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For many bloggers, getting accepted to Mediavine’s advertising placement service is the holy grail. That makes sense because the Mediavine requirements aren’t the easiest to meet.
Most people get started with Adsense because it’s near-automatic approval with few exceptions. But if you want to make any real money, you need to partner with a better ad management service.
Mediavine is generally considered one of the best ad networks amongst most bloggers. But how do you get accepted?
In this post, we’ll explore Mediavine requirements, and share the experiences of real bloggers that have gone through the application process and been approved to be partners.
What is Mediavine?
Mediavine is an ad representation and placement service that connects advertisers with bloggers to help content creators make money on their blogs by displaying ads on their websites.
The company works with thousands of websites and helps to place high-quality ads in optimized places across your blog posts and landing pages.
Advertisers are already looking for quality websites to display their ads, but often don’t have the time or resources to seek out content creators to work with.
Ad placement services act as the middleman and in exchange get a cut of the ad revenue that websites generate.
But don’t misunderstand as I certainly have in the past. Mediavine is NOT an ad network and they actually get pretty upset when referred to as one.
Instead of just placing random ads on your website the way a network like Google Adsense does, Mediavine helps you strategically determine where ads are placed on your site.
They also work directly with advertisers on your behalf while helping to control the prices advertisers pay out to content creators.
How Do Bloggers Get Accepted Into Mediavine?
According to their blog, the Mediavine requirements include a minimum of 50,000 sessions per month, and the company uses Google Analytics to determine if you’ve met this metric. Mediavine estimates this is about 60,000 page views per month.
What is a session? According to Google itself, “A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and eCommerce transactions.”
Wait! 50,000 sessions? I’ve seen blogs that say I only needed 25,000!?
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news… But pre-pandemic, yes. Mediavine requirements were half the amount they are now. The monthly sessions required were just 25,000 for many years.
If you’ve seen blog posts with the old metric, they are outdated, and relying on those outdated posts will only lead to disappointment when you’re denied acceptance.
If you’re not there yet and are looking for another great ad network to get started with, Ezoic is our best recommendation as outlined in this article on best ad networks.
You might be wondering – why the sudden change?
In June 2020, Mediavine explained that the driving force behind their session increase was to ensure they are maintaining their standards for high quality.
They only want to partner with top-tier blogs to keep their advertisers happy. And because they are an independent company that doesn’t rely on any backers, they make their own rules.
How Much Does Mediavine Pay?
This is where things get tricky, unfortunately.
As Mediavine explains, “No two sites have the exact same audience. Nor do they have the exact same site setup.”
That is why there’s no definitive number you can guarantee you will earn. In fact, if you were to compare your Mediavine dashboard to another blogger’s (even in your niche), the numbers and rev share might look very different.
Mediavine ads also pay varying amounts throughout the year. Why? It’s part supply and demand, part monthly negotiated deals with advertisers, and a bunch of other corporate minutiae that we can’t even comprehend since we don’t work directly with Mediavine.
The bottom line? Your rates may vary drastically, but one thing remains key: the more page views you get, the more money you will make.
According to Fat Stacks Blog, you can expect around $30 per 1,000 visitors, but they also shared that across the eight websites they run, their RPM ranges from $11 to $43.
Then again, Fat Stacks said they have seen RPMs as high as $70 or more.
Imperfect Idealist shared that in their first month working with Mediavine, they earned “$1,043.24 with 47,964 sessions for an RPM of $21.75.”
Niche Informer posted an income report that showed they earned $866.49 in the first three weeks of April 2020 with 64,255 Sessions and $13.49 RPM.
Finally, Fork in the Road shared that they earned $2,162.29 for 65,748 sessions and $32.89 RPM in a single month.
How much you will get depends on:
- your website
- your niche
- your visitors
- the advertisers
How Much of a Cut Does Mediavine Take?
This is an understandable question considering you as the blogger are the content creator. However, it’s important to remember that without Mediavine, you would have to be chasing all the advertisers yourself.
For Mediavine, they explained their “revenue share is a base of 75% to you, the publisher, and 25% to Mediavine, on ads where we have the expense of the ad server.”
More simply put, “You receive 75% of gross proceeds paid by advertisers and networks as reported by our ad server, while Mediavine receives 25%.”
They don’t charge fees for things like administration, hosting, sales commission, etc…
And, if your ad impressions meet certain metrics, your revenue share increases. They said, “If your site produces 5 million ad impressions over the previous 30 days, your revenue share increases to 80%.”
We recommend you read Mediavine’s Revenue Share help article to learn more about the breakdown.
Mediavine Requirements: Bloggers’ Experience With Applying to Get Accepted
In my opinion, there isn’t enough personal opinion on the internet when it comes to comparing services. One thing I haven’t really seen other content creators doing is sharing experiences about the Mediavine requirements and application process.
With that in mind, we reached out to real bloggers to get their take on what it was like applying to get accepted, and how the process went.
Oberon’s Experience
Oberon Copeland runs the website Very Informed, which aims to help readers become informed about products, services, and more.
For him, he says the process of applying for Mediavine was extremely straightforward. Thankfully, he already met the traffic threshold for the Mediavine requirements. All he had to do was export the last 30 days of traffic from Google Analytics and fill out the application.
He said, “For my most recent site, it took me just over 2 weeks from applying to getting approved. In the past, it has been just under 2 weeks, but I would say 2 weeks is a good time to work from.”
His best advice for bloggers trying to meet the new page views threshold of 50,000 sessions is to publish more content.
He said, “It seems so simple and obvious, but more content on your website simply attracts more views.”
I agree wholeheartedly there, but make sure you’re using SEO tools for each one of your articles to improve your chances of ranking and increase your reach.
In terms of what he wished he’d known before applying is that in 2022 and onward, you need to have “Google Analytics 4 tracking your visitors.”
Naomi’s Experience
Naomi Robinson is the founder of Houseplant Authority, and her website was accepted in June 2022.
She said, “From submitting my application to Mediavine until their acceptance was only one week.
However, it’s worth mentioning that this is my second site with Mediavine, which may make the vetting process quicker than those submitting their first site.
It also meant that I’m very familiar with what Mediavine is looking for in sites within their ad network and so I ensured my site ticked all of those boxes before submitting the application.
This includes the points that Mediavine includes in their post here such as short paragraphs and ensuring images are added throughout each article, which I agree with in my post on blog post writing tips.
My site was launched last November (2021) so it took seven months to reach Mediavine’s traffic requirements.”
Naomi explained that the Mediavine requirements are based on sessions, not page views. If you hope to meet the threshold, she says your best bet is to focus on keyword research from the start.
Think about your end-user, and write content that they are actually looking for.
Naomi’s focus when writing her content is on the user intent, and it has been from day one. It’s what helped her meet the requirements so quickly as well.
She also said that if you want to monetize your blog, laser focus on all the things that will move your traffic needle should be your top priority.
She wisely said, “For example, posting on Instagram is fun and all, but if it doesn’t move the needle for how many people actually click through to your site, I’d argue that it may not be worth it.
Instead, do those things that will get your site traffic actually moving. Once you hit that Mediavine threshold, you’ll start to see just how worthwhile all that hard work was once the money starts flowing.”
I couldn’t agree more and have long since been a fan of traffic sources like SEO and Pinterest that tend to translate into more page views than other, more social platforms.
Lauren’s Experience
Lauren Schmitz runs the website The Simple Homeschooler, and was originally with Monumetric before jumping ship in favor of Mediavine in September 2020.
She said that she has been so happy since making the switch because it instantly multiplied her income.
Here’s more of what she had to say about the entire process:
“The Mediavine application process was very simple and user-friendly. I was nervous to apply, but the Mediavine staff assured me there was no harm in applying. I could also reapply as many times as I wanted or needed to.
For the application itself, all I had to do was fill out a simple form with information about my website. It can easily be found on Mediavine’s website.
I was approved in 1-2 weeks, so that was a huge relief. I have heard it can be a month or longer to wait, but that was not my experience.
Mediavine does not have a pageview threshold, it is sessions, which are much harder to reach.
My advice is to invest your time in learning high-quality SEO, go after low-completion keywords, and write as many posts per week as you can.
All of the social media platforms are like playing a slot machine for bloggers. It might pay off big…but it very well might not.
SEO is like getting a 9-5 job. It’s not as exciting, but it pays the bills and is steady. Over time you will see increases in traffic that you can depend on for years.
Getting into Mediavine was one of my goals from my first year of blogging. The only thing I can say is that all the rumors are true. It really is as great as everyone says it is.
Put in the work now. Stay up late to work, get up early to work, and feed your kids Mac and Cheese so you can work. The investment will pay off.”
Michael’s Experience
Michael Rozenblit is the co-founder of The World Was Here First – a travel site that specializes in getting off the beaten path in Europe and around the world, supporting local economies, and promoting responsible tourism.
He has been using Mediavine as his ad management service since the end of 2018 – long before they updated their sessions requirement.
He said they started their website in early 2017, and it took all of those nearly two years to reach 25,000 sessions.
They decided to go with Mediavine for ad placement because of its great reputation amongst other travel content creators, and because at the time it had lower traffic requirements compared to its competitors.
The key for traffic to get accepted into Mediavine for Michael was to write a lot more posts with SEO in mind. This also helped the blog to reach the targeted readers in the US and the UK – a critical target audience if you hope to be accepted by Mediavine.
Michael said that when they applied, it was easy to fill out the questionnaire, and then it took roughly two weeks to be accepted.
He also said, “Once we were approved, there were some technical changes that we had to implement on our website to ensure ads displayed correctly before anything launched. They did also offer to make the changes for us if we didn’t know how to do it.”
After being accepted, it took about another week for ads to be live on the website so they could start making money.
His best advice for meeting the new Mediavine requirements is to focus on SEO because it will be what brings in consistent traffic.
Then again, he says it may also be worth it to use social media and email marketing for those quick wins to drive up your traffic numbers quickly.
Karolina’s Experience
Karolina Bartnik runs the website www.simplytogether.co with her husband. It features dating and relationship advice for women.
Here’s what Karolina had to say about her experience with Mediavine so far:
“We used to monetize our website with Adsense and then Ezoic before. It took us over two years to finally meet the requirements for Mediavine.
As soon as we started getting our first significant ad revenue ($200-300) a month, we knew we could be making so much more with a better-paying ad network. So Mediavine was our end goal.
It took us a long time to get there. But we were complete newbies with no prior business or blogging experience.
Initially, we tried Pinterest as our main traffic source. But after their big algorithm update in 2020, our numbers suddenly dropped from 15k sessions a month to 3k.
It was then that we decided to start focusing on SEO. We had a lot to learn and it took us quite some time to get results.
In October 2020 we were finally getting there, steadily growing with a whooping 48k sessions/month only to get hit again with a Google algorithm update.
Our Google traffic plateaued after this and to make matters worse, our Pinterest account got suspended.
But we eventually recovered and started growing again. In May 2021 we finally hit 50k sessions a month and applied on the next day.
We got accepted in about two weeks. The whole onboarding process was very quick too. We sent our application on March 05, 2021, and started earning money around May 05, 2021.
What I wished to have known sooner was to not put all my eggs in one basket when it came to traffic.
Depending on an algorithm [update] can be very disheartening. Sometimes all the good results of your hard work get taken away for no reason.
Having multiple traffic sources and revenue streams can help offset the damage and keep peace of mind.”
Karolina’s best advice to new bloggers trying to meet the Mediavine requirements is “Never stop learning new things that can improve your chances and get you results quicker.
I feel like people have the tendency to get stuck doing the same things over and over again, even when they’re not working. It’s certainly something I struggle with.
This is why it’s important to be ready to try out new things and experiment with different traffic sources.”
Alexander’s Experience
Alexander Stoicoff runs the website Suits Expert and has been with Mediavine for several years. He says so far, he’s had a great experience with them.
He first learned about them on a forum. Back when he applied, they only required 25,000 unique sessions monthly.
For Alexander, he was accepted immediately, though it took about a month to set up the ads. He had been blogging for more than two years prior to applying.
He says they were very friendly, and still are especially when it comes to guiding creators through the optimization process.
For example, acceptance included sidebar optimization, a few CSS changes, and instructing users on how to write shorter sentences (which benefit both SEO and RPM).
Since then, Alexander has explored most of their ad optimization settings and attributes his growth to joining the platform.
The biggest thing he wished he had known before applying is that shorter paragraphs help your RPM. This is a pretty drastic thing for him because when the paragraphs are shorter, “Mediavine can integrate more ads.”
He went on to say, “It’s a matter of percentage/ad ratio that most people neglect.”
He also encourages bloggers to “focus more on informational/informative content and content that genuinely helps readers rather than commercial content with an intent to sell something”
Finally, he said to not forget about images. These are critical to your blog’s success.
“Readers stay engaged with the content and tend to stick longer to your post – Thus, they’re more likely to focus on an ad.”
Alexander’s current session RPM is between $40-$45, so he must be doing something right!
Adriana’s Experience
Adriana Dikih runs the food blog Willamette Transplant and was accepted just before Mediavine doubled their sessions requirement. Here’s what she had to say about her experience:
“I internally vetted the 3 major ad networks prior to monetizing: Ezoic, Mediavine, and Adthrive.
For my circumstances, Mediavine was the best fit by far! I didn’t have high enough traffic metrics at the time to apply for Adthrive, which some believe has higher RPMs.
Ezoic was notorious for slowing sites down/creating speed issues. Mediavine is the sweet spot for beginner bloggers– and they are working hard to improve their products.
More and more [of the] top bloggers are switching from Adthrive to Mediavine in recent months and earning more.
Furthermore, Mediavine publishes heaps of content, blogs, emails, Facebook lives, etc FOR publishers about the industry of blogging, optimizing ads, SEO, and running your own site.
They have created their own WordPress Theme optimized for site speed as well as a social sharing plugin.
Upon hitting the traffic requirement, I easily applied online.
It was a quick application with easy questions. I then shared a ‘view’ level access of my Google Analytics data with the MV team– they use this to review traffic sources, channels, countries, etc– basically they are manually reviewing the quality of your traffic. That’s it! Within 30 days I was accepted and a week later ads were up and running on my site. Piece of cake.
My blog was live for 9 months prior to meeting the Mediavine requirements!”
I also agree with Adriana’s sentiments here as we also made the switch from AdThrive to Mediavine with one of our other niche blogs and our income immediately increased after the switch.
Important Things to Keep in Mind Regarding Mediavine Requirements
To summarize, I wanted to share some important items of note that you need to be aware of if you plan to apply for Mediavine.
1. Not everyone is accepted into Mediavine even if you meet the Mediavine requirements for traffic.
Adriana shared with us that although it wasn’t an issue for her, she has blogger friends that met the traffic minimum but weren’t accepted.
The reason? She said, “A strong US/Canda/UK traffic base is an unspoken benchmark. Advertisers are after showcasing ads on sites with traffic based in those countries on the MV platform.”
2. Once accepted, your initial contract is 90 days.
After the 90-day initial period ends, your contract gets extended for another 30 days automatically up to or until either side asks to terminate the agreement.
The reason they require 90 days is to fully optimize your website with Mediavine ads. Though it’s rare, you or Mediavine might decide to terminate the agreement after that initial 90 days.
Basically, if you want to stick with the company, just make sure you’re not doing anything that could hurt your relationship – i.e. suddenly changing your niche to something that is not advertiser-friendly like adding gambling, illegal, or adult content.
3. You have to grant Mediavine exclusive access to the display ads for desktop and mobile advertising.
The reason for this, according to Mediavine, is they want to get you the most ad money possible, and if you allow other ads, it could sway how much advertisers are willing to pay to display ads on your website.
They do a much better job of explaining their exclusivity requirement here.
Don’t worry though. This doesn’t mean you can’t still share sponsored posts and affiliate links. You just have to grant them exclusivity for display ads.
4. The Mediavine Requirements could change again.
This might seem obvious, but it’s important to keep in mind that at any given time Mediavine could drop another requirement change that increases their traffic requirements, limits niches, or any other change they choose to make.
That’s why you should never have all your revenue eggs in one proverbial basket.
If you are serious about making money in blogging, ads should only be one aspect of your monetization strategy.
To learn more about Mediavine and to apply for their ad placement service, click here.
Getting More Traffic to Meet Mediavine Requirements
I don’t want to repeat myself too much here or repeat what has already been said by my fellow bloggers.
But I do want to reiterate what you can do if you’re still in the waiting phase to meet the Mediavine requirements. Because let’s be honest, it’s a sucky place to be, right?
Obviously, you need more traffic.
As already mentioned, social traffic is often fickle and unreliable in the long term. You need steady and consistent traffic to win this race.
We’ve been around this block a few times because we started out with Pinterest traffic and have seen quite a few ups and downs over the years.
We have a few niche sites and with all of them, we’ve found that Google SEO is by far and above your best bet for consistent, more sustainable traffic that will hang around for the longest.
Sure, Google has its algorithm updates too and no one is technically safe, although you’re MUCH safer with the right strategies.
Check out our article on our favorite SEO tools to learn more. You can also check out our article on the best ad networks if you’re looking for an alternative to Mediavine while you wait!