Mediavine’s New Ad Program Requirements: MV Journey

Heyyyyy, y'all! We've been waiting for this announcement from Mediavine for what seems like FOREVER. Here's what we know so far (March 2024). Mediavine has launched a new ad program, but it may not as straight forward as you'd expect. They do have a low threshold of 10,000 sessions, but there are some hoops to jump through. Let's talk about them.

This will be updated as I learn more. Get on my list to be the first to know what's up.

What are Mediavine's new pageview requirements?

They finally announced their new requirements, though they're fairly vague, it seems they're ready to compete with Ezoic and Monumetric with a low traffic threshold:

Journey by Mediavine is the ad management solution for websites with traffic starting at around 10,000 sessions per month and the publishers behind them. Paving your way to a successful business through digital advertising just got easier. Simply install Grow by Mediavine and run it for a minimum of 30 days. (The sooner you get started, the better.) We’ll measure your traffic and reach out when you’re ready to run ads. 

Mediavine is lowering the requirement for applying to get ads – but only for those who run Grow for at least 30 days. Seems that this is to combat the third-party cookie issues looming above us.

I signed up for Grow a few years ago, but never really used it. I've heard from other bloggers that Grow has helped, well, grow, their email list, so I am going to try it out for 30 days and report back to you guys.

But my thoughts are this: I don't think it will hurt to use Grow and see what happens, but I also don't think it's worth it to have ads on your blog at 10K sessions.

Let's talk about why.

Should you add Mediavine ads to your blog at 10K sessions?

I don't put ads on my blog until it's worth it for me. You have to decide what “worth it” means to you. For me, I'd have to be making a minimum of $1,000/month from ads set on minimal settings (no sticky, over-image, or video ads) before I'd put them on my blog.

When I owned Slap Dash Mom, I made anywhere from $5K-$10K a month with ads, and it was worth it to me. But now I run my business a bit differently and rely on my own products instead of ad revenue, and I make double that with 10% of the pageviews. Imagine how much I would've made had I handled SDM like I handle my current blogs. Whew!

Let's use Nina's ad revenue calculator, and set it at $25 RPM with 15,000 pageviews. The total per month would be right under $120.

At $45 RPM, it is still under $300 per month.

Put ads on your blog (making a slightly less amazing user experience) and make $100-$300 passively per month?

Or make your own “ads” that advertise your best affiliate posts and your own digital products, and make a lot more?

For example, I averaged 15K pageviews a month and was making thousands in affiliate revenue from two affiliates.

I am big on diversifying blog traffic sources as well as income. Affiliate marketing is one of my main sources of income.

Why is Mediavine pushing Grow?

Many believe Mediavine is pushing Grow because of the changes to third-party cookie regulations. Makes sense to me.

Mediavine says:

Grow lets independent content creators collect first-party data by encouraging users to log in.

Many people just want to read our blogs. They don't want to have to sign into things. So, using Grow, you have to give them a reason to sign up and log in. That's more work on your end, but also more work on their end. Will more people agree to sign up after it becomes more of a “norm?” I hope so.

Is Grow a good platform to use? The jury is still out. I don't hate it but I also am only trying it to collect data and report back.

Mediavine also says:

Individually, no single publisher can generate the volume of authenticated traffic and the scale of first-party data that advertisers need to replace third-party cookies.

We’re talking about tens of millions of registered readers. Not even the top sites on the internet with the biggest subscriber bases have that.

But combined? Mediavine publishers are bigger than the top sites on the internet. 

Trying to grow your newsletter on your own is fine, but even a successful website is probably sending out emails to tens of thousands of subscribers. We need tens of millions.

Tens of millions means at least 5-10% of traffic from Mediavine sites logging in. Grow readers are shared between our sites, and we need to bring in a lot more of them — together.

It takes all of us, and the sooner we start this collective mission, the closer we’ll be to the goal when third-party cookies are officially a thing of the past.

Grow was created for self-preservation on Mediavine's part, but seemingly, also to protect us as publishers when third-party cookies go to shit.

Mediavine's Grow allows your blog visitors to create their own Grow account, so they can easily bookmark and share your articles. When they sign up, they're also able to agree to being shown personalized ads. This is a good thing.

If you plan on utilizing ads as part of your blog monetization strategy, try Grow out for 30 days and let me know what happens.

How to Sign up For Mediavine Grow

It's easy to create a Grow account:

Follow the step by step instructions on the Mediavine Journey site to get started.

Put in your website address and name, then click “Submit site.” Agree to the terms and conditions on the next page (you have to scroll down and click a checkbox).

Then, install Grow on your site. I chose the WordPress plugin option, though you can use a script if you prefer.

This is what the plugin looks like in your WordPress dashboard.

Click on “Connect or Create an Account” and walk through the prompts.

Once you have everything connected, you're in the “review” phase.

I enabled Grow Labs, Google Analytics, and co-branding. If you do this, you'll need to add your logo.

There are many other settings you can walk through, but those are the basic ones I set up.

If you have ConvertKit, MailerLite, or Mailchimp, you can integrate those accounts with Grow. I use a white-label of GHL, and am very happy with their email service, so I won't be using the integrations.

Next, you'll wanna log in and update your subscribe form settings.

Update the header title, body, and if you want to change the wording from “subscribe” to something else, this is where you'll update that.

Another feature of the Mediavine Grow platform is that you can require a login to access certain content. I don't know that I really like this myself, and I have never signed up to get blog content. I will sign up for an email list, but I don't even like that Medium and various newspapers have paywalls. So while this isn't a paywall, it requires sign-in.

Are your readers going to be willing to do that? Only time will tell. Maybe it'll become the industry standard, who knows.

Mediavine's says their pop-ups are Google compliant, but you'll have to decide if you want your users to have to deal with pop-ups or not. All of these are very personal decisions for your business.

Don't feel pressured to put ads on your blog just because others are talking about it. It may or may not be the best path for you.

Remember, I make a LOT more with my affiliate posts (like this AI writer review that made $250+ yesterday with only 214 visitors) and low ticket memberships than I've ever made with ads, even when I had 300,000+ pageviews a month.

After you've applied to maybe get ads on your blog, you should get this email:

How to Get To Mediavine Fast

I know this question is going to be asked a lot so I want to answer it real fast before I close out this post. If your goal is to get ads on your blog via Mediavine as fast as you possibly can, you've gotta publish more blog posts. Need ideas? Read 10 easy ways to find blog content ideas.

Write and publish a blog post 2-3 times a week, consistently. The time it takes to hit 10K sessions will vary based on niche, the path you take, and the network you have lifting you up.

In my VIP coaching program, there are 200+ of us and we share each other's stuff (like the freebie library to grow everyone's list), give each other organic backlinks, and even email shout outs. When you have a network who lifts you up, you achieve your goals much faster. Find your people so you can grow fast.

Your Next Steps

If you're going to sign up, now's the time. Be patient. Unless Mediavine has doubled their staff, they're going to have a helluvatime keeping up with the influx of new potential customers. 😉

Set up your email opt-in on your blog using Grow, and see what happens next!

A word of caution: I would not use Grow to completely REPLACE your email marketing efforts. It's more about allowing personalized ads. Do some A/B split testing: put Grow in some posts, and your own email opt-ins with freebies in other posts, and see which convert best. In my experience, my email opt-ins outperformed Grow tremendously. However, my experience IS limited so I don't want to say which way is better or worse. I think it depends on your readers.

Remember: this is not “getting ads on your blog at 10K” like Ezoic and Monumetric (ehem, I don't recommend Ezoic, just FYI). It is simply the first step in a “maybe” you can get ads. So don't put too much faith into this process until we see that they're actually approving people after the 30 days. In other words, keep working the PIPs path, and count on what you know will pay the bills.

Once you try it out, leave a comment and let me know what you learned! Did your email list grow? Did Mediavine accept you for ads? Are you willing to put ads on your blog for a few hundred bucks a month? Share it all, I wanna know!!

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