Monetizing online content can be quite a tricky landmine to traverse. Either, you’d optimize the ads on your site to benefit the user experience, which means placing fewer ads and thus, you’re leaving money on the table. Or, you’d try to nickel-and-dime your site with embedding ads on every square inch, to the detriment of anyone who clicks onto a page. Can Ezoic vs Mediavine solve this?
Compromises are often necessary for earning money online – too many ads or too few of them. It could significantly impact how your site grows in the long run, and how well you’d attract people to hop aboard. However, many premium ad providers nowadays, such as Ezoic and Mediavine, have a series of solutions to solve those pitfalls, complications, and issues with monetization.
They have clever tools, services, and technologies respectively to help publishers like you earn much higher ad revenues than you could possibly dream of. At least, they’re netting you far higher returns compared to Google’s AdSense. With that being said, between Ezoic vs Mediavine, which one is the right ad network for you? Plus, can they really earn you that much with serving ads?
- What Are They?
- Minimum Requirements
- User Experience
- Ad Revenues
- Pricing And Fees
- Miscellaneous
- Final Thoughts
- FAQs
Who Is Ezoic Vs Mediavine, And What Do They Do?
Before getting a bit too in-depth with Ezoic vs Mediavine, let’s discuss a bit more about what these two are, and what do they do. Both of them are premium ad network providers, which essentially means they’re who you go to if you’d want to put ads on your website. In a sense, they’re similar to Google AdSense, as a way to monetize your online content or business by displaying advertising.
However, unlike AdSense, which we’ve concluded to be more suitable for those who are just getting started, Ezoic and Mediavine are more advanced solutions. As such, they’re both promising high ad revenues, though the use of clever management or technology that AdSense doesn’t offer. As we’ve proven with our comparison between Ezoic and AdSense, there’s merit to this argument.
Mediavine dashboard.
But today, Ezoic vs Mediavine will be a more apples-to-apples comparison, as we’re looking at two highly specialized and lucrative networks. In Ezoic’s case, they take pride in their inclusion of AI in addition to machine learning computation. Through intelligent processing, it could proactively and dynamically optimize how ads are shown on your website to net you maximal ad revenue.
On the other hand, Mediavine focuses on a relatively less tech-savvy approach. Instead of AI or machine learning, they provide ad ‘management’ services. As such, you’re essentially allowing them to sort out and optimize the ad placement for you. To that end, we can see that Ezoic vs Mediavine has a similar goal – to earn you as much as possible with a well-optimized ad layout.
Ezoic Dashboard
What Are The Minimum Requirements For Ezoic Vs Mediavine?
Our comparison here between Ezoic vs Mediavine will try to break things down one by one. First, a good start would be looking at whether or not your site could even qualify for either Mediavine or Ezoic. It’s worth remembering that every ad provider has some form of minimum requirements for you to monetize your site with ads from their network. Usually, this concerns site traffic.
Most ad providers will set some threshold for monthly pageviews/visits/sessions. For example, that site you own needs to have at least 100,000 monthly visits to qualify for an ad network to let its ads run on your site. The same applies to Ezoic vs Mediavine, as they both have these requirements, as well. Mind you, it’s quite clear that Ezoic is more approachable and accessible than Mediavine.
As you can see in this table below, smaller sites could easily jump aboard and monetize with Ezoic. Meanwhile, Mediavine has pretty high requirements. So, you’re not likely to be able to earn with its services until your site has grown a fair amount. The latter, therefore, is more suited for larger and more established publications:
| Minimum Requirements – Ezoic Vs Mediavine | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ezoic | Mediavine | |
| Monthly Traffic | None (at least 1,000 monthly pageviews recommended) | 50,000 monthly sessions (roughly 60,000 to 80,000 pageviews) |
| Compliance With Google Ad Policies | Yes | Yes |
| Post Quality And Engaging Content | Yes | Yes |
| Content Type Or Niche | Anything (aside from content that’s been flagged as illegal, questionable, or adult in nature) | Lifestyle-focused is preferred (travel, health, fitness, culture, food, fashion, etc.) |
| Regional Traffic | Anywhere in the world | US, Canada, and the UK (preferably, most of your site’s traffic is from these regions) |
| Approval Time | Between 12 to 24 hours for full approval (another 3 to 5 hours later for integration and setting up) | Between 2 to 3 weeks for final approval and vetting |
A) Ezoic’s Minimum Requirements
Ezoic used to feature a minimum barrier of entry of 10,000 monthly pageviews for your domain to qualify to monetize with ads through their platform. Although, they announced that as of June of 2021, sites with fewer than 10,000 monthly pageviews could be accepted into their network.
They then announced the creation of their Access Now program, which caters to those small publishers with sub-10,000 monthly pageviews. This initiative is designed to bring the same tools, add-on services, and perks that large publications enjoy to tinier up-and-coming sites.
It means that regardless of whether you’re an upstart blog with several thousand pageviews. Or, a gargantuan site with millions of followers, you could easily monetize with Ezoic. That said, they do advise that your site should have at least 1,000 monthly pageviews for optimal results.
A1) Other Requirements To Consider For Ezoic
Otherwise, you might not be seeing the same high and worthwhile returns from Ezoic. Aside from that, Ezoic has a few other requirements, where your site must:
- Have at least 1,000 monthly pageviews, and has been live for some months. These aren’t hard-set requirements but are recommended by Ezoic to attain the best results. Also, your content has to be unique (i.e. not a copy-and-paste of some other site) and of good quality.
- Comply with Google’s ad policy, as Ezoic sources its ads from Google’s ad marketplace. This means that your site can’t feature items that violate copyright rules. Or, sites that contain inappropriate material, such as adult content, or anything else that’s illegal.
- Show that it’s pulling traffic. You can reference tools like Google Analytics to find out how much site traffic you’re pulling. There should ideally be a bit of traffic leading into your site. Plus, it shows signs of growth in traffic, and that you’re updating your content periodically.
B) Mediavine’s Minimum Requirements
Unlike Ezoic, Mediavine’s ad network isn’t as accessible and is only really suitable for far larger and already-established sites. For example, your site has to be pulling in 50,000 sessions every month, at least. This could roughly equate to between 60,000 to 80,000 pageviews.
This is a significant hurdle for most people wanting to monetize with Mediavine. It’s especially hard given that once upon a time, Mediavine’s minimum requirement used to be just 25,000 sessions per month. At a high 50,000, you’ll have to work hard at growing your site’s traffic.
In short, if you’re a new blog that’s just starting out, you can forget about monetizing with them. Or, at least not before you’ve evolved with higher traffic. But in the meantime, you’ll have to monetize with someone else, like AdSense or Ezoic, and their reasonable requirements.
B1) Other Requirements To Consider For Mediavine
Aside from that high traffic threshold that you’ll have to meet, Mediavine has other requirements that you’ll have to meet. For example, your site must:
- Have a good standing with AdSense. This means that traffic is solid and shows signs of growing, as well as not having any previous issues with monetization. For example, if your site was rejected for any reason in the past, it might prejudice your application with Mediavine.
- Contain long-form, engaging, and high-quality content. Mediavine will review what you’ve written and see if your site is worthy of advertising with them. In short, there has to be a lot of interaction and engagement from your audience.
- Include content that’s relevant to lifestyle subjects. For example, fashion, culture, travel, health, food-related topics, and something similar. Technically, your site can be set around other subjects, but they might stand a lower chance of getting monetized.
- Get most of its traffic from the US, Canada, or the UK. An odd requirement, but Mediavine targets these regions as their ad markets are high-paying and worthwhile for their business. This permits Mediavine to show high-quality and valuable ads.
How Does Ezoic Vs Mediavine Impact Your User Experience?
Moving on, another crucial aspect of monetization is what sort of impact do those ads on display have on user experience. If you display too many ads to capitalize on your site’s audience, this would earn you higher ad revenue in the short term. But over time, as folks on your site have become tired of being bombarded with ads left, right, and center, they’ll leave your site in droves.
Thus, impacting your site’s ability to grow in traffic and increase its ad revenue in the future. On the flip side, you could improve your site’s user experience by displaying fewer ads. This gives your users fewer distractions and annoyances and could build you a loyal following as folks continually return and enjoy your content. Nevertheless, fewer ads mean lower ad revenue across the board.
Therefore, a good ad provider has to manage that fine-balancing act of monetizing ads without a significant impact on your audience’s user experience. All the while, it could instead provide more optimizations to better improve your site visitors’ engagement and interaction with those ads.
| User Experience – Ezoic Vs Mediavine | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ezoic | Mediavine | |
| Automated Ad Management | Yes (with its AI and machine learning-enabled Ad Tester to dynamically change a site’s ad layout) | Yes (as the support and tech teams at Mediavine will fine-tune your site’s ad layout based on an out-of-the-box layout) |
| Ease Of Setting Up | Takes a bit of time and patience, as you’ll have to configure each setting manually, but it manages all this on the fly once your settings are in place | Mostly effortless, as Mediavine will help out with integrating your site, and practice a primarily hands-off approach to optimizing your site for you |
| Granular Controls | Yes (there are an abundance of options and configurations for you to choose from, and let you take full control) | Minimal (as much of what you’ll have to configure or set up is done by Mediavine’s team, leaving you with little control) |
| Focus On Core Web Vitals | Yes (with tools like Leap and its cloud-based CDNs to help improve your site’s Core Web Vitals scores) | Yes (as the team over at Mediavine will automatically tweak your ad layout for optimal user experience from the get-go) |
A) Ezoic’s User Experience
Ezoic’s speciality and its key USP over its rivals (hence becoming a leading factor when looking at Ezoic vs Mediavine) is its implementation of AI and machine learning. While setting up your site for monetization with Ezoic, you’ll have to manually create ad placeholders.
These are those banners and spots where ads would appear. You can use their own plugin or a Chrome extension to include these placeholders one by one. While doing so, you could alter their respective placement, sizing, density, and type of ads that’ll eventually appear.
This process can be quite tedious at first, as you’ll need to create possibly dozens of placeholders. Each one could differ substantially, so you’ll have to analyze them. Nonetheless, while it can take quite some time initially, it’ll soon go through Ezoic’s AI computation.
Those placeholders you’ve just set aren’t necessarily a definite spot for ads to appear. If anything, Ezoic treats them as sort of suggestions for their Ad Tester tool. Using AI, it’ll automatically test thousands or even millions of ad layout combinations at once.
For example, it might enlarge certain placeholders, put them in different places, or generate new ones based on the template you’ve set with the original layout. There’s a lot of granular control as well, such as optimizing your site for better user experience, or higher monetization.
Best of all, Ezoic then uses machine learning to periodically fine-tune that layout. As your site goes live and Ezoic analyzes how your site’s visitors engage and interact with those ads, Ezoic can make further tweaks. And, it’ll serve specifically optimized layouts for each user, too.
Optimizing user experience (with higher ad revenues) with Ezoic is further aided by the inclusion of these neat tools:
1. Ad Tester
This is the AI and machine learning-powered ad layout optimizer tool we mentioned earlier. It’s a fantastic tool that gives you maximal control over the ads that get shown on your site. Yet, at the same time, Ezoic’s clever AI and machine learning will keep improving on your inputs.
While it can take a lot of time to set up at first, it’s practically on auto-pilot once the initial set-up phase is over. Once it’s running, the Ad Tester can dynamically alter your site’s ads, varying in their:
- Placement – Where do ads appear (header, footer, side margins, between paragraphs, etc.), which may attract the keen eyes of your users, but without distracting them from the content.
- Density – How many ads to show on a single page at a time (Ezoic could show as many as 100 ads at a time). The more ads you have, the higher your ad revenues per page will be.
- Sizing – How large do each ad banners appear (large, medium, small, or in portrait and landscape orientation), with big placeholders having a higher chance of attracting the user’s attention.
- Type – What sort of ads get to appear (native ads, anchor ads, sidebar ads, etc.). Every type of ad might gauge differing engagement or attraction from your audience based on what it may show.
Another thing to note with Ad Tester is that Ezoic’s AI and machine learning processes don’t work immediately. It will take a bit of time for it to refine the layout, roughly 12 or so weeks once it’s live. After that, it’ll understand the most optimal way to show ads, and help you maximize your earnings.
This Ad Tester tool takes into account numerous variables to alternate and optimize the ad layout. For instance, it would note down each users’ behavior and interaction with those ads. It might also analyze how different ads work with one another or even match it with the time of day.
2. Leap Optimisation
Ezoic won’t just help with picking and choosing the layout for how ads appear, as it also has tools to help with optimizing the back-end of your website. This is a part of their Leap optimization service, with analytics into how well or poor your site’s Core Web Vitals scores are.
This is crucial, as Core Web Vitals can have a significant impact on your site’s user experience. Pages that load slowly or sites that are sluggish to browse around will deter folks from revisiting your site again in the future. Plus, poor scores would also rank lower in Google’s search results.
To combat this, Ezoic Leap will conduct regular analysis of how quickly or slowly your site performs. It’ll then prompt quick diagnosis and troubleshooting steps for you to quicken your site’s load times and general responsiveness. Mostly, it’ll look at the extra weight on your site.
Do you have any unnecessary plugins or unused scripts lying around that might slow down your site? Or, could you afford to cut down the size of images to speed up load times? In all, Leap will even enforce its optimizations site-wide, without you having to spend time modifying each one.
3. Ezoic Cloud
Speaking of performance, Ezoic could allow you to host content on its speedy cloud-based CDN, too. This works by loading up ads and entire sites server-side, which doesn’t just load faster. However, it consequently elevates your site’s Core Web Vitals score, as we mentioned earlier.
It’s beneficial for the user experience, as folks don’t have to wait too long for a page to load. On top of that, Google’s search algorithms highly favor sites with good Core Web Vitals scores. Thus, your site could be bumped up the search results even further, gaining you extra ad revenue.
Over the long run, leveraging both Ezoic’s cloud hosting and Leap optimization has other benefits. One of those benefits includes actually saving you money. Ezoic’s performance enhancers could help highlight unnecessary software or tech that you otherwise wouldn’t need.
Moreover, Ezoic points out security and privacy benefits for publishers, too. There are highly advanced security measures in play, such as DDoS protection. In addition, it has extra tools such as detecting click fraud, preventing spam-type ads from appearing on your site, bot protection, and more.
B) Mediavine User Experience
Here, we can note down one of the key differences when analyzing Ezoic vs Mediavine. With Ezoic, a large portion of the user experience tweaks or monetization options could actively be controlled. You could granularly override Ezoic’s settings or alter it as you see fit based on your preferences.
This doesn’t apply to Mediavine, as they have what they’d call a catered experience. In other words, you don’t have as much control or configurability with Mediavine, such as the ad layout. Technically, Mediavine does have some form of artificial intelligence or machine learning processes.
Although, you never get to see it in action, as you would with Ezoic. Instead, Mediavine works by you keeping a set of basic ad placeholders and a pre-built layout/template. Within 90 days after you’ve gone live with Mediavine, these placeholders need to stay in place where they are.
Once that period is over, Mediavine will make subtle changes on its end to balance out the layout. They’ll do so by balancing for a good user experience, while at the same time, ensuring that your site could earn as much as possible. This is all done by their support and tech teams, respectively.
You at least get some control over how many times a specific ad is shown on your website. And, you get a select few other options to choose from in your Mediavine dashboard. Otherwise, these aren’t entirely consequential, and more substantial changes need to be done by Mediavine.
For example, if you want to change your site’s ad layout altogether, you’ll have to contact the staff over at Mediavine. From there, they’ll confer with you about their suggestions, and make adjustments if and when you’re okay with them. Some of Mediavine’s uniqueness in this aspect include:
1. Hands-Off Ad Management
With Ezoic, you get a platform where you’ll have to configure and set things up to work right. In the case of Mediavine, you’re mostly dealing with hands-off optimization, as Mediavine tries to bring a good balance of user experience and ad revenues out of the box.
Once your site is integrated, it’s up to the team at Mediavine to find the best way to show ads on a webpage. They’ll then tailor their placement, density, sizing, and type of ads as best as they can. Compared to Ezoic, you’ll have to spend less time setting up Mediavine.
2. Lazy Loading
One technique that Mediavine adopts to improve page load times (one of the most crucial aspects of a good user experience), is “lazy loading” ads. This essentially means that ads are loaded in once the rest of the page has finished loading. As such, Mediavine’s performance is typically better.
In contrast to even the most lightweight settings on Ezoic, Mediavine’s injection of ads onto a page has a much smaller impact on page load times. Overall, Mediavine could more easily meet Google’s Core Web Vitals optimizations, thus improving your site’s user experience.
How Can Ezoic Vs Mediavine Maximise Your Ad Revenues?
Next up, we can now look at one of the most important factors to consider when comparing Ezoic vs Mediavine – how much you’ll earn. That’s one of the aspects that we’ve not touched on so far, as the rate of monetization you get does differ. Both Ezoic and Mediavine have varying ways of maximizing your site’s ad revenue. As such, the earnings you’ll accrue will also vary between either one.
Ad revenue and the effectiveness of your site’s monetization can be a deal-breaker if you’re choosing ad networks. In our experience, that’s why we’ve abandoned AdSense, as the ad revenue was far too low. Since then, switching over to Ezoic has been one of the best decisions we’ve made. On our case study domain, monthly ad revenues shot up 3.5x within a single month after moving to Ezoic.
These days, our one-day ad earnings are at least 3x higher within a 24-hour span with Ezoic than the returns we were getting with AdSense across an entire month. But how about Mediavine? While it’s been said that Mediavine has an equally high return on investment compared to AdSense, could it be better and out-perform Ezoic? In some cases, yes, but in general, Ezoic is more uniform.
Just for a quick reference, here’s a rundown of the average RPM (revenue per thousand) across 4 of the most popular ad networks out there, including AdThrive. It comes courtesy of the good folks over at Income School and their extensive testing. From the websites, they have access to here is the finding from what they saw across different ad networks.
| Ad Networks Revenue Comparison (Adjusted For ~50,000 Monthly Sessions) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AdSense | Ezoic | Mediavine | AdThrive | |
| Minimum RPM | $8.00 | $14.00 | $12.41 | $4.79 |
| Maximum RPM | $28.59 | $31.74 | $47.00 | $37.00 |
| Mean RPM | $18.30 | $23.48 | $25.42 | $22.70 |
| Median RPM | $18.30 | $25.00 | $24.30 | $23.06 |
A) Ezoic Ad Revenues
Based on our own experiences and from what we’ve observed with other publishers, there are some caveats to consider. As far as ad revenue is concerned, it’s mostly dependent based on what niche or subject matter your content is written around. Certain genres might earn you more.
Additionally, you’ll have to look at where your traffic comes from. Remember that ads are regional and targeted based on who’s browsing your site. In other words, an American browsing a UK-based website will get served with relevant ads of American nature, not British.
Therefore, you’ll have to bear this criterion in mind, as your results might not be reflective of ours. Depending on geography, niche, as well as the ad provider itself, one site’s ad revenue with Ezoic or Mediavine could be significantly different from another site.
Ezoic ad revenue growth from our case study.
With that in mind, however, we’ve found that Ezoic generally guarantees higher ad revenues. This is thanks to its prioritization of earning you as much as possible from ads rather than providing you the absolute smoothest user experience. Therefore, it wins out against Mediavine.
Mediavine Dashboard -Revenue / Sessions / RPM
Once again, your mileage might vary, but there are good reasons to pick out Ezoic among the two. For starters, we’ve found that across a variety of genres (lifestyle, tech, cars, sports, etc.), Ezoic tends to outperform Mediavine ever so slightly across the board. And, it’ll do more consistently.
Plus, Ezoic’s ad revenues are also typically higher than Mediavine for international audiences and traffic. Aside from that, Ezoic has a plethora of additional techniques for publishers to eke out ever higher ad revenues compared to its rivals, like Mediavine:
1. Split-Testing
If you can’t decide between Ezoic vs Mediavine, you could always employ both! Ezoic has a unique split-testing feature, where you can throttle your site’s traffic through two ad providers. As such, it’s possible for you to monetize 50% of your site with Ezoic and the other 50% with Mediavine.
This is a neat way to test the waters and find out if one’s any better than the other under the same conditions. Ezoic themselves offer a guarantee where they promise to earn you at least 25% more in ad revenue than its rivals within 30 days. If not, they’ll pay the difference (and 25% on top of that).
2. AI And Machine Learning
As we’ve discussed earlier, Ezoic employs extensive use of both AI and machine learning to figure out the most optimal way to monetize your site. A better user experience isn’t just the only positive side-effect of this, mind you. It could also rake in ad revenues more effectively, too.
Ezoic’s computation will determine the right ad layout to maximize your ad earnings. In addition, a higher chance that folks would notice, interact and engage with its ads. However, we’ve found that certain ad-heavy layouts can badly impact page load times and the user experience.
3. Tag Tester
Besides optimizing the ads themselves, Ezoic has tools to help you better calibrate your content, as well. This is through their Tag Tester tool, where you could run a page through it. In the end, Ezoic will test how that page performs traffic-wise, and try to optimize the page titles and URLs.
Mainly, it’ll change tagging and titles based on how well they rank respectively in Google. In practice, it’s a case where the SEO around one particular keyword isn’t as good. If that’s so, Ezoic would then determine the best titles for respective pages on your site, and make alterations accordingly.
4. Mediation
Going back to our point of simultaneous monetization, Ezoic has its mediation tools. It does so by tracking the data behind the bidding for specific ad spots. In particular, one of the best features of Ezoic is its AdSense mediation. Here, Ezoic could swap out its ads for AdSense.
For example, if Ezoic finds that AdSense could earn you more (i.e. Google got the higher bid) for an ad spot, it would automatically swap Ezoic’s ads out for Google’s. Thus, netting you a higher ad revenue. In addition to header mediation, it’s a win-win, as you earn more regardless.
5. Video Player
Adding rich media like videos is a great way to enhance the engagement and quality of your content. Since you’re already hosting those videos, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t monetize them, too. This is usually done by uploading videos to YouTube and raking in ad revenue that way.
However, and as we discussed already, AdSense doesn’t pay you nearly as much. In that event, you’d be better off using Ezoic’s video hosting services. Just upload your YouTube videos there, and you can even put Ezoic’s ads on top of it. Thus, opening up a secondary source of revenue.
B) Mediavine Ad Revenues
Between Ezoic vs Mediavine, we’ve highlighted thus far that Ezoic commonly yields higher earnings from monetization than its competition. With that in mind, is Mediavine really that far behind? No, not really, as it could still earn you quite a lot, too. But, this does vary in some cases.
For example, it’s been noted that in certain regions, such as the US, Canada, and UK (as you might notice from earlier), Mediavine nets rather high ad revenues. In certain situations, it does overtake Ezoic’s, but it’s not as consistent, especially once you account for traffic from other regions.
Another interesting note is that lifestyle-focused topics, as is Mediavine’s forte, really do give you better odds of gaining maximal ad revenue. When we speak of lifestyle, we mean subjects such as culture, food, travel, adventure, fashion, fitness, health, arts & crafts, DIY, and so forth.
Blogs or publications that revolve around those genres could be better optimized by Mediavine, but other niches of content could perform decently well, too. It’s fair to say that Mediavine and Ezoic pay pretty handsomely for ads, both often one-upping each other depending on the situation.
One possible reason why Mediavine isn’t always able to out-earn Ezoic might be due to its out-of-the-box ad placement settings. As we’ve noted earlier, Mediavine’s settings are more biased towards an enhanced user experience.
Seeing how neither we nor anyone else could give you concrete data on the monetization rates, we’d still highly recommend that you give both a try. For example, you could sign up to Ezoic, and use its split-testing feature to monetize alongside Mediavine. Then, jot down the results. Don’t forget that Ezoic literally guarantees you will earn 25% more than the competition as well.
Here are a few factors of why Mediavine is able to extract such high ad revenues sometimes:
1. Premium Publishers
While Ezoic is usually pretty good at cutting down on spam-type ads, there are occasions where you may notice intrusive ads. This is especially toned down once you’ve subscribed to Mediavine, where they work very closely with their premium advertisers. So, you can be assured of their quality.
This is one reason why Mediavine has high and oft-specific requirements, as they work with a very exclusive pool of A-tier advertisers. When you’re monetizing with Mediavine, you’ll be getting ads from Google’s ad marketplace, as well as DoubleClick ads.
2. Video Player
Just like Ezoic, Mediavine offers its own video hosting solution as an alternative to YouTube. This is a great solution if you already have a lengthy archive of YouTube videos. But, you’ve not been entirely impressed by the less-than-ideal returns from monetization from YouTube.
So, why not host them over on Mediavine, too? As with Ezoic, you could layer those videos with ads from Mediavine, and take advantage of the more lucrative monetization options with them, instead. Embed them alongside your written content, and you now have an extra revenue stream.
3. Lifestyle Focus
As we’ve noted thus far, Mediavine has built its advertising solutions and partnerships around a primarily lifestyle-type focus. This has allowed them to offer typically higher ad revenues for those publishers that create lifestyle content, too.
In contrast, Ezoic’s generalized approach does mean that they’re more consistent with monetization, but without a key focal point. If you’re primarily a lifestyle publisher, Mediavine may offer you more benefits compared to Ezoic or at least they have done in the past, Ezoic’s revenue guarantee may have just changed things.
And when we mean lifestyle, we mean content around niches and genres such as:
- Foods, drinks, or cooking
- Travel, adventure, camping, or other outdoorsy content
- Personal finance, financial tips, or investing
- Family and parenting
- Home or DIY work
- Arts, culture, entertainment, or language
- Health and fitness
- Hobbies, interests, sports, games, etc.
- Fashion and style
How Do Pricing And Fees Compare With Ezoic Vs Mediavine?
Seeing how well they work, what would competing between Ezoic vs Mediavine cost you in the end? Most ad providers, such as Ezoic vs Mediavine, charge you for their services using a revenue-sharing model. In short, for all that you earn with ad revenue, they take a cut to subsidize their services.
Ezoic is the cheaper among Ezoic vs Mediavine. Ezoic has a low revenue Share – here, 10% of all your ad revenues with Ezoic will be shared with Ezoic as payment for using its platform. Note, this doesn’t count for mediation or split-testing, as anything you earn with other ad providers goes back to you (via the other ad provider).
Combined with its low monthly pageview requirements, this makes Ezoic a great choice for all publications, as the fees are relatively low. Best of all, many of the other add-on services or tools that we’ve made mentioned earlier come included with that fee. This includes Leap, its video hosting service, cloud CDNs for caching, tag tester, and in-depth analytics, among others.
Nevertheless, be wary that certain products from Ezoic may cost you. They have a premium program that will earn you more money, but you do need to pay for it in advance. Furthermore, Ezoic offers other financial incentives, such as grants, as well as free WordPress hosting. The latter gives you free web hosting with unlimited storage.
Breakdown Of Pricing And Fees Between Ezoic Vs Mediavine
With that being said, there’s a good chance that the longer you monetize with Mediavine, the lower the costs will get over time. Mediavine has just one pricing option, which is also a revenue-sharing tier. In this instance, it’s much higher than Ezoic’s, as Mediavine takes a 25% cut of your ad revenue. This is just the base tier, however, as you stand a chance of having to pay even less.
Some of Mediavine’s advertisers don’t charge as much for their services. For these companies, their cut of the deal could be as low as 20% (where you keep the remaining 80%). This gets even better as your ad impressions gain increased engagement. The revenue share would drop even further to 15%. Or, as low as just 10% (matching Ezoic) if you opt for Mediavine’s 1% loyalty bonus.
This table here should break up the financial aspects of Ezoic vs Mediavine more thoroughly, which includes some mentions of the withdrawal options:
| Pricing And Payments – Ezoic Vs Mediavine | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ezoic | Mediavine | |
| Fees (Revenue Share) | Yes (10% revenue share, not counting mediation or split-testing) | Yes (25% revenue share base, but could be as low as 20%, 15%, or 10% with the loyalty bonus for the latter) |
| Ad Revenue Payment/Withdrawal Options | Cheque, PayPal, Direct Deposit, International Wire Transfer (Payoneer), and Payoneer Prepaid Card | Direct Deposit, International Wire Transfer, Local Wire Transfer, PayPal, and Cheque |
| Payment Schedule | 30 days (that’s 30 days after the end of the month for the ad revenue to be processed) | 65 days (that’s 65 days after the end of the month for the ad revenue to be processed) |
| Payment Timeframe | Between the 27th and 31st of the month | On the 5th of every month following 65 days after the end of that month’s ad revenue |
| Minimum Withdrawal Threshold | $20 (for all payment options) | $25 (for all payment options except an ACH international wire transfer, which requires a $200 minimum) |
Some Other Miscellaneous Facts In Ezoic Vs Mediavine
| Miscellaneous Variables – Ezoic Vs Mediavine | ||
|---|---|---|
| Ezoic | Mediavine | |
| Do They Provide Extensive Data Analytics? | Yes, their Big Data Analytics tool provides you with an abundance of information, more so than most analytics dashboards | Not really, and they don’t really share that much information with you, as most of their services are managed by the team, not you |
| Is Their Client And Technical Support Good? | Fast, responsive, and detailed technical/customer support, with further problem-solving and long-term planning with your Account Manager, or one-on-one insights with your Publisher Success Manager (accessible for large and growing sites) | Fast, responsive, and technical/customer support, with a highly knowledgeable tech and support team ready to provide recommendations or help you with optimizing ads on your site |
| How Easy Is It To Integrate Your Site With Them? | It requires changing nameservers or integrating through Cloudflare, installing one plugin and one chrome extension. It is all fairly simple. | Fairly easy, as it’s less hands-on owing to Mediavine’s catered approach of doing most of the work for you through their tech and support teams, but you get minimal controls and configurations as a result. |
What Are Our Final Thoughts On Ezoic Vs Mediavine?
That then rounds up our thoughts on Ezoic vs Mediavine… So, how can we conclude? With its great balance of approachability, comparative low pricing, ample add-on services, great support team, as well as high monetization rates and ad revenues, we’d give Ezoic the crown for this competition. It’s hard to beat what they offer, and there’s little downside to monetizing through their network.
They have a pretty clever system with AI and machine learning, plus a myriad of incentives and perks when you’ve signed up. As we ourselves have experienced it, our ad revenues skyrocketed once we’d swapped to Ezoic. Even after comparing it against other providers, we’ve never looked back. If your site is on the up and up, or already has a strong following, Ezoic offers the perfect fit for you.
However, this doesn’t mean that Mediavine isn’t a good option, as it could handily stand on its own. No doubt their focus on smooth, uninterrupted, and seamless user experiences does pay dividends. Yet, Mediavine could earn you just as much, if not more for certain situations (Ezoic will guarantee to bet it plus 25%). Combined with their ease of use, simple integration, and hands-off management, Mediavine is a great choice, too.
Albeit, their critical flaw is the high minimum requirements, which makes Mediavine inaccessible to smaller or upstart publishers. Otherwise, we’d highly recommend both, with a slight bias towards Ezoic given their utmost focus on ad revenues. If you have the chance, we’d still suggest that you give both providers a try and see how they perform. That said, you can’t go wrong with Ezoic.
FAQs On Ezoic Vs Mediavine
If you’re still unsure or have any questions, hopefully, our FAQs on Ezoic vs Mediavine could help answer any uncertainties…
What Is Mediavine
Just like Ezoic or AdThrive, Mediavine is a premium ad network provider. Unlike more entry-level or simpler solutions like Google’s AdSense, Mediavine works closely with advertisers to help maximize your ad revenues. They provide a catered approach, where Mediavine would help in managing and integrating ads on your site for you. This hands-off approach makes them a great option for those who don’t have the time or technical know-how to best optimize ads on their sites.
How Does Mediavine Work
Compared to more hands-on ad providers like Ezoic, Mediavine has a much more catered approach for publishers. Rather than having to spend time creating placeholders or going through the hassle of integrating your site, Mediavine will do it all for you. With its ads, their team will take a look at your site, and will provide some optimized layouts to monetize with. They do this by leveraging machine learning to understand the best placements for ads to appear in, and then make adjustments.
How To Qualify For Mediavine
While Ezoic and AdSense make their services very accessible for smaller sites, this isn’t the case with Mediavine. They have a pretty high minimum requirement, including a mighty 50,000 sessions every month that you’ll have to meet. This is just the minimum, which equates to roughly 60,000 to about 80,000 pageviews. Plus, your content has to be long-form (high word count), and have most of your site’s traffic originate from the UK, US, or Canada. All in all, pretty challenging to qualify.
How Many Page Views For Mediavine
First, you’ll have to understand the difference between ‘pageviews’ and ‘sessions’. ‘Pageviews’ is an instance when someone visits your site and logs out after browsing for a little while. On the flipside, ‘Sessions’ is when someone visits your site and keeps on browsing for a few more pages. Usually, a single ‘session’ is counted as roughly 4 opened pages in succession. Mediavine has a high barrier to qualifying, with a minimum of 50,000 monthly sessions. Or, around 60,000 to 80,000 pageviews.
How Much Can You Make With Mediavine
As with every other ad provider like Ezoic, there are never any upper limits for how much you can make with Mediavine. You could be earning ad revenues by the thousands or millions, although Mediavine is best suited for larger publications. At the end of the day, you’ll have to work your hardest to grow your site’s traffic. This is the only way forward for wanting to maximize your ad revenues.
How Much Does Mediavine Pay
Compared to solutions like Google’s AdSense, Mediavine pays handsomely in ad revenue, although a tad below Ezoic in some cases. The actual amount will vary greatly based on how much traffic a site is pulling. The more people you have browsing around and viewing or interacting with those ads, the more you stand to earn. In general, Mediavine’s payout is somewhere between $20 to $50 for every 1,000 pageviews.
What Is Mediavine Food
As with any ad provider, Mediavine has to create specific tags for advertisers to bid on and supply ads for publishers. One of their most popular tags is for food, drinks, cooking, and other culinary-related sites. Among every ad provider out there, Mediavine has a strong focus on publications around any lifestyle topics. These include foods, or perhaps niches for travel, health, fitness, culture, and so on.
Mediavine How To Remove Ads From One Page
If you want to remove ads from a single page, you’ll have to log in to your Mediavine dashboard. Here, go to the Settings page, and find the Disabled Ads section. Here, you can pick and choose which ads you’d like to disable. For example, would you like to remove all ads, or just for one specific part of a page? Once you’ve selected them, set a date for when those ads will expire and be removed. By default, this is set to 60 days. When that’s complete, Ezoic will generate a code. All you need to do now is copy this code into the HTML source section within a page editor, and it’ll remove those ads.
What Do You Think Of Mediavine For Your Ad Network
Mediavine is a top-earning premium ad network that could easily boost your site’s ad revenues when compared to AdSense. Especially for lifestyle-focused publications, Mediavine could be a great option for monetization. However, this changes if your site’s traffic is predominantly international, or if your content is more generalized. For those publishers in the latter category, we’d recommend using Ezoic for your monetization needs if you care about earning higher ad revenues.
How To Apply Mediavine
If you’re interested in monetizing with Mediavine, head over to their website, and click on the Apply button in the top-right corner. A form will appear, where you’ll have to type in your name, email, as well as your site’s URL, and domain name. Click on Submit once you’ve filled in the form. Finally, you need to wait for Mediavine to grant approval for your site to be monetized through their platform. This review process could take between 2 to 3 weeks, or sometimes up to a month.
How Much Do You Make From AdSense Vs Mediavine
Any premium or third-party ad provider is a better option than Google’s AdSense. On AdSense, your site’s RPM (how much you earn for every 1,000 visits) is usually around the single-digit mark. On the best days, you might earn as much as $15. In start contrast, Mediavine (as with other platforms like Ezoic or AdThrive) could easily earn you between $20 to $50 for every 1,000 views.
How To Get Approved To Mediavine
For the approval process to monetize with Mediavine, you need to make sure that your site has the bare minimum of monthly traffic. In the case of Mediavine, your site has to be pulling in 50,000 per month in sessions (around 60,000 to 80,000 pageviews). Another key approval criterion is that your site must have a good standing with AdSense. Moreover, your site has to contain original, unique, and long-form content, mostly around lifestyle.
Mediavine Application How Long Review
One of Mediavine’s specialties is that they work closely with premium advertisers. This ensures that domains monetized with Mediavine get high-quality, engaging, and interesting ads. A downside to this is the application process, which has strict requirements for publishers. Once you’ve applied, Mediavine will conduct an extensive review and screening of your website. This could take anywhere from 2 to 3 weeks, or sometimes as long as a month.
Which Is Better Than Mediavine
If you’re looking for a good ad provider, Mediavine is a great pick. However, there are other, better solutions out there, such as Ezoic. With its use of AI and machine learning, Ezoic could dynamically optimize your page’s ad layout for maximal ad revenue. At the same time, Ezoic provides far more tools and add-on services compared to Mediavine. In addition to higher monetization rates, Ezoic is relatively cheaper, is more approachable, and has a fantastic support team.
How Do I Test My Mediavine Ad Placement
Testing the ad placements on your site is a great way to make sure that you’re using up every single part of a page. In doing so, you’re essentially double-checking to ensure that you’re not leaving any money on the table. Remember that broken or non-existent ad banners yield nothing in return. For you to test the ad placements in Mediavine, open an incognito browser window. Log into your site and Mediavine, and open the page that you want to test. Finally, copy this code (?test=houseads) before pasting it on the end of the URL for that page. This will show you all available ad placements.
How To Use Create Plugin By Mediavine
Mediavine’s Create plugin is a great way for publishers to maximize the SEO of their content. With this plugin, you could quickly create Schema cards for recipes, how-to guides, instructions, lists, and more. To use it, you’ll first have to download and install the Create plugin for WordPress. Once it’s installed, go to your WordPress settings, and register your Mediavine account. When that’s done, it gives you a selection of cards to choose from, which you can quickly and easily embed into a page.
When Does Mediavine Pay
Mediavine has a pretty lengthy 65-day payment window. Specifically, this is 65 days from the end of a specific month when you’ve been accruing in ad revenue. From those 65 days, Mediavine will then make payments on the 5th of every month. For example, January’s ad revenue will be paid by the 5th of April. Meanwhile, February’s ad revenue will be paid by the 5th of May, and so on.
How Does Mediavine Pay
Ad revenue payments through Mediavine are made through Tipalti. On your Mediavine settings, you could set a variety of payment options. The most popular ones are direct deposits, as well as a wire transfers (local or international). Alternatively, you could opt for the ad earning to be deposited to your PayPal wallet. While you’re choosing which ones to go for, be wary of the withdrawal fees.
Mediavine Keeps What Percentage Of Ad Revenue
The base-level pricing tier has Mediavine following a 25-75 revenue sharing split. In other words, you get 75% of the ad revenue, while Mediavine keeps the other 25% as its cut. However, this could drop down to 20% (that Mediavine keeps) for certain advertisers which don’t charge as much. If you keep up with higher ad impressions on your site, it could drop even further to just 15%. Additionally, they have a 1% loyalty bonus, which could drop their cut of the ad revenue to just 10%.
Mediavine How To Increase RPM
Just like with any ad provider, you’ll have to work hard if you want to see your site’s RPM (revenue per thousand) increase. Mainly, this revolves around attracting more traffic leading to your site. The only way to achieve this is by focusing on your content and putting more effort into making some high-quality, engaging, and unique content. Otherwise, you could skip Mediavine altogether, and consider trying other ad providers like Ezoic, who’s known to pay handsome RPMs.