Mediavine Vs Ezoic – Which Pays More And Provides A Better User Experience

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Ezoic And Mediavine are two of the hottest names in Ad Management right now.

They both offer considerably higher revenue than Google Adsense and both cater for intermediate to advanced bloggers.

You can get accepted to Ezoic with 10,000 sessions per month and Mediavine from 50,000 sessions per month.

Ezoic are good but not perfect, earning md range RPM’s while Mediavine have earned us the highest RPM’s we have ever acheived at $45* per thousand visitors.

*2021 Update

We had great success with Affiliates in a number of industries before we discovered Income School which promoted building up the traffic on your sites and monetizing through Adsense and then the various different professional Ad networks like Ezoic and Mediavine.

Ezoic have a lower threshold requirement than Mediavine at 10k sessions per month compared to 50k session to be eligible for Mediavine.

That is why we recommend for smaller sites to run Ezoic and switching to Mediavine when you have enough traffic.

Sign Up For Ezoic Here:

Mediavine have a video player while Ezoic have just released their beta player.

The ads on Ezoic can be quite intrusive and can slow your site down while Mediavine tends to have less Ads, positioned better on your website.

In my experience, Mediavine has also offered a significantly higher RPM than Ezoic and I would highly recommend Mediavine.

Highest RPM With Mediavine: $45
Highest RPM With Ezoic: $15

The two main concerns that people are likely to have before putting Ads on their website are:

How much Money Are They Going To Generate
How Much Are The Going To Affect User Experience, Site Speed And Traffic

In this article, we are going to explain our complete experience with each platform so you can make up your mind about what is the best solution for you.

Comparison Table Of Ezoic Vs Mediavine

Ezoic	Mediavine
10,000 Monthly Sessions Required	50,000 Monthly Sessions Required
Easy Approval	Approval Takes Up To 4 Weeks
Easy Installation & Setup	Easy Installation & Managed Set Up
AI Optimized But Intrusive Ads	Continually Optimized Ads
Google Ad & Premium Ads	Google Ad, Double Click, Premium Ads
Mid Range Earnings	BEST In Class Earnings
No Video Player	Video Player With Ads
Quality Support	Dedicated, Responsive Support
No Community	Thriving Facebook Community
Rating: 82/100	Rating: 98/100

Starting Out With AdSense

My start in blogging came from an Amazon Affiliate course with SEO and it was legit. It thought a special recipe for success which laid the foundation for a very successful site.

The ideology of that course was that every page should make you money and there was no suggestion of using paid ads like Ad Sense or Ezoic. To be honest I hadn’t even heard of them and we were making $1,000’s per month though various affiliate programs.

We had a site that was a good candidate to try these ads out on and we got started with Ad Sense and the returns were not very good. We got $3.8 RPM which was not great but enough to keep the ads on as they weren’t affecting performance and traffic volumes.

Moving To Ezoic

Once we hit the 10,000 page views a month we signed up for Ezoic to get their Ads on the website and within 1 week we were up and running.

We got a login to the dashboard and we set up the wordpress plugin to connect our site to the dashboard.

We then got our Account manager named Oscar who was a huge help and someone that really helped us out a lot to get up and running with Ezoic.

Ezoic Will Ask You To Change Your DNS Settings

So our Account manager asked us to use the DNS setting instead of the WordPress plugin and we went along with it.

The issue of DNS has never been my strongest point, I am aware of what nameservers do to point at a particular host and email provider but don’t have much detailed knowledge beyond that.

We switched the namesevers over and Oscar got to work setting up our Ads and they were running very shortly after the DNS settings were changed, much to our excitement.

Monetization With Ezoic

Our excitement continued the next morning when we discovered that we were getting over $10 per 1,000 page views.

This is what we had waited a long time for because we knew that if simply increasing traffic was our goal we could quickly hit 1,000, 2,000 and 3,000 pageviews per day and at $12 per day, we would quickly be able to make a full time income from just these Ads.

Then The Pandemic Struck And Things Started Going Downhill Fast!

So, we held our end of the bargain quickly increasing the traffic but almost as soon as the pandemic struck, we started losing RPM fast.

That makes sense since a lot of advertisers were not paying for Ads anymore with their business shut down.

But it kept getting lower and lower and the strangest part was that our Affiliate sales were going through the roof.

Our website hits kept going up and up and the RPM’s kept coming down further and further and further, eventually bottoming out at $6 or $7 per 1,000 page views.

That’s when we got selected for Ezoic Premium.

Ezoic Premium

We had gotten to almost 2,000 views per day at this stage and our application had already been sent to Mediavine, which took a long time for them to accept as they were swamped.

We got an invite to trial Ezoic Premium for 2 weeks before they wanted us to commit to a monthly or yearly contract to pay THEM, so we could have access to their premium suppliers, this seemed a bit nuts but the promise they make is kind of ok.

They promise that you will earn more than you pay with premium. Never a fan of contracts though.

We went with the top package for our trial which costs $110 per month on a yearly contract and promises to pull in a guaranteed $140. I have some serious question marks about what happened next.

We did hit the $140 per month mark with the premium side, but the regular revenues dropped almost immediately.

Our traffic was way up yet weren’t making anywhere close to the $12 RPM we started out on and it seemed that the increase in premium corresponded perfectly to an almost equal drop in our regular revenue.

Our regular revenue dropped to $5 RPM at one point towards the end and we were glad to switch over to Mediavine and give them a try at this stage.

Don’t get me wrong, I am really grateful to Ezoic and I’m sure our dip in RPM was down solely to the Covid 19 situation but there were two other things I wasn’t 100% happy with.

Site Speed

As a member of Income School, we are privy to what people like about Ezoic and what people complain about and the hit on Site Speed, especially with mobile is one of the biggest turn offs people have with Ezoic.

We did notice a considerable decrease in our site speed when we switched to Ezoic but it didn’t have a negative effect on the amount of traffic coming into the site.

Intrusive Ads

Although you have full control over the placement of the Ads, they put a ton of Ads on your site by default and it can affect the overall user experience or just how you feel about the site yourself.

There was a lot of ads on our site but it wasn’t affecting our affiliate sales or our traffic didn’t go down so it wasn’t something that we saw much of a problem with.

Pros And Cons Of Ezoic

Pros:

Good Account Support And Set Up

Low Sign Up Numbers (10,000 visitors a month)

Quality Dashboard

Manual Placement Of Ads

Good RPM’s (At The Start That Dipped Quickly)

Excellent Way To First Monetize Your Blog

Accept Income School Students With Low Traffic

Cons:

Premium Feels Wrong

Changing DNS Settings

Support Take Longer To Respond

RPMS Dipped Considerably Over Time

Big Fluctuation In RPMS Between 3 Sites

The Move To Mediavine

So Mediavine is the next Ad Network that we were recommended to try by the guys at Income School and the general consensus is that they offer higher RPMS than Ezoic but you need to generate more traffic to get accepted to the platform.

We worked diligently on Blog posts designed to generate traffic as opposed to generating affiliate sales and we quickly scaled to 30,000 visitors a month when we applied for Mediavine.

The Application Process

The basic application basically involves filling out your general information like URL, Category, Where you heard about Mediavine etc and you have to give them a PDF of your Google Analytics results for the past 30 days to prove that you have sufficient traffic to move ahead.

The Waiting Game

We thought we were going to be up and running on the platform within a couple of days of sending in our Application but that wasn’t to be the case.

1 week passed and then 2 weeks and still no word and that is when I started to think we weren’t going to be accepted so I emailed them again and they responded quickly saying it was still in review as they were swamped.

Another 2 weeks passed and we finally got the email to say that were in and it were again excited by the prospect of higher RPMS and the setup process was under way.

Honestly, the hardest thing about switching from Ezoic to Mediavine with our site was changing the DNS settings back from Ezoic to our own Hosting provider.

I wasn’t sure where the files were being stored so I took a back up just in case and switched the DNS back. It turns out Ezoic sits in the middle of your site and the Ad provider so nothing to worry about but still confusing.

Mediavine Control Panel For WordPress

Mediavine connects to our WordPress site through the downloadable plugin which you connect to mediavine dashboard and that is about it. It is an extremely straight forward process.

The Side Bar

Another thing we had to do was to make our sidebar wide enough for the Mediavine ads.It was a little too narrow starting out and the Mediavine Engineers adding some custom CSS to resolve the issue and we were up and running and ready to start earning enhanced RPMS.

Remove All Ad Scripts

We had to remove our plugin called Ad Inserter and the Google Ad tags in the footer of our site before Mediavine could run and I was able to do this easily.

If you have any trouble with this process, the engineers will help you out with this without any issues.

We had to add a privacy policy for Mediavine and were up and running.

Ad Placements

Mediavine suggest 9 default Ad placement that they recommend you to stick with for the first 2/3 months and that is what we are doing. The RPMS started at $8 and it is still climbing steadily everyday.

This has coincided with a lovely increase in traffic so we can see a full time income coming just from Mediavine in the near future which is awesome.

Initial Teething Problems

We started earning really quickly with Mediavine but two initial snags held us back. The option to automatically upload the Ads.txt file wasn’t working due to our host so we had to upload that manually which wasn’t much of an issue.

We forgot to check the Custom Ads for the EU setting: Since we have a lot of visitors from the UK and the EU, we had to add a cookie policy to show personalized Ads within the EU and Mediavine support actually emailed us to check this option.

We are glad we did as it rapidly increased our RPMS to over $8 which is really cool, but we are just getting started and will check back in once the Ad Revenues settle.

Typically RPMS don’t fall below $20 on this site.

The average would be $25

Nice and very regular is $30 RPMS

Highest RPM we had in Q4, 2021 was $45 which is mind blowingly good!

Pros And Cons Of Mediavine

Pros:

Higher RPMS (Up to $30 Consistently Now)

More Up Front About Revenue Shares

Better Support

Facebook Community

Better Ads And User Experience

Better Ads For EU Customers

Rewards For Loyalty And Growth

Cons:

Long Approval Time

Less Control Over Ad Placement

Need Higher Traffic To Be Accepted

Conclusion

Ezoic and Mediavine are both fine providers of Ads for your website and both will earn you comfortably more than Ad Sense. Whether Ezoic or Mediavine will make you more money seems to change from industry to industry.

Some people have seen huge jumps in revenue when moving from Ezoic to Mediavine and the advice that I have followed and would give to anyone is to move to Ezoic as soon as you have enough traffic (10,000 visitors a month) and then move to Mediavine when you meet their minimum requirements.

If you find after a month or two that your revenues are down because you switched, you can always move back.

There are a ton of other providers for higher traffic numbers like 100k visitors per month and if you can get to someone like Ad Thrive, I would give them a go as well although personally I see no reason to move from Mediavine.

Our recommendation, while we do favour Mediavine and earn higher RPM’s with them, would be to try both and see what works the best for you and your readers! We do have another site with Ezoic still earning over the $10 RPM right now which is also cool!