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!

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.

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:

• 5 Things You Need to Know Before Launching a Blog in 2020
• Blog Income Reports (with Traffic Stats) – Perfection Hangover
• Monumetric Review

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.

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

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

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.