If you’re not meeting Mediavine’s minimum requirements, you’ll be glad to know that there are interesting alternatives for smaller publishers. In this post, we’ll discuss Mediavine alternatives, but they are great alternatives to Google Adsense too.
Displaying ads on a blog is the most passive way to make money blogging.
All you really need is traffic and a self-hosted blog. Yes – that’s right, you won’t be able to display ads if you’re using a free blogging platform.
Adsense used to be the easiest way to get started with ads, but publishers were only able to make a few dollars per month with little traffic. No blogger wants to plaster their blog with ads if the return is not good enough.
Over the years, several ad networks appeared. I’ve been using Mediavine and it’s no secret – it’s one of the best ad management systems for publishers.
In 2020, they changed their minimum traffic requirements. It went from 25,000 monthly sessions to 50,000 monthly sessions.
If you’re looking for a solution, you’ll find the best Mediavine alternatives for bloggers below.
AdThrive
AdThrive is a solution for publishers who have over 100,000 monthly pageviews. Read about their requirements here. Depending on their traffic sources, some blogs are denied on Mediavine and decide to opt for AdThrive instead.
It’s the only solution for bloggers who have a large audience. It’s the biggest competitor of Mediavine because they are both targetting bigger publishers.
Aside from its proprietary ad placement technology, the company also maintains direct relationships with advertisers that bid directly with the firm for placement in Adthrive’s publisher network.
AdThrive has a pretty stringent quality assessment procedure for all applicants. They require that most of your audience comes from the United States.
After manually reviewing your site for conformance with initial requirements, your site and site traffic will be analyzed further for feasibility.
If these meet with Adthrive’s approval, you will get a layout recommendation that is intended to attract advertisers for high-quality ads that will earn you maximum revenue.
Monumetric
Monumetric is a great Mediavine alternative for smaller publishers. Like all ad networks, it partners with publishers to increase their revenue from ads. The key difference is how Monumetric makes this possible.
Unlike other services that employ a “one-size-fits-all” approach to ad placement, Monumetric never bombards your site with irrelevant ads. Instead, it works with you to improve your site’s productivity and make the content and delivery more exciting.
This helps you generate more organic traffic and enables you to earn maximum revenue from the ads placed on your site. Many publishers love Monumetric for its high ad quality.
Monumetric does have a somewhat steep requirement for applicants. You need to have at least 10,000 views per month and pass the 80,000 views per month ceiling to forego the high setup fee. Learn more about Monumetric requirements.
But if you are confident that you can pull in the numbers, Monumetric could be a great way to monetize your blog. That said, several publishers reported that they managed to make the money back within the first month.
Although, you should note that with the pandemic, Monumetric is not accepting small publishers at the moment. You could end up on a waiting list for months. I had to wait a few months, but eventually, I managed to join Monumetric with Nomad Life 101.
SHE Media
If you have a female-oriented blog that you want to monetize, SHE Media could be the perfect option for you. A partner network that monetizes blogs and websites catering to female audiences, SHE Media generates more than 50 million visitors per month.
This gives you an excellent opportunity to reach out to a pretty sizeable audience.
SHE Media also offers sponsored posts and paid product reviews. This gives publishers such as yourself even more opportunities for monetization.
Application to SHE Media is a fairly straightforward process. Your site needs to be geared toward a female audience and has been online for 90 days or more.
You also have to attract 20,000 or more visitors per month and allow commenting on your posts. They also require an audience mostly based in the United States. Although, some publishers reported that their requirements are somewhat flexible.
Ezoic
Ezoic is a Google-certified ad network that employs a range of state-of-the-art automated tools that could boost your earning potential considerably.
Unlike many other ad networks that have increased their page view requirements to 50,000 or higher, Ezoic maintains a modest requirement of 10,000 views per month. Lately, they started accepting smaller publishers once a month.
They usually announce it and they accept the first 200 applicants regardless of their traffic.
Even though the site is fairly small, it provides testing and optimization services for content and ad placement.
Ezoic also utilizes extensive data to determine your site’s ad tolerance and maximizes placement accordingly. This enables you to earn more revenue than if placeholders were used instead of ads.
Signing up for Ezoic is free, and you get to choose whether you start with an ad or layout tester. The service does review sites manually, so it might take a while before your site is approved. Once accepted into the network, you should see a considerable improvement in your site’s revenue.
Although, Ezoic has been quite controversial amongst publishers. Depending on your hosting provider and theme, you could have bugs.
Many publishers mentioned that their blogs were broken after installing the ads, some others reported that their site speed went down.
On the other hand, some publishers love their experience at Ezoic. It seems like it really depends – so it could be worth a try if you can’t be accepted anywhere else.
Final Thoughts On Mediavine Alternatives
Now, you’ll be happy to know that Mediavine is working on a solution for smaller publishers. The rumors predicted that this solution should be launched in 2021. Unfortunately, it’s still hasn’t launched even though we’re now in 2022.
That said, we don’t know what the minimum requirements are going to be, but we hope small publishers will be able to apply.
We’ll update this blog post when we know more.
Until then, you can always apply to one of the ad networks mentioned above. Note that some ad management systems make you sign a contract, so if you don’t want to be stuck with ads you don’t like, make sure to pick a platform that doesn’t require a commitment.
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