our WordPress framework that there are some big announcements coming about Today, later today, there will be a Facebook Live with Eric about our WordPress framework. It’s called trellis you know, you worry a lot about site speed and how to handle it. trellis is the solution to that. Cool. So, yeah, it’s pretty, it’s pretty awesome. These are things like I remember when we first started and Eric was like, No, we can’t ask for anybody’s WordPress logins, I’m not being responsible for that they have to do all of this ourselves. And then we’d be like, Eric, they can’t even get the script on the site, we have to help and they’d be like, okay, you know, and now we’re building products for WordPress, that it just the and I think that’s important to touch on right like, even though we’re building WordPress blog products, the core of our company has become this ad management. And everything is in service of that, that and user experience, right and site speed. So we built Because user experience was suffering from other people’s plugins, and site speed was suffering. And then we built trellis we started on trellis before we had grow, we started, we started building trellis, because we need it we’ve, for a long time, we’ve wanted to move our owned and operated sites to try to WordPress, but we can’t do that, especially with The Hollywood Gossip. Because if we were like we evaluated moving it to Genesis and things like that, and it was just too slow. That site is just too big. And so we had to find a solution that would allow us to do that. And that was the original idea around trellis And just like with create, like a lot of creates features came from the recipe card that Eric built for food fanatic. And it’s kind of one of the things that we figured out the pain points for ourselves. And now it’s like well, we know All these pain points, why would we only build it for ourself? And so we, which is exactly the story of the ad tech, right? And so that’s how all of this stuff has come to be. But every single one of these things is in service of you getting more out of your advertising as well as keeping people on site.

Mike Beatty 51:19
Right. Cool. And it

Unknown Speaker 51:21
just, yeah. It just kind of acts like it’s a whole picture, right? We’re not just an ad company. We’re kind of your whole blogging solution. We want to make the business of blogging better.

Mike Beatty 51:33
Yeah. That makes total sense is a seems like you kind of have to do that. Don’t you guess if you’re providing all these ads it because that is the that is the most annoying thing about putting ads on a website, is the user experience slowing things down? Absolutely. It can just be so frustrating because, you know, you get to the stage where you’re getting an increase in traffic and then all of a sudden you put ads on there to make some money in and you lose all your traffic and yes, like, yeah, I can see it makes total sense. And it’s probably why I hear a media vine so much from different bloggers and things like that so

Unknown Speaker 52:09
well and you want to know some crazy stuff, Mike, we number one, we don’t do any outbound marketing other than going to conferences, and speaking at them. And we don’t offer a referral programme. Because we wanted the opinion out and the opinions of us out in the world, we wanted them to be based in honest experiences and not tied to a revenue stream. And so the thing about a programmatic network is that the bigger it grows, the better money it makes, right? Because programmatic is all about scale. So in terms of like a referral programme, technically, if you’re talking about us and more really quality websites, join media vine, you will make more money in that sense, but we don’t have a refer and there’s even a blog post on our website. Like we’re very specific About our finance bloggers hate it, because they love a referral programme. But we don’t offer one because we did. I personally fought and decided early on, we will not offer one like, we grow fast enough. And there is no reason for us to sort of muddy the waters by paying people to write about us.

Mike Beatty 53:27
Oh, yes. Imagine if you hadn’t done that. The right hours.

Unknown Speaker 53:31
Oh my gosh, say, well, that and we definitely didn’t want to. We definitely didn’t want to become a Bluehost situation. You know, I hate to speak ill of an ecosystem partner, but like Bluehost is not a good host. Yeah, exactly. And so it’s like, it’s one of those things where like, if someone’s talking about us, I want it to be from a place of authenticity and we work our butts off to make sure that The experience they’re having is a positive one. So that if they do talk about us, it’s because they’ve had a positive experience.

Mike Beatty 54:10
Yeah, makes total sense. Right? I’m very aware of kept you for a very long time already. So I just want to get like three quick questions through absolutely, like quick fire or just you answer them however you want out of them quick fire. But, um, one thing that I know, I would be thinking this whole time that’d be listening to this chat is what is the typical RPM, you know, what is the actual typical sort of amount of money that someone could expect to earn if they get to that? 50,000? Yeah, sessions per month.

Unknown Speaker 54:42
So this year’s been a little weird. Not gonna lie. 100%. Even numbers for 2020 are a little skewed. They’re lower than they were last year. But right before we got on, I got some numbers from Brad, who I mentioned our Director of ad Ops, though Average RPM for the last seven days has been $21 and 60 cents. And that’s up from 12 to $13 at the beginning of the month. Now that’s keeping in mind that June is the end of a quarter. It’s still the end of q2. But people are, you know, now that things are coming back a little bit in terms of the the economy, across the globe, people are spending a little bit more money, which is why you’ve seen that giant jump of almost $10. But typically in June, a site with 50,000 sessions would see about $850 Wow.

Mike Beatty 55:39
That’s awesome. And you sort of said it’s the end of q2 and I’ve heard this from some other people as well. I’ve heard you particularly like December, I’ve heard the ad. Income like RPM tends to jump up lows because certain companies have like an ad spend that they can spend and so they just spend it sort of thing is that

Unknown Speaker 55:58
yeah, it is true. So I’ll give you a quick overview view. But there’s also a blog post on our site called ad revenue by the seasons, written by Brad, that gives you some good data of how this works and stuff like that. But basically advertisers work and then think of it in terms of how magazines work, right? magazines, decide their budgets ahead of time or their content budgets ahead of time. And they

Unknown Speaker 56:25
they are very

Unknown Speaker 56:28
conservative at the start of the year in terms of the content that they’re putting out. But then, towards the end of the year, it’s balls to the wall, and they have every kind of thing you can imagine this, it’s the same with money, right? So they decide they know that people are not spending money in q1, right, because they’ve just had a giant Christmas or Hanukkah and spent all the money and now they need to tighten their belts, right. They’re also not going out to eat because they’ve made new year’s resolutions, all these things right. And so it doesn’t make sense for an advertiser to dump a bunch money into the market at that time, because people aren’t spending money. And so as you go through month by month, people start to loosen a little bit, you see a holiday, like you’ll see Valentine’s Day, there’s a little pop of money around that time, then you’ll see Easter, there’s a little pop of money around that time. And advertising budgets are decided by quarter. And then by Well, they’re decided by year and then by quarter, right? So they start out very conservative in q1 because of all those things I mentioned. And then as we go through, they are loosening a little bit each quarter. But the thing is that even when you get into q2, April, people are still not spending money. Whereas in June, because people are starting to go out. It’s summertime all of these things in a normal time. They they’re dumping more money because of that, but they’re also dumping more money. Because typically the rule is if you don’t spend the money in the quarter it’s assigned to you don’t get to roll it over. Yeah, so, so June, typically has way more spend than April. But then what will happen next this week, which we always love this. So we’re now going to be in q3, which people tend to associate with money money, not as much as q4. But the thing about q3 is its people always forget this. It starts in July. And in the United States where most of the advertising like exchanges are, there’s a holiday right at the beginning of the month. So that means people aren’t working, meaning like the advertising people aren’t working so they aren’t pushing out that ads so they aren’t spending money. So it’s almost like there’s this delayed start to q3, because as soon as July one hits, all the spending goes away, and it doesn’t come back until after the holiday. And so for like the first five to 10 days of July, everyone wants to kill themselves, but they’re they’re just like this is awful What happened? You know, and some people it really stinks because they’ll have like a really big pop of traffic because I had a great job. They’ve got a great July 4 recipe or something like that. Or like you guys might see more spending because I heard that the pubs are opening on July 4, you’re getting our own and yeah, that’s that’s exactly it. Yeah. You think I don’t live with two British people. And so it’s like this, this whole thing. depending on what’s literally happening in in your world and your sphere, you’ll see advertising money change. Yeah, right. And so yeah, so that that’s what happens to like at the like in the US. And now that like Black Friday is a concept that has sort of continued into other places on the globe. In the US, the q4. The reason that it makes some money so much money is the lead up to Black Friday, and then the lead up to Christmas. What’s interesting is that you’ll actually make more money together. Typically in November in the lead up to Black Friday, then you will in Christmas because people stop buying Christmas presents around the 20th. And so advertisers pull back because there’s no reason for them to be pushing

Mike Beatty 1:00:14
anything go the January sales where they try and get some stuff out. But yeah, fail miserably.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:20
Yes.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:22
So that’s kind of how the cyclical like advertising money works. And so yeah, you you absolutely we even put warnings in our Facebook group like Joey one is coming, or is coming, I need you to understand like, please don’t do that. Don’t write in and be mad at your support person. Like there’s nothing they can do. This is literally the advertisers and how they’re spending.

Mike Beatty 1:00:43
Yeah, that makes total sense. Right. And then last quick two is one from again, these are both actually from people that I just reached out to our Facebook groups and things. Richmond said, what are the requirements for like existing partnerships, so it’s They already had a partnership from like the 25,000 sessions. And now with the change is Yeah, because I think before was it like 15,000 sessions if you already have one or something like that was a bit of a grey area.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:13
This is where the game of telephone gets us. So we had an unofficial policy wasn’t written into the contract wasn’t written and help docs of if a second, if a person hadn’t successful first site, we would allow them to, to apply a second site of 10,000 sessions. Now that didn’t guarantee it would get in at all. It still had to meet all the other metrics, but people sort of took it as a given that it would and so one of the things with COVID is we saw people you know, I talked about people spinning up sites that had you know, been around for two months and had more than enough traffic. They were spinning up sites. Like, instead of having two sites, they were spending up five and applying them, right. And a lot of those were getting rejected, which was adding to the volume of applications. And so we’ve decided like basically a second site, we have to do away with this, this smoke and mirrors second policy. And they and it’s in the blog post that Steve wrote.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:28
Or I can’t remember receiver Eric, but

Unknown Speaker 1:02:32
it’s now 50,000 for a second site as well. But if you are a blogger that is in an industry that has been hit hard by COVID, so for example, a travel blogger, you can and this was what it always was, is basically you were supposed to write in and ask for us to consider your site before the session requirement. And so we’re especially taking that into account for industries that have been hidden By COVID, because like, obviously travel bloggers have been hit really hard, whereas food bloggers have seen an increase in traffic. So like when we’re evaluating a second site that’s below the 50,000 threshold, if it’s a food blogger, we might be a little bit more critical of the fact that it’s not at that 50,000 session, then we would have travel blogger, it’s not guaranteed, but it is something we are taking into account simply because we understand that there’s context.

Mike Beatty 1:03:28
Yeah. And the traffic probably is going to come back like if it’s been there before.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:33
Yeah,

Mike Beatty 1:03:34
hopefully. Yeah, inshallah, as they say, in Cata. And then the last one, then is just there was I think, in that blog post, I’m guessing the one that you just require, mentioned, there was a mention of like, for new scalable ad solutions for smaller publishers and things and something coming potentially in 2021 can share a little bit more about that. You don’t I have to go into too much detail because obviously so

Unknown Speaker 1:04:02
I won’t.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:05
I don’t Well, I’m not allowed to share a whole lot. So there’s that. But we do have some plans to try and create a solution. Like, again, I’ve said a few times, right that we don’t think you should put ads on your website before a certain point because it really doesn’t make sense monetarily. But there’s an entire sub group of folks that don’t agree with that and want to put ads on their site from day one. And I guess our our thought is, well, if they’re going to do that, maybe what we should do is provide a product that allows them to get the best possible history so that when they are at a 50,000 session level, they’re not starting out with a handicap because that sticks with you. Or like people will put AdSense on and then accidentally do something wrong like their mom clicks all their ads or something and they get banned by AdSense. That means we can’t work with them. Right? So providing a solution, a scalable solution that you can just kind of opt into, and it doesn’t need a lot of heavy lifting from support or anything like that is really kind of what we’re looking at. We’re trying to come up with ways that we can do that, that would allow someone to put ads on their site media vine ads on their site, but not not necessarily be opting into the full product that media vine ad management is today.

Mike Beatty 1:05:32
Yeah, that makes total sense as well. But yeah, no, honestly, I could keep on going and asking you loads of little questions, but I am going to leave you. Okay. Thank you so much besides that, um, but is there any way for people to kind of get in contact or is there what’s the best place for people to kind of reach out and check out more info?

Unknown Speaker 1:05:53
Yeah, so there’s tonnes of information on media vine.com our blog, we update it like eight times a week. not even joking. With different stuff about the industry we write about SEO topics we write about new things that Google’s pushing out, we write about add stuff like that blog is pretty prolific if I do say so myself, the team that I had up, runs the blog. And so we, we work our little tails off to put as much information out there as we can. And then actually, our help files are open to the public. So you can look at help at media vine.com. And learn more about us in that like what it would be like to get started, there’s an entire section there have joining media vine. And then there is on our blog, there’s something called the RPM challenge. A lot of people want to know like, what they can do to their content to make sure that it’s well formatted for media vine before they’ve even applied, and like how they should be writing their content from the jump in terms of like formatting and things like that. That the RPM challenge you can use it even if you’re not a media vine publisher, there’s like a downloadable PDF. There’s a Google analytics dashboard that you can instal and get emailed to yourself every day or you can actually still have that for food fanatic. And it helps you to sort of know what content you should be paying attention to, to optimise little tweaks that you can make that mean when you do launch with media vine, you’re already optimised and you will basically be giving yourself the best foot forward. And then if you have any questions that you can’t find an answer to on our blog or on the help files, you can email publishers within ask publishers at media vine calm.

Mike Beatty 1:07:48
Awesome. Thanks so much Amber. I’ll put links to all of that in the show notes as well if people want to grab them, but no, I really appreciate your time. It’s been so

Unknown Speaker 1:07:56
cool to chat via YouTube Mike, thank you so much.

Mike Beatty 1:08:03
So there you go. Amber’s is just so down to earth and so normal and just so helpful with everything that she did there, she gives so much actual useful value. It’s not just all about ad network and making money, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, here are the main takeaways that I took from the podcast, which hopefully can help you as well. So number one, is that the reason that the change actually happened from 25,000 to 50,000 monthly Sessions is just mainly because media vine wants to be able to still give that support. Obviously, Amber was totally upfront and said COVID has had a massive impact on what has happened recently. You know, with the numbers and the amount of like RPM so what people are actually making per thousand monthly impressions has been impacted. And so just to allow media vine to still be able to provide the support and things required for the clients and the memberships and partnerships that they do currently have, they needed to make this change because it can just means that there’s less people applying, because they’re still having thousands of people apply every single month. And so they can actually then give real support to people that can have that. And as he kind of went on numerous times throughout the podcast, they believe that you really should only put, you know, ads and things on your website once you hit a certain threshold. So 2550 sounds like a lot if you’re brand new blogger, but it is definitely achievable if you stick with it. Number two, is she talked so much about site speed, and the fact that media vine really works on trying to help keep your site speed up. So lots of people associate putting ads on their website as really having this negative impact or to their site speed. Now I’m going to be totally honest, I haven’t used media vine yet. One of the My Health website is actually in the process, or if one of those applicants that she was talking about from when it was 25,000 monthly sessions, so I will see if it gets up accepted, I don’t really know. But I mean, this kind of links on to number three as well, which is the fact that the actual, your audience is super important for to to become a partner with media, Vine, lifestyle blogs, such as food, travel, finance, parenting, cars, gaming, health and fitness, I guess, all those kinds of websites are going to be better suited typically, for the audience that they’re after, you know, typically she said, lifestyle blogs are going to have attract women that are typically affluent in 20 to 45 age bracket, and they’re in control of the spending decisions of the house and things like that. And she said there are you know, certainly countries as well, that just won’t. If you’re getting most of your traffic from certain countries, they’re not going to be able at that ad networks and things are not going to be able to make enough revenue from advertising from those countries. So the main ones are UK, US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the big five, basically. And then she said, also Switzerland as well. And there are other countries that can that can do well, but those are the main things to be aware of. And it needs to be like brand safe and long term, not just sort of get a load of traffic in December and then never any traffic for the rest of the year. So those are some of the things to be aware of. Number four is where media vine places the ads to the to in the sidebar as the addition at the bottom, so like a little sticky one at the bottom. And then there’s the in content ads as well. And those ones are like dynamically placed so it’s not like you have X amount of ads per article is more depends on how long the article is. So she talks a lot about this 7030 split, so 70% content for 30% ads, and they found using data and stats and analysing it, that seems to be what that’s the ratio that he kind of has to be to perform the best best basically, and without breaking up user experience too bad number. I think I just said number four. Number five, is if you do get 50,000 sessions, you can expect to earn somewhere around $850 per month. So that gives you a good ballpark figure to kind of go off. As you said, recently, there are new figures that have just come out it was $21 60 RPM, so that’s the revenue per thousand impressions. And it has gone up from because of COVID and things like that. It has been a lot lowest it was sort of saying that around 30 dollar range. So it’s been a big jump at the end of this quarter. But it’s back in line with more what they were kind of at. So I do hope that was super helpful. If you do want to get the show notes, head over to make time online.com forward slash 60 to make time online.com forward slash six, two, and you can get the shownotes with all the links that amber mentioned towards the end of that podcast as well. Thanks for listening in to this episode of Make time online. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. And please take a moment to write a review for our podcast in the App Store. keep changing for the better guys. Take care

Mediavine podcast summary

Amber is super down to earth and so helpful. She just shows how personable and support focused Mediavine really are. 

Here are my top takeaways from the chat:

  1. The change in 25,000 to 50,000 sessions has happened due to COVID and the changes in the economy. It allows the team to still focus on support to their existing members
  2. Mediavine focuses on helping site speed with features like ad Lazy Load
  3. Lifestyle blogs are still the best suited content attract the best audience for ads
  4. Currently a $21.60 RPM at the end of June 2020 (50k sessions = around $850 per month)

What were your main takeaways? Got any questions? Leave a comment below?


About the Author

Mike Beatty has built a passive income online whilst working as a full-time PE teacher without any marketing or technical experience. Learn more about how he's done it here.

Mike Beatty

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