Mediavine Requirements: Why Our Application Process Yields the Best Results

Wondering about the requirements to become a publisher at Mediavine? You’ve come to the right place. Mediavine is for big bloggers and smaller publishers alike, placing a premium on original content and website quality. How do we define that, and do you qualify?

Let’s break down the Mediavine requirements and application process:

Mediavine Application Requirements

Mediavine requires 50,000 sessions a month (usually around 60,000 pageviews), according to Google Analytics. Unlike other ad management services, we use sessions as our metric of choice. (And here’s why.)

In short, we’ve found sessions to be the ideal metric for gauging how an audience interacts with a particular website, as well as its monetization potential. For further reading on the topic, see our recent guide explaining what is RPM and how Mediavine calculates it.

Mediavine requirements include much more than just session totals, however. So what else are we looking at during the application process?

Website Quality

Those familiar with Mediavine know that integrity and reputation mean everything to us. This is not only our mentality with publishers, but within the industry and with advertisers as well.

There’s a reason Mediavine delivers industry leading CPMs.

Incredible sales and revenue teams working behind the scenes, engineers developing innovative technology, and a support staff working 24/7 to help publishers all set us apart, but we’d be going nowhere fast if advertisers didn’t trust the quality of Mediavine sites.

Mediavine has built the largest, most trusted, brand-safe portfolio of sites at this scale, and we’ve developed longstanding partnerships with advertisers that typically wouldn’t work with what the industry (meaning advertisers, not publishers) often calls a “network.”

Remember, Mediavine is more than a network, and the reason advertisers trust and work with us is our reputation.

We maintain that uniquely high industry standard with the strictest guidelines and requirements of any ad management company out there.

Size and Quality Are Not One and the Same

We often hear that other companies require more traffic than Mediavine. This is true, but more traffic does not mean stricter quality guidelines.

Mediavine takes a long-game, holistic approach to ad management. Our bloggers produce quality content and provide advertisers with excellent value because their audiences are engaged. That happens at 50,000 sessions or 25 million sessions.

That’s what’s important to us, and it’s why we have such strict guidelines for whom is accepted.

Think about it this way: When searching for anything — a recipe, a credit card or the news of the day — do you rely on only the biggest and loudest voices, or do you turn to smaller, more personal and authentic sources you know you can trust?

So What Defines Quality?

At Mediavine, we require publishers to create original content that engages with users, to be closely vetted and to be in good standing within the industry and with our ad partners. We examine the following factors with every site that applies to Mediavine:

Original, Engaging Content

From craft, parenting and travel blogs to food, finance and fitness, Mediavine publishers succeed in all verticals and all are welcomed. First and foremost, our support team looks at the top-performing and most recent posts on every site to ensure that users are engaged with its content.

The reason is simple: If users aren’t engaged with content, they’re not going to be engaged with ads. Advertisers are obviously seeking a return on their investment, and if ads with Mediavine aren’t performing, they won’t see that return and will realize it quickly.

Clean, Verified, White-Listed Traffic

Going hand-in-hand with content that engages readers? Actual, human readers. Wild concept, right? Every Mediavine applicant submits a PDF providing us with their Google Analytics and all the traffic and user behavior insights therein. This allows us to ensure that traffic is natural and organic.

You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at the sheer amount of NHT (non-human traffic) or paid traffic plaguing the Internet. Some studies have suggested that up to 40 percent of all online ads are served to fraudulent visitors. At Mediavine, that percentage is close to zero.

After extensive vetting using Google Analytics, we hand things off to our ad partners who use internal blacklists and third-party tools, such Integral Ad Science and White Ops, to further verify your traffic and safeguard our reputation, their own and yours as well. Everybody wins.

Google Adsense Good Standing

Mediavine is a Google Certified Publisher Partner and one of the biggest players in the industry is Google AdExchange. In order to make sure sites perform optimally, we’ll make sure your site is in current good standing with Google AdSense and Google AdExchange.

We unfortunately can no longer work with sites that are not.

Eliminating Ad Policy Violations Before They Happen

We recently joined the Coalition For Better Ads, but Mediavine was a vocal advocate for the highest industry standards long before that, placing user experience above all else.

As part of our requirements, we ensure publishers won’t be hit with policy violations pertaining to ad density, incorrect sticky or refresh ads or other non-disruptive units.

A frequent question we get is how many ads does Mediavine run? Short answer: the perfect amount to maximize viewability and page speed, resulting in the best CPMs and user experience.

Brand Safety

Advertisers are understandably vigilant about their brands running alongside appropriate content, not material that could tarnish their image. We vet all sites to make sure their content is brand safe.

Once you make it through the application process, all of which is vetted by Mediavine, the rest is remarkably fast, thanks to our ad technology and incredible launch team.

We know the Mediavine requirements and application process might seem a bit more involved and strict than some publishers expect, but the results are well worth it.