How Much Can You Make With Mediavine? A $2,000 Case Study.

I had a lunch with a friend who told me about Mediavine and all the extra money it was making him ($2,000+ monthly). So is it worth it? Yep and I’ll tell you how to do it too.

What is Mediavine?

(The above picture is a screenshot). Here is Mediavine.com’s official page.

It’s basically an ad network like Google Adsense, where you sign up with it, then put up the network’s ads on your site. There are a few STARK differences though…

Google Adsense vs Mediavine, the main differences explained:

With Google Adsense, you’d get paid each time someone would click on an ad that is displayed on your site.

With Mediavine, you’d get paid per session on your website (also known as visitors who come and stay on your page, basically having a session in it).

This already would make the latter ad network FAR more attractive for potential users but there’s actually more to this that when I heard from that same friend, my eyes almost exploded…

This place actually pays you EXPONENTIALLY more than you’d get paid from Adsense. We’re talking 10-20 times MORE. And in the case studies I will be showing you today, you’re going to see that this is possible with Mediavine. And on that note…

How much money is my friend making with Mediavine? Here are his stats:

My friend Eddy runs a big website called WorkatHomenoScams.com and was eligible to run Mediavine ads on it.

Since doing it, here are his monthly earnings reports with Mediavine:

Additionally, I have another friend who I know runs Mediavine ads on his site that also makes several $1,000 from it monthly. Now that’s 2 personal case studies out of many others out there who likely have similar experiences with this ad network.

This is an example of what’s possible with Mediavine.

Here’s how you can do it too:

Mediavine has a specific quota a website owner must meet if he or she is to become eligible to run their ads on their site and that is 25,000 ORGANIC and REAL visitors monthly. This is about 900-1,000 visits a day, which in Eddy’s case, he did accomplish.

Here is a link to sign up with Mediavine and you will find that 25k user quota mention there.

Now in Eddy’s case, were he to use Adsense for his site, he’d probably make about $10 a day with his current traffic stats. And this is why I really don’t recommend Adsense if you’re seeking to make serious money through display ads.

But with the other network it may actually go past $100 and his stats above really show the difference. And here’s another major perk of Mediavine:

• They pay PER visitor.
• Adsense and other common display networks pays per click.

This means you can literally make money from every visitor who comes to your site with the former.

Despite Mediavine being a lucrative option, there are strict quotas…

Besides the 25,000 visitor MONTHLY sessions that need to be met, this network also requires that you do not run any other ad network’s ads on the same site, which I personally have NO problem with since most of the other ones pay so little, they are an easy thing to throw out and to exclusively stick to only this network.

Now the other thing I have to mention is affiliate offers…

Suppose you run a website that has affiliate links or checkout carts to personal products or services you sell, would that make you ineligible to run Mediavine ads on the same site?

The answer is no because this rule about exclusivity only applies to competing ad networks, and has nothing to do with affiliate offers, so affiliate marketers, rejoice, you can have it both ways here.

The only 2 real obstacles here are:

And they can be completed:

1) Meeting the 25k visitor quota:

Getting a 1,000 or so visits a day to your website is certainly a tough thing to do and those visits would ideally have to be organic visitors and this means you can’t use paid ads or any other artificial means to get traffic to your site.

So the person who seeks to be eligible for Mediavine would have to ONLY rely on organic traffic and if they meet the quota, they would need to prove to this ad network that the numbers are legit.

From what I was told by my friend, they literally log into your Google Analytics account to verify the numbers, so don’t think you can “cheat them”. 

2) The other is the speed of your site with the ads on it might be slower.

From what I have noticed, a person who runs Mediavine ads on their website can have the speed of that website lowered. Why? Because all those ads loading up on a smartphone or laptop takes extra time. Now this MAY present 2 issues:

A) The longer a site loads typically means the less chances a person will wait for it to happen, so if you have good hosting, you can generally avoid this problem and considering my friend is making good money from this venture, the speed issue doesn’t appear to be a big deal.

By the way, I recommend hosting from this company, Wealthy Affiliate, which provides security, high quality hosting and other benefits, like training to build up the site, all included in it’s premium package.

B) Site rankings on Google and other search engines are impacted by slow load times, so this may result in lower rankings in certain cases. I hope this is something Mediavine and hosting companies can figure out in the future, which would make it much more recommendable (even though it already is).

About reaching that 25k visitor quota. I can help you there:

Well this is where we need to talk traffic generation. And that’s something I am good at, as is Eddy.

Normally this is where I’d preach about the concept of niche oriented content creation and that your website should produce content strictly based on the niche market, but in order to make your page eligible for Mediavine, this can become a tough thing.

For example, if you own a website that is centered around a not so popular niche market, then you’d need to produce 100’s of articles worth of content to get even close to that quota.

My advice for people who have sites on none popular niche markets would be to broaden your content production, meaning expand outward in the type of content you create and start writing articles that are related to the niche, but not directly about it.

For example…

If you run a blog on on mountain bikes, that is a very specific topic, and you’d probably need to write several 100 articles on this very specific topic to get close to a 1,000 visitors a day. 

One way I’d expand outward if you own a site like this is to start writing content on sports bicycles, hybrid bicycles and start reviewing popular bike accessories which aren’t necessarily related to mountain bikes. 

While this would dilute the incoming traffic to your website and bring in people who aren’t interested in mountain bikes, it would raise the number of overall traffic to the site, and in a far shorter time, bring your site’s daily traffic closer to the 25k session mark.

Now if you do own a website whose niche is specific, YET popular, keep producing content based on the same topic. 

In my particular case, my site currently gets about 300 visits a day (yet it still makes $60k yearly) and I would need to start writing about more broadened make money online topics, such as survey sites, rewards sites, MLM programs and basically just ANYTHING that could be construed as making money online.

My current plan (I will probably be using Mediavine in the near future):

The friend I mentioned isn’t the only one who took the plunge and started using them. I can name at least 2 more friends (from this following list of people who make money online) who have started using this network too and are praising it.

Currently, my goal is to get THIS website up to 1,000 or more visitors daily, get the approval from Mediavine, run the ads, then apply secondary sites I have but am not really focused on monetizing, to use that network. At the moment, this site gets about 500 visits daily, 400 of which are organic.

There are at least 2 particular sites I have in mind that I want to monetize off through this network:

A drone site that currently gets 50 or more visits a day.

A site on mud running events that gets about 100+ visits a day.

Update: A travel and nature site I’m also building up is going to probably be using Mediavine when the organic traffic climbs to the 25k quota.

Remember, your first quota will be 25k sessions, but the next one will be 10k sessions, so applying this, the secondary sites I just listed would need to get 300-400 visitors daily to meet that secondary quota (not a problem).

Vitaliy, aren’t you contradicting yourself when it comes to ad networks like these?

Let me try to remain advice consistent here:

For years (and this year too), I have stuck by a principal that your site can monetize better if you promote ethical high ticket products, promote affiliate offers which pay you in recurring fashion, and promote your own stuff that also either pays well and/or in recurring fashion. 

There’s simply WAY more money in the short and long term through doing that and when I preached about these things (I still do), I compared the other options on the table to monetizing through a site, and when I did, ad networks like Adsense were what I compared those options to.

Naturally because Adsense paid very little and distracted people on your page, I figured omitting that ad network and going with my option was the clear choice. In fact, I have a very good article explaining how the same friend who currently uses Mediavine also made good money from Adsense, but he really lost out in the end and it was some serious losses.

With the knowledge I now have on Mediavine, that opinion has slightly evolved and allow me to explain specifically where:

1) Firstly, from what I’ve been told, the ads Mediavine runs on your site do not really impact conversions and sales all that much. If you are a good content creator, you should have no problem keeping eyes of your visitors on the content you put up, and then you can run those visitors (still) to your main affiliate or personal offers. Being that my experienced marketing buddies have already confirmed this, it’s a safe bet.

2) Secondly, the payment itself from this network is ridiculously higher than Adsense and they pay you per visitor, NOT for each click, so you can literally monetize off the incoming traffic on your site and not worry about who clicks and who doesn’t. A site which meets the 25k quota a month session can literally make $1,000’s of extra dollars monthly off this.

3) I personally don’t have time to invest in the secondary sites I mentioned because I have to focus on the main money maker/s, it’s just the smart and most logical thing I can do (there’s a lot of money to consider), so why not prop up the secondary sites so they meet the quota to run Mediavine ads on them and have them REALLY make good money and use those profits to expand my money maker sites to the next level through things like paid ad networks? 

That’s how I’m looking at it…

4) I can even use the Mediavine profits to hire decent freelance writers to further expand my site or sites content base with those profits.

When used intelligently (and I figure this strategy is more than intelligent enough), this is simply a win-win and great way to prop up my entire online business, not just sections of it.

Update: Here is an updated post on Mediavine and how to make sure you get approved for it.