Mediavine Review

Mediavine Review: First Month Earnings vs Monumetric

This post may contain affiliate links. Click here to read my full disclosure.

You might have recently heard the bad news. Mediavine has increased its traffic requirements for all blogs to be considered for the network. This Mediavine review still stands despite that fact.

Will it be more difficult for blogs to reach threshold? Absolutely. Does it matter? Kind-of but not really. Read the review for yourself but please keep in mind that there are many ways to make money blogging…not just through ad revenue.

Affiliate marketing is my #1 source of income, and it should be a major focus for many blogs!

Mediavine Review - How I Earned $769 my First Month

Monumetric Review

I’ll share my Mediavine review below, but I first want to remind you of my experience with Monumetric so that you can compare the two.

When I first joined Monumetric, I was ecstatic with my earnings vs Adsense. I don’t think many bloggers have been successful in increasing Adsense RPM’s.

Fun fact, Adsense is actually how I monetize my YouTube channel, and it pays very well on that platform.

In order to get accepted into Monumetric, your site must receive at least 10,000 pageviews per month.

You also need to pay a $99 setup fee. Now, most ad networks don’t charge a setup fee, but Monumetric claims that they don’t really make any money during a bloggers’ first six months so the $99 fee helps them break even while your ads are leveling out.

Monumetric RPM

I really loved Monumetric for a few months. My RPM started out great at around $12-$15. If you’re a new blogger and don’t know what RPM is, it stands for “rate per mille” or rate per thousand pageviews.

February 2019 Monumetric

In my first full month with Monumetric, I earned $453.48. See how many sessions I had? I could have been accepted into Mediavine, but I felt obligated to give Monumetric a chance.

I could always apply to Mediavine later, so my loyalty was with Monumetric. I believed I would continue earning that RPM.

Fast forward five months later, and I was averaging $311 per month income from Monumetric. My traffic dipped below the 25k sessions so I was unable to get accepted into Mediavine at that point.

Don’t get me wrong. $300 is a lot of money for a new blogger, but I was bummed that my RPM dropped significantly.

I finally got through the summer slump on my blog, and I reached 25k sessions in mid-August. I gave Monumetric a 30-day notice that I was going to switch to Mediavine.

I received an email from Monumetric that stated if I were to remove ads prior to the 30 days:

  • a $.20 eCPM fee from my last 60 days’ performance would be applied to the payments still owed to me.
  • If ads were to stay active on my site for 72 hours past the 30-day notice, my site would remain active and would require ANOTHER 30-day notice.

The threat of taking money away from me (even just a little) kept me from switching over early, and I wish I would have taken the hit because Mediavine has exceeded my expectations!

New, Updated Mediavine Requirements

Mediavine requires a minimum of 25,000 now 50,000 sessions per month to be accepted into their ad network. The reason they use sessions as a metric instead of pageviews is that some bloggers use slideshows to get more clicks on their site.

Have you ever clicked to visit a list that you’re genuinely curious about only to stumble upon a slideshow that you have to click through to read all 10 points?

Annoying, right? That’s why Mediavine chooses to value sessions over pageviews because it’s an accurate snapshot of visitors to your site.

Mediavine has also removed the ability to add a second site with just 10,000 sessions (total bummer, I know). Now, each site must meet the 50,000 session requirement before applying for acceptance into Mediavine.

But don’t let that discourage you! My income from affiliate marketing is much higher than my ad revenue. For example, in the month of April, during the COVID-19 crisis, I was able to earn $2,330 from a single affiliate program (with a total of 45,700 page views).

You don’t need hundreds of thousands of pageviews to earn a good living blogging!

Click here to read more about how to start your own blog. 

Mediavine Review

The first thing I want to say is that even though Mediavine is an ad network, they are so much more than that.

They offer support and encouragement and a community (in the Mediavine Publishers’ Facebook group) where you can learn from other bloggers how to increase your traffic.

[ss_click_to_tweet tweet=”More traffic means more income, and more income means I’m able to contribute to our debt snowball and we don’t have to rely solely on my husband’s income every month.” content=”More traffic means more income, and more income means I’m able to contribute to our debt snowball and we don’t have to rely solely on my husband’s income every month.” style=”default”]

This is a big deal, y’all! Blogging has given me a way to work from home around my kids’ schedules without a boss telling me how to dress, what to do, and best of all, I have the flexibility I craved and don’t feel guilty if I have to take a personal or sick day.

Related Posts:

Visit this post where I teach you how to start a blog of your own. 

I launched Mediavine ads on Perfection Hangover on September 17, 2019, and I earned $121.66 that month. September consisted of 36,200 pageviews (23.8k sessions).

Another fun fact: Mediavine won’t kick you out of the network if you fail to reach 25k sessions. They know that when you’re on the border, you might go above one month and below another while you’re building traffic to your site.

Google SEO traffic efforts take time as it can take up to 6 months to rank an article, and we can’t all get 1 million pageviews from Pinterest like Grace and Silas from Chasing Foxes (although that would amazing).

The image below shows how my Mediavine RPM spiked at over $30 my first full month.

You see a massive jump in the middle of the month, and I’ll explain what happened there.

Mediavine RPM income first full month

Blogarama Blog Directory Fail

I had signed up for my blog to be included in a directory online called Blogarama. It cost $4.90 per month, and it was sending me a good amount of traffic, but the traffic was mostly desktop referral traffic with a very low bounce rate.

You might be thinking, “That’s good, though, right? Low bounce rate, high time on site…”. Yes, typically those are blogging goals, but when I reached out to Mediavine to ask about ways to increase my RPM, they performed a site audit and determined that this traffic was bot traffic.

Not only was it bad bot traffic, but if I didn’t remove my blog from the directory, advertisers could block Google bidding on my site and it would be very difficult to earn any money at all.

So I canceled my subscription to Blogarama, and my RPM and revenue increased significantly (even though my traffic took a hit).

Something else I noticed was that after I canceled Blogarama, my organic traffic increased. I can’t help but think there’s a connection there.

If you’re considering Blogarama as a source of traffic, just don’t. Consider yourself warned.

Mediavine Income Report

Mediavine earnings

During my first full month with Mediavine, I earned $769.66. My pageviews were at 44,200 in October, and sessions reached an all-time high at 33,800.

You don’t need hundreds of thousands of pageviews in order to make money blogging, y’all. Perfection Hangover is proof of that!

In fact, this blog has earned up to $2,600 per month. Here’s an article that shares how I make money blogging.

It takes time to build a site from the ground up and monetize it, but I am happy with my switch to Mediavine.

Another consideration is that if I had leveled out my RPM around $30 at the beginning of the month, I would have earned approximately $1014!

This is a 66% increase from Monumetric!

You can read more income reports from bloggers of all different niches and traffic sizes on Mediavine’s income report page here.

Mediavine Dashboard – Go for Teal

Mediavine teal star site health check

The Mediavine dashboard offers a site health check that keeps you in compliance and also helps you earn more revenue.

When you have red, yellow, or green lights instead of teal stars, there is an opportunity to tweak some things.

This is actually what prompted me to email support, which resulted in me canceling Blogarama.

Once I achieved the teal star across the board, my ad revenue increased significantly.

Mediavine Videos = More Income

There’s one more thing I should mention in my Mediavine review, and that is the ability to add videos to your blog posts.

As a YouTuber, I already had a few videos embedded in blog posts, and I’m sure they helped my channel earn a little more income, but when I added videos to my most popular articles on the blog, my RPM increased even more.

Mediavine offers the ability to upload an mp4 into the dashboard, where you can optimize it with keywords and metadata. Google actually picks up on this because I can see them in my Google search console.

Bottom Line

If you’ve reached 10,000 pageviews, you might want to join Monumetric until you can reach 25,000 sessions. But as soon as you qualify for Mediavine, you’ll be better off signing up for a company that actually cares about its publishers.

Your success means their success, and it shows in their everyday business practices.

38 thoughts on “Mediavine Review: First Month Earnings vs Monumetric”

  1. Melissa, I love your review of Mediavine and I’m glad that you were accepted into their program and you ended up earning so much! But what I love the most about your post is that you show bloggers that diversification of income is extremely important for a blog. That’s awesome!

  2. Been looking for Mediavine perfect review and i can say this is the one i needed, not so sure why monumetric didnt approve my site,they said advertisers were impacted by covid etc but my site has 5k+ users organically a day mainly from USA. Just signed up for mediavine hopping to get approved, monthly sessions are over 165k

  3. Hi Melisa, thanks for putting this Mediavine Review together. Please can you confirm that one needs to get a higher percentage of their website traffic from top tier countries like the USA, UK, Canada?

    My website meets the current Mediavine requirements but only about 20% is from the United States. Is mostly African traffic.

    Thanks for your time.

  4. Now that it’s been longer, do you have any comparison numbers for the same ad periods? The holiday season always pays more, so I’m wondering if some of the difference is due to advertisers paying more in Q4 than other quarters. My RPM changes significantly after Christmas, within the same ad network. I’m not sure it’s as much as that 66% that your experienced by changing, but I wanted to do a comparison and see what part should be attributed to ad spending and not the ad network
    Thanks for all the specific information. It’s appreciated!

  5. Pingback: 2019 Blog Year in Review and 2020 Forecast | Perfection Hangover

  6. This is great information that I am pinning, but I would love to have gotten on your email list. I never did see a field where to sub to it. Thanks for all the fab info!

  7. Thanks for writing this post. My monthly page views are now 13,400 so I have applied for Monumetric. I wasn’t sure if I should just wait until I had enough for Mediavine and then apply straight to them but I’m not sure how long it will take me to get up to 25,000. I’ve been blogging for 5 months and got to 13,4000 so it might take me another few months at least when I could be earning money from Monumetric. I’m just scared it will be difficult to set up or might in some way mess my site up. Thanks for writing your post. I found it really helpful.

    1. You’re welcome, Olivia! I’m glad you found this post! I waited far too long before applying for Monumetric and missed out on hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars!

  8. Thanks, Mel for this!
    At this situation, your guide help a lot of new bloggers to succeed in their journey and make passive as their full-time income.

  9. Melissa,
    This is the post I needed. I just hit my first 10,000 sessions and while I just hit it I wanna to maximize on it. Because I need to start offsetting cost.

    My end goal is Mediavine but considering Monumetrics. I still on the fence but have a better idea on what I am looking at.

    I was wondering what the switch would be like, why the $99 fee etc. You answered many of those questions.

    Thanks!!

  10. Really enjoyed this blog post, Melissa. Thank you. Had a question, which I have since forgot….
    Let’s see….virus….panic…exhaustion.
    Oh yeah, does MediaVine require that they handle all ads? I have Taboola sponsored content too, and wondering if that has to come down too, should MV accept my site. Thanks again.

    1. I’m honestly not sure about that, Richard. You’d have to reach out to Mediavine support for that. I know they do have a special link for each publisher to share with companies that wish to offer display advertising on each site.

  11. Hello Melissa!
    Thanks again for your great reviews on Mediavine and Monumetric. I’ve just joined Monumetric and put your name “Melissa Blevins” in the referral box 😉 I have 18.5k sessions per month right now, so I don’t qualify for Mediavine.

    I must say I was hesitant and thought about waiting to join Mediavine after reading some comments about Monumetric. Also, when I signed up and registered their dashboard said it could take 2-3 months! Ugh! But surprisingly, I heard from their representative the very next day and the day after that, they internally approved my site! Now, I’m just waiting for their advertisers to approve my site..”fingers crossed”!

    Anyway, so far so good. Their representative seemed to like my site and was all positive about it. I wonder if it was hard for you to switch over to Mediavine after Monumetric as their representatives so far seem so nice.

    Thanks again!
    David

    1. Hi, David! Congratulations on being accepted into Monumetric! You are going to be blown away by the difference in revenue vs Adsense!

      It wasn’t hard AT ALL to switch over to Mediavine. Mediavine customer service is phenomenal, and I’m earning way more than I was with Monumetric.

      I think Monumetric is a great stepping stone to Mediavine, but I wouldn’t go back.

  12. What an awesome post, thank you for sharing! How long did it take you to start earning steady income with Mediavine. Was it low for the first 1-2 weeks as ads were starting to settle / accumulate?

    1. Thanks, Sean! I joined Mediavine in mid-September, so December 1st was my first payout. I earned $121.66 that month, and the following month I earned 769.66, so I started earning right away. Since then, I haven’t had a month below $1,000 🙂 Best decision ever joining Mediavine!

      1. Thanks for the reply Melissa! Much appreciated. I’ve only just been accepted so an absolute newbie over here! Would love to chat to you sometime about a link-share or similar. Wanted to do it with as many Mediavine sites that I could find as it feels we’re all a little ad revenue family now haha

  13. What is the best way to switch from Monumetrics to MediaVine? Once accepted by MediaVine, did they work with you during that 30-day notice period that you had to give to Monumetrics? I am not sure how the timing of “switchover works”…..thanks!

    1. Hi, Catherine!

      You just need to apply to Mediavine, and if approved, you can give Monumetric notice that you’re leaving. Mediavine takes care of everything so that it’s a smooth transition. 🙂

  14. Great article. We are just about at 10,000 so we will go Monumetric for now, but, Mediavine is on the radar. One question, your site was a little overload on the ads, mostly all the video ads going. I know Mediavine you don’t get a lot of say on how many ads, but, I have also not seen many sites as overloaded as this one. Do you have the option to choose how aggressive the ads are? My audience would not be happy with all the videos. Also, if you can choose the videos, what was the RPM without videos or did you ever test that?

    1. Chris…thank you so much for this comment! I actually appreciate the feedback on the videos. I have one video set to pop up on every post (and a couple of single videos that are post-specific), but I have wondered if it’s too obtrusive. This confirms my suspicions.

      When I added the videos, my RPM increased significantly. I wanna say it was around $15/1000 sessions before and during Christmas went as high as $63 and has settled out now around $33.

      I’m going to do some more testing and remove the main video from mobile to see if it affects RPM. Thanks again!

  15. I have AdSense on my blog, I just turned it off after reading your post. Now I have come to realize why I’m not earning money on my blog. I submitted my site to Blogarama, people wrote good reviews but it’s the other way round, I’m getting good traffic though but no clicks, nothing. I want to refund my money back and then tell them I’m removing my site. I have wasted money, it hurts me so bad!. How did you get your money back from Blogarama?.

    1. I didn’t get my money back. I just canceled the payment in Paypal and sent them an email asking them to remove my site. I believe I also deleted my url out of the settings on their site.

  16. Thanks for sharing your experience. I am right at the point where I can apply for Mediavine. This has convinced me! I’ve been with Monumetric for a few months. Of course, it’s better than Adsense, but it seems to me that I might do even better with a switch to Mediavine. Thanks again!

  17. My site gets over 300,000 sessions per month and I never knew about Mediavine or Adthrive. I was making peanuts with Adsense.. less than $1 RPM. Let’s hope I get approved.

  18. morning! great post, thank you! I have a question…I don’t suppose you remember how you got your site off Blogarama do you? Mines on there and I can’t see a way to get it off and of course, they don’t reply to emails?!
    Thanks!

  19. I’ve been thinking of testing Mediavine on my site for ages. I have tried Ezoic and Adsense in the past but I don’t know why I never applied to Mediavine (we meet the requirements). After reading this we most probably will, thanks!

    What’s next for you? AdThrive with 100k page views as requirement? 🙂

    1. I don’t know if I’ll ever leave Mediavine honestly. With my RPM that high and the service level where it is, I just don’t see leaving as an option (even when I reach 100k pageviews).

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