In the publisher advertising space, there are no two names that are more known than Ezoic and Mediavine. These two ad technology networks are the most commonly used companies after Google Adsense as a way to monetize a blog through advertisements. There are other big players like Monumetric and Adthrive but I’ve had no experience with these.
I started my blogging journey only using Adsense before switching over the Ezoic in 2019. Over the years, Ezoic was making more money for me than Adsense ever was which was good. At some point, my blog traffic really started to pick up and I was able to get past the Mediavine threshold of 50k sessions a month so it was a matter of time before I decided to switch to Mediavine.
If you’re reading this post, you probably already know the basic differences between Mediavine and Ezoic. You’ve probably read over and over again why Mediavine is the gold standard and to switch to Mediavine as soon as possible. That’s exactly what I did (although it took me longer to pull the trigger).
This blog post will talk about my experiences on Ezoic and my experiences on my new ad network, Mediavine. I will compare my RPMs (revenue per thousand visitors), ad quality, site speed, customer service, and more. I will be providing my own personal opinion and experience without any sponsorships or bias. I apologize for any blunt wording in advance!
What is Ezoic Ads?
Ezoic is an innovative platform that leverages artificial intelligence to help website owners and publishers optimize their ad revenue, user experience, and site performance. Founded in 2010, Ezoic offers a suite of tools designed to simplify the process of managing and monetizing online content. The platform’s core functionality revolves around automated A/B testing, which enables users to experiment with different layouts, ad placements, and content configurations to determine the most effective combinations for maximizing revenue and engagement.
One of Ezoic’s standout features is its AI-driven ad tester, which dynamically adjusts ad placements in real-time based on user behavior and interaction. This allows publishers to identify the best-performing ad configurations without manual intervention, leading to improved click-through rates and higher overall earnings.
Additionally, Ezoic provides a comprehensive analytics suite that offers insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and revenue metrics, empowering publishers to make data-driven decisions to enhance their website’s performance.
Approval process for Ezoic
Ezoic has a very lax approval policy. There are no more traffic minimum requirements which makes it easy to get a site approved. They generally just require you to be in good standing with Google Adsense, and not be in a questionable niche.
What is Mediavine?
Mediavine is a high-end display advertising network that is very popular with lifestyle sites. However, it will accept other niches. It’s one of the most popular digital publishing networks because it pays some of the highest RPMs to bloggers and is easiest to set up.
RPM stands for revenue per mille (mille means thousand in Latin) and is the estimated amount you will earn for every 1,000 views. They also breakdown RPM by sessions which will always be higher than that of page views.
Approval process for Mediavine
Mediavine is extremely popular and considered the gold standard among advertisers. They have strict requirements to join with requirements like
50k sessions a monthTraffic primarily coming from US/UK/EUTraffic cannot be concentrated in just a few pages
Expect to take roughly 2-3 weeks from when you apply until they accept you. They will audit your entire website including checking Google Analytics, as well as the content of your blog.
Once you are approved within Mediavine however, they go through all the stops to make sure you are optimized and earning as much as possible. They make money when you make money so it is in their best interests to take care of you as much as possible.
Mediavine has since released a product called Mediavine Journey where you only need 10,000 sessions a month to qualify. I don’t think this program earns at the same rate as a full fledged Mediavine member but I’m not an expert on it.
My experience with Ezoic
My experience with Ezoic for the past 5 years has been overall satisfactory. I wouldn’t say it was anything exceptional but I also wouldn’t say it was anything negative.
Ezoic does a good job of optimizing your ad space and ensuring you earn much more money than being on Google Adsense. I found their customer support to be decent as they always were able to answer my questions and concerns in a somewhat timely fashion. I’ve broken down my experience with Ezoic in the following sections.
Setting up on Ezoic
I joined Ezoic in 2019 after receiving an email from their staff promising higher ad rates than Adsense. I was not earning much money in those days (maybe $100-200 a month) so I figured why not give it a shot? Within a few weeks, I could tell that Ezoic was definitely worth the investment as my earnings more than doubled.
At the time, Ezoic required 10,000 visitors a month (similar to sessions in Google Analytics) but nowadays, they have waived this requirement and you don’t have any minimum traffic requirements.
Ezoic was not easy to set up and their interface, while professional looking, was anything but intuitive. I had to add so much code to my blog, tinker with the different ad settings, wrap code around my ads, change my nameservers to integrate into their platform, and so much more. It is certainly a painful process and I’m not sure I ever fully got it right.
The process of adding ads onto the blog was also overly complicated. I spent hours and hours setting what what I thought was what I wanted only for it to be far from it. I had countless emails between myself and the Ezoic support on getting ads right that eventually, I just gave up and let their “AI” do it for me. This was also quite disastrous as it would put ads in random places.
Ezoic’s impact on site speed
One of the negatives for Ezoic was how cluttered their ads were. They injected a ton of code into your website and you could tell it slowed down the website. Even super fast WordPress themes seemed to be boggled down by the weight of Ezoic’s code. I spent years trying to figure out how to optimize the site speed and was never sure I got it right.
Ezoic did introduce its Leap feature some years back which promised to be the all in one caching and CDN plugin that you would need to beat Google Core Web Vital scores. I implemented this immediately and even though it took a long time to set up (days or weeks on end), I saw that it did make an impact on real world site speed. I still never passed mobile CWV scores but it definitely felt faster when I tested it.
Look and feel of the Ezoic Ads
The worst part of Ezoic simply came down to how its ads looked. Their ad script did a terrible job of injecting ads in the right places of the blog. Different ad sizes, random video ads, and spammy looking ads all contributed to Ezoic giving an ugly ad experience. Let’s be honest, there are no ads in the world that look nice or make a website better but Ezoic seemed to really make my website look worse.
I wish I had taken more screenshots of the ads on my blog before I left Ezoic.
Ezoic customer support
Ezoic customer support was always helpful for me. Perhaps that’s because I was one of their Premium level publishers and had been with them for awhile. In the early days, they helped me set up my ads but I still had to tinker with it repeatedly to get it the way I wanted.
As I progressed through the ranks of Ezoic, I joined their Premium program and always had a dedicated customer support rep to help me with anything I need. They were generally responsive replying to my messages within 1-2 days. Every quarter, I was also allowed 1 in depth meeting with my support rep where they would do a deep dive into my blog and provide any insights. These were nice as I was able to speak to a real live human being and talk shop.
While I know many others have had bad experiences with Ezoic’s support, I can’t say the same about my experience.
There is a Facebook Ezoic group which you can join when you become an Ezoic publisher. There are a lot of discussions happening in this group about the blogging space, questions around Ezoic, and general helpful tips.
Ezoic has produced a lot of extra tools in the years I was with them that are meant to help your website grow and enhance the user experience. These include things like
Ezoic Leap which is a caching and CDN plugin meant to speed up your websiteBig Data Analytics: A detailed analytics system similar to Google Analytics but tailored for analyzing your ad revenuesNicheIQ which is an all in one SEO toolkitFlickify which turns your text based content into videos.
I tried many of these products and long story short is while they are nice things to have, they never really produced the added value that Ezoic probably had envisioned. Many of these things were buggy and ultimately didn’t help me out as much as I thought it would. I’m sure others had more positive experiences but it simply wasn’t needed for me.
I think perhaps some of the reason Ezoic’s user experience declined in the years I was with them was because they put too much resources and focus on producing these types of products that probably didn’t need to be done.
Ezoic Premium Plans
Ezoic’s Premium plans were something of a controversial topic within the digital advertiser space. For a monthly fee, Ezoic would allow you into their “premium” plan where they promised you more revenue as you were offered better advertisers. The costs would vary depending on how much money you made per month.
Your revenue would then be split by “core earnings” and “premium earnings”. To earn premium earnings, you would have to pay a fee and then you were promised a premium earnings range that was a bit higher than your fee. For example, let’s say the premium fee was $100 a month. Ezoic would guarantee you something like $150 a month.
However, the whole thing just seemed sketchy because why would I pay money to make a bit more money? I subscribed to the premium program nonetheless and was never sure if it was actually earning me more money or if it was just all a big ruse.
My experience with Mediavine
I joined Mediavine mid 2024 after many years on Ezoic’s platform. Mediavine is and has always been considered the gold standard when it comes to advertising networks. I was always jealous of other bloggers on Mediavine’s network and I had always liked the look and feel of the ads they were running.
Mediavine is considered the gold standard in the publishing space. You need to have 50,000 sessions a month in order to qualify for their services. This threshold used to be 25k sessions but was increased in 2022. 50k sessions a month is no easy feat and many bloggers will never reach these heights in their entire careers. Sessions are not the same as pageviews after all so you really need to have decent traffic to hit this threshold.
I first hit the 50k sessions threshold on a regular basis at the end of 2022. I maintained this throughout 2023 and finally took the plunge and applied for Mediavine in 2024. I was quickly approved and I immediately noticed the difference.
Setting up with Mediavine
To integrate with Mediavine’s system, I only had to install Mediavine’s WordPress plugin, add a few lines of code to my website, and the rest was entirely taken care of by Mediavine’s staff. I couldn’t believe how easy it was especially after spending countless hours setting up Ezoic.
There were a few small details I had to change on my blog like increasing the side bar width and updating my ads.txt file but the entire process felt like a hand-holding exercise on Mediavine’s behalf. I was fully integrated within a few minutes.
Once you’re integrated, you and Mediavine’s staff will agree on a “start date”. They will then flip a switch on the start date and all the ads will be populating your blog. They do say it can take a few weeks and up to a few months for their algorithm to fully understand and optimize your website. It took at least a month for my RPMs to stabilize and they were increasing throughout this period.
All in all, Mediavine is simple. There is no extra fluff, the ads are lightweight, and there is no convoluted premium plan where they ask you to pay up front for something. Once you’re fully set up, you’re off to the races.
Look and feel of Mediavine ads
For starters, Mediavine ads simply just look better. While no ads are great, I always liked how Mediavine organizes them with consistent ad sizes and a parralax scroll effect over a light grey background. While the number of ads remain the same between Mediavine and Ezoic, I’ve found that they generally look less out of place within a blog post.
Mediavine’s control panel is also much easier to use and understand than Ezoic’s. There are far fewer pages and far fewer customization options to understand with Mediavine. Everything is simple and it works.
Mediavine, while it doesn’t have the in depth analytics tool that Ezoic’s BDA (Big Data Analytics) provides, still offers a stats section that gives you all you need. Mainly this is your top performing pages along with their traffic and RPMs, traffic based on your device type, traffic by country, and more. I never missed the BDA tool from Ezoic.
Mediavine Customer support
Mediavine customer support definitely elevates the experience. They have a dedicated chat function in the admin panel and you can expect a response within a few hours during work hours. I haven’t been with Mediavine long enough to really provide detailed feedback on the support but I also feel like I won’t need to talk to them as much because everything works so well.
Similar to Ezoic, there is a Mediavine Facebook Group which seems to have much more legit publishers with big time blogs. There is more insightful discussion happening in that group than the one in Ezoic.
Mediavine site speed
Mediavine’s back end code is far less than Ezoic. I think this lends to Mediavine being less resource intensive for your website and therefore site speeds are better. I have not done any specific tests on this matter but my Google Core web vital scores are already much better using Mediavine than when I was in Ezoic.
I’ve also changed my caching plugins since I was using Ezoic Leap and now I use FlyingPress.
Mediavine also produces a few extra tools to help publishers with their website. These include
Grow: Grow is a tool Mediavine created to help with newsletter sign-up forms. Once Grow has emails, it can also send automated newsletters to this list. It’s very simple and effective, without needing a WordPress pluginTrellis, a high speed and simple WordPress theme that has been heavily optimized for site speed, simplicity, and aesthetics.
While I don’t use Trellis because it costs money and I find the layout to be too simple for my tastes, I have used Grow which looks great and is very easy to set up. It’s a great tool to get people to sign up for my newsletters. I don’t use it for my newsletters as I want more customization which Grow doesn’t currently offer.
RPMs between Mediavine and Ezoic
Now on to the most important stuff, money. While I make money blogging, it’s not the reason I do it. Nevertheless for this post, it’s what everyone is after!
While the customer experience and visual impact of the ads are extremely important, money is probably one of the main points of interest.
RPMs for Ezoic
In my 5 years using Ezoic, I’ve hit the $45 mark only on a handful of days but I generally averaged between $20-25. There was a period in 2022 where I hit the mid $30s as Ad spending was at its peak and again in Q2 of 2024. However, I have no way to compare this to what I would have had with Mediavine since I can only use one ad network at a time.
I was on Ezoic’s premium plan and the revenue figures in the chart above is inclusive of all my premium earnings. Remember, Ezoic premium also charged a monthly fee and I was paying anywhere between $100 and $300 a month to be on their premium plan so all in all, this had to be deducted from my total earnings which means my EPMV should also be $2-4 less than what is shown on these graphs.
With Ezoic, my highest revenue month was March 2022 ($2.1k after premium subscription fee) and April 2024 ($2.2k after premium subscription fee).
One feature I liked about Ezoic was its Ad Revenue Index. This graph represents a normalized composite of ad rates paid by advertisers for display ads realized by websites across the globe, measured and charted by date. It updates every day and you can use it as a way to gauge how well the market is doing overall which has a direct impact on your EPMV.
RPMs on Mediavine
I’ve been with Mediavine for 3 months as of the time of this blog post and it’s clear that Mediavine is the winner as far as revenue generation goes. My RPMs (Revenue per thousand sessions) which is very similar to Ezoic’s EPMV (Revenue per thousand visitors) is significantly higher on Mediavine than it is with Ezoic.
In the first month alone, I made almost $3k from Mediavine. This was with less traffic than what I had the month prior when I earned about $2.2k on Ezoic.
On average over the past three months, I’ve generated something in the $40-45 RPM range with Mediavine which is roughly 50% higher than that with Ezoic. This is an insane number that I never thought I could achieve with any consistency. These three months were between June and August which encompasses the end of Q2 which is generally higher for advertiser spending, as well as the beginning of Q3 which is typically when advertisers stop spending. This means the RPM sample includes the good and the bad.
RPMs with Mediavine take awhile to ramp up as their algorithm gets to know your blog and where and how to best place its ads. I will update this graph in the future with more data as it becomes available!
Mediavine vs Ezoic Pros and Cons
Mediavine and Ezoic are both great alternatives to Google Adsense and you’re likely to make more money than just being only on Adsense. With that said, I think if you have the traffic requirements, absolutely go with Mediavine because the experience can’t be compared.
Lot of people like to trash on Ezoic, but overall, I had good experiences with them. They generated a lot of money for me in the 5 years I was with them and for that, I am thankful. However, there’s just a noticeable step up when you switch to Mediavine that cannot be dismissed.
