Last Updated on May 6, 2022 by Scott Charleboix

This two-part blog post, an overview of Mediavine, is a round-up post.  If you’re a blogger this goal should at the forefront of your business so that your blog (an asset of your business) can start making lots of money.  The 1^st part (this post) looks at an overview of Mediavine with an emphasis on getting accepted into Mediavine.  The 2nd part looks at tips and suggestions that other bloggers have provided for the purpose of how to get your blog into Mediavine. 

An overview of Mediavine

I wanted to give you a little insight into this sudden revelation that came out of nowhere.  I was blogging yesterday, and I was looking for Pinterest pins on Mediavine to add to my Pinterest Board, PinArtwork SEO Blogger. In the process I found two blogs (see below) that had the same feature at the top of their blogs, and I was determined to find out what it was.

I spent a good few hours researching on Google trying to find out what they’re called and fortunately, someone on Mediavine reached out to me. 

The Mediavine team is continuously working closely with publishers to improve the tools they offer to bloggers like you and me. And they provided me with helpful information even though I’m not yet one of their publishers.

Once you join (and even before) Mediavine has a vast pool of helpful resources for educating bloggers to improve their blog. Even if you’re not in the Mediavine forum yet, there’s a wealth of information in the form of FAQs and articles for you to get into the Mediavine arena at Mediavine help docs.

After all, they one you to profit from your blog and I’m sure they take a portion of those profits too, so why wouldn’t they want to help you when it’s a win-win situation.

I don’t want to lose sight of what it was that led me to Mediavine so I’ll get back to my point. 

1. 5 Creative Ways to use the create WordPress plugin in your Marketing
2. How to get your blog into Mediavine

Mediavine tools

If you go to either of these two sites what you’ll see (after you begin to scroll down the page a little more) are the items pictured below (the last two are the same photos with a closer look – later in the post I’ll tell you what these are called):

I knew from blogging that getting into Mediavine is exceptionally hard.  Harder now than it used to be because at one-time the requirement was only 25,000 sessions, but as of now (in May 2022) it’s at 50,000 sessions per month (hopefully it won’t get any higher). 

I’m sure that I won’t get accepted into Mediavine (at this time) because I have way less than the required amount, I’m only sitting at 442 sessions per month. 

From Mediavine here’s the threshold that you must achieve in order to be Mediavine approved. 

“Our network partners require that we only bring on publishers with 50,000 sessions or more and who are in good standing with Google. If you’ve ever banned, rejected or had a unresolved policy violation with Google Adsense, we won’t be able to bring you on at this time.” -Mediavine

After submitting my request I was prompted with an e-mail with the subject:  Mediavine Application Request for Additional Information: 

“We ask that you verify that your site’s monthly traffic by running a report out of Google Analytics using a template that has been approved by our ad partners, and emailing us the results.” 

The instructions for the steps to follow are outlined in the e-mail,  An important element that I’d like to bring to your attention is this is perhaps one of the easiest ways to determine how many sessions you have per month.

How to check your sessions in Google Analytics

“Visit this URL. It will take you to your Google Analytics and create a template of the dashboard we [Mediavine] need from your analytics automatically.” 

Unfortunately the requirements that Mediavine states in their e-mail is that they want you to change the time period to the last 30 days. 

What I had thought my total sessions were for the last 30 days was a dismal 62 sessions per month and not the 442 that I thought when I looked up the stats for last month.  You’d think they’d be the same, but it isn’t the case and different parameters are pulled in the equation for the last 30 days vs. last month. 

At the present time, I’m in an expensive 4-month blogging course called The Brilliant Blogging Academy (TBBA) so this will be the next topic that I’ll ask for help from my blogging mentor, Taylor Stanford. 

There are many advantages that other bloggers rave about when they get into Mediavine that has tremendously monetized their blog as compared to other networks offering ads.

I personally tried Google AdSense and the ads that it was showing were so far fetched that I didn’t even want to click on the ads so I quickly turned off Google AdSense.  If I wouldn’t click on the ads, the chances are very likely that my visitors wouldn’t want to either. 

I’m making it a personal goal to get into Mediavine and it’s going to be a long haul before that will happen.  The thing is that I need to find the “right” strategies to get into Mediavine which are mainly centralized around improving the total number of sessions per month.

In July of 2022, PinArtwork SEO will have been blogging for two years.  It’s doubtful that I’ll be there by then but at least I’ll have the framework done to get there and it all begins with establishing SMART Goals. 

The first part is that since I’m not there (and if you’re not either) we need to look at the strategies that exist before we can begin to create some specific SMARTER goals. This post provides the framework to define the strategies and next I’ll personally be developing SMARTER goals to achieve these strategies and you may want to consider adding those goals to your “written” business plan.

With my collective earnings in blogging I’ve been able to amass a small fortune of $52.00.  This stems from my affiliate links earnings.  But that’s not good enough for me and I’m looking at the bigger picture to make both of us more money for our blogs.  

Mediavine entry requirements

Mediavine’s entry requirements are “tough” for little bloggers

We need to have at least 50,000 sessions even to be considered!

I wouldn’t suggest that you apply unless you have an amount that’s relatively close to 50,000 sessions. 

If you’re relatively close there’s a chance that you might get accepted and if you don’t it’s my understanding that Mediavine will provide a detailed explanation as to what’s needed in order to get there. 

From what I’ve been able to gather (because I’ve only partially applied), the principal items they look at is your sessions per month, they also look at your site’s bigger picture such as details like your bounce rate, your site’s content, the traffic that you’re getting and where it’s originating from.  In a nutshell, they’re concerned with your site interaction and engagement.  Why?  For the purpose is it sufficient enough to earn an ad income?   

How to get our blogs accepted into Mediavine

I’m looking at the experience of other bloggers and extrapolating what they’ve had to say in order to get accepted into Mediavine.  Hopefully these tidbits of information will lead us in the right direction. 

As mentioned above there are many factors that Mediavine looks at to get accepted and getting to 50,000 sessions per month is only a part of the acceptance equation. 

You’ll need to have diversified traffic as well as a good bounce rate.  I’ve put a lot of effort into reducing my bounce rate and I’m proud to announce that my average bounce rate is less than 20%. 

What it takes for you to get into Mediavine is going to change from one blogger to the next.  Luckily, for my blog once I’m able to reach the 50,000 sessions per month, it “should’ be a slam dunk.  If not, I’ll be provided with the necessary steps to take if I don’t get accepted and move forward from there. 

What we need to do is to identify the things that are necessary for in the future so that someday we can confidently apply to Mediavine with confidence to get accepted. 

Fellow bloggers have already provided how they’ve been able to qualify for Mediavine so the remainder of this blog post is to use their tips. 

Is it merely just about how much traffic you have?  Nope.  It’s more than just that.  By focusing purely on your traffic and your number of your sessions you’re taking the wrong approach.  Please don’t misunderstand what I’ve just said, it’s still important to pay attention to your page views and the number of sessions that you have on a monthly basis.  But to reiteriate, that won’t be your ‘primary’ focus. 

Let’s move forward instead of getting a dear John letter from Mediavine so that we can get an acceptance welcome e-mail to the exclusive Mediavine club. 

What’s an alluring part of Mediavine?

First, Mediavine stands slightly apart from affiliate links because they’re ad networks.  Much like affiliate links, you’ll get paid when the ads that are provided get clicked on and you’ve send traffic to those sites. 

Secondly, content creators can have better payouts and Mediavine is their to help you setup your site taking you by the hand to set up your ads. 

Mediavine is famous for two things. First, they are known for paying their content creators way better than other ad networks. Secondly, they are known for top-notch customer service and setup. 

Mediavine has already helped me and I’m not even a publisher yet.  How did they help me you might ask? 

At the beginning of this post, I mentioned that I was looking at information for Mediavine and wanted to know what plug-in it was that created the information for the two posts at the top of the post.   Remember this (see below)?

This is Mediavine’s response and what the image above is referred to is called the Header Carousel of Recommended Content (a filmstrip) feature. 

“Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you are talking about the Header Carousel of Recommended Content (the filmstrip) feature and that is actually part of another product, Grow, which is available exclusively (for now) to Mediavine Publishers and has not been part of Grow Social Pro.

What’s Grow you ask?

Grow is Mediavine’s user engagement suite that is designed to help encourages readers to log in, save their favorite posts, and share content, as well as gives readers a personalized browsing experience – and it’s our solution to the demise of third-party cookies, which will help publishers make more money in the long run.

Grow is also completely free and is currently only offered to Mediavine publishers (for now!)! Here are some great articles to help you learn more about Grow, if you’re interested:

• “What is Grow?“
• “Grow and First-Party Data: Everything You Need to Know,”
• “Grow Features Available NOW!“
  

I hope that helps, let me know if you have absolutely any questions!

Julie Sarault
Lead Support Specialist, Mediavine”

Other ad networks to try (that I haven’t participated in yet) are InfoLinks, Media.net and there’s a few more that you can try. 

How much do you make with Mediavine?

An incentive to help motivate you is that one blogger started earning $10/day immediately after she joined Mediavine. 

I personally don’t want to put a monetary value on how much you can make with Mediavine because it’s going to vary from blogger to blogger.  To me, I’d feel awesome if I were to make at least $10/day.  Then once you have a good handle on that you can shoot for another goal and branch out to hopefully make more. 

I did a quick Google search for how much do bloggers make with Mediavine and this what at the top of the SERP results:  “Bloggers can make between $10-30/1,000 blog sessions or beyond with Mediavine’s high-earning RPMs (rate per one thousand impressions).”

Let’s take a look at the official Mediavine entry requirements and then we’ll look at some specific tactics that we need to take for our website. 

Mediavine Entry Requirements

As I previously mentioned, you’ll be required to provide analytics from Google regarding your traffic if you want to apply to Mediavine – in order to “show” that you meet the fundamental requirements. (Find their blog post about how to get your blog into Mediavine here.)

Per Mediavine, these are the basic requirements: 

Here are some suggestions that aren’t listed in the criteria above but may come to if you’re not approved.  Mediavine also wants to see the following: 

• Traffic coming from more than one source
• Engagement on your site, preferably a low “bounce rate.”
• High time-on-page – more than a few seconds on average
• The more organic traffic, the better – So you need to concentrate on your SEO

Conclusion

By working on all these that first appear to be very daunting, you’ll have a better chance to earn more revenue with Mediavine (after we’re accepted – gotta start thinking positive on this one)! 

The amount of income that you’ll receive is directly correlated to the factors that have been mentioned above (basic requirements and those not listed). 

The post called How To Qualify For Mediavine: Top 5 Tips is a post that I highly recommend. One of the recent goals that I have on my blog is to update all of my old content. And wouldn’t you know it, Becky suggests that updating your old content is her #1 tip to getting accepted into Mediavine. Becky also has advice in the blog post to how you should proceed with updating old content (right before the tip of #2).