Third-party cookies aren’t going away until 2024, but, well, 2024 isn’t exactly far away at this point, and regardless, you need to be running Grow now.
You should be running it yesterday or last month, honestly, but we’ll settle for now. Why? There are so many reasons we made a Top 10 list.
As a percentage of your overall audience, email traffic might be quite small — but it may be your most valuable traffic source. That’s because your email list is the only relationship with your audience that you actually own.
Your social traffic lives and dies with the platform you build it on. (How are your MySpace followers doing lately?) Even if the platform survives, algorithm changes wreak havoc.
Google Search traffic can tank with an update. Referral traffic can vanish without any warning or fault of your own. And few of us can rely on people typing our URL into their browsers.
The one constant since the 1970s? The Detroit Lions being bad at football. Email.
Grow is loaded with Subscribe features to help you expand exponentially in this arena. From Spotlight Subscribe, to pop-ups, Action Pack and Exclusive Content, Grow fuels newsletter growth — and builds relationships with your readers — no matter what the future holds.
We all love to talk about Chrome getting rid of third-party cookies (3PC) in 2024, but let’s not forget the trendsetters — Safari and Firefox put the kibosh on 3PC years ago.
When readers are logged into your site through Grow on these browsers, your earnings could increase*. Today. These readers currently can be valued at more than double the worth of non-Grow readers on average.
Better still, even with 3PC still around for the time being on Chrome, you could make more there as well. On average, authenticated traffic can be worth over 50 percent more than third-party data on Chrome because it’s so reliable. That’s right now, before cookies are gone, and that figure should only increase when we lose the ability to track non-Grow readers once 3PC are gone and the value of those readers decreases.
We still have two weeks of 2023 with 3PC in effect, and the 2024 phase out is going to be a slow rollout (only 1 percent of cookies will be deprecated initially).
That means we still have some time left with cookies around, and you better believe Grow is taking advantage of that.
On Chrome, if a logged-in reader who created a Grow account comes to your site, when they show up, they’re already signed in.
Publishers get all the advantages of logged in readers, like increased CPMs, and readers get personalized content they’ll love.
Simply turning on Grow could mean more money in your pocket* with no effort — and the sooner you turn it on, the more valuable it becomes in the long term.
To be clear, when we talk about cookies going away, we mean browser-based third-party cookies. When a reader logs in to your site, that’s stored on site as a first-party cookie.
That means all those readers who come to your website, even through third-party cookies on Chrome, will remain logged in to your site once third-party cookies go away.
Think of these like a nice “cookie bridge” — and the sooner you run Grow, the sooner you can begin building up your reserves for a post-3PC world.
Convert third-party cookies into first-party data starting today, simply by enabling Grow.
If extra money and future-proofing your business with authenticated traffic aren’t enough to persuade you, how about increased web traffic?
Grow has features like Recommended Content, Search, Bookmarks and Automailer that are designed to increase the value of every visitor to your website by providing them opportunities for repeat engagements.
Getting that second pageview out of a visitor is huge — and we all know how challenging that can be, especially with traffic from social media platforms.
Through years of optimizations and built-in machine learning, Grow optimizes your readers’ experiences to make sure they stick around — and it works.
The average site running any of those features gets more pageviews. In November 2023, we saw nearly 13 million additional pageviews across sites running these features, which could mean more money in your pocket today.
Did we mention that you get all of the tools listed above without slowing down your site?
Across the internet, related content, subscribe forms and search plugins are often some of the most taxing on your site. Not with Grow.
Grow provides you all of those features with built-in lazy loading and optimizations to help ensure that neither your server nor your site’s Core Web Vitals are adversely affected.
So turn off those taxing plugins and other third-party JavaScript and help speed up your website with a single Grow script (or with our Grow WordPress plugin). A faster site can mean more ad revenue.
We’ve spent a lot of time discussing ways in which you can earn more money with Grow. But would you believe you can also save at the same time?
That’s because Grow is free. Better than free, actually, because it may help you earn revenue*!
Removing many of the plugins we just mentioned means eliminating paid, recurring expenses from your budget. Not only can you save money by removing those and going with Grow instead, but our Automailer feature allows you to send emails for free.
Paying for an Email Sending Provider (ESP) is one of the most costly expenses for many publishers. In many cases, Automailer is an effective, free replacement.
NOTE: If your email solution is optimized, and you’re happy with it, we definitely recommend sticking to your ESP. But if you’re like many of us and never optimized an ESP? Automailer is for you.
A lot of us set up RSS-to-email feeds and then moved on. In those situations, you could ditch that setup for Automailer — a system that automatically sends your latest and top performing posts to your readers based on their individual recommended content. That means tailored emails to each subscriber.
(For free, in case we didn’t mention that three times already.)
We all love any traffic we can get, but not all traffic is created equal. A reader that consumes one pageview after coming from Pinterest will never be worth the same as a loyal reader who returns week in and week out after opening your newsletter.
Why? That’s a subject for an entire blog post — but long story short, readers who are more engaged with your content are also more likely to see relevant ads, which improves their user experience.
Plus, thanks to Grow, all of these logged-in readers will fall into the category of authenticated traffic, which again, on average, can be worth more than double the value of unauthenticated traffic on browsers like Safari and Firefox.
You might not think of your readers as “super fans” along the lines of Taylor Swift’s legions of devotees, but this is the publishing equivalent — they will follow you no matter where the web goes. They belong with you, if you will.
Bad jokes aside, we can’t predict every aspect of what the web will look like in a few years, but we can promise you it’s changing fast and won’t be like it is today.
Loyal readers will stick with you, though. Grow is the engagement framework built for you to attract and keep super fans, and Grow readers are that fan base.
Mediavine is constantly working on even more ways to make sure they keep coming back. Features like Subscribe, Automailer and Bookmarks are just the beginning.
Individually, no single publisher can generate the volume of authenticated traffic and the scale of first-party data that advertisers need to replace third-party cookies.
We’re talking about tens of millions of registered readers. Not even the top sites on the internet with the biggest subscriber bases have that.
But combined? Mediavine publishers are bigger than the top sites on the internet.
Trying to grow your newsletter on your own is fine, but even a successful website is probably sending out emails to tens of thousands of subscribers. We need tens of millions.
Tens of millions means at least 5-10% of traffic from Mediavine sites logging in. Grow readers are shared between our sites, and we need to bring in a lot more of them — together.
It takes all of us, and the sooner we start this collective mission, the closer we’ll be to the goal when third-party cookies are officially a thing of the past.
We purposely launched Grow in what we call the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage when we released it three years ago, and we did this for a reason.
Grow has always been about providing value to readers. Since every site is different and you know your readers better than anyone, it’s you — our publishers — who have been driving the roadmap of Grow from the onset.
You can’t be providing that feedback, and driving the future of this platform and the web, unless you’re running Grow — and thousands of our publishers are not.
Are there features missing from Grow that are preventing you from running it? Or things you think could be done better or differently in an ideal world?
Run Grow now. Then share that feedback.
Grow has evolved like crazy in the past three years and will only continue to do so in 2024 and beyond, but we need you to be part of the solution.
The future of the web is in our hands. Let’s Grow together.
Please note: Grow users must be utilizing Mediavine’s ad services to potentially increase revenue with Grow. Mediavine does not guarantee any revenue increase as a result of using Grow.
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Eric Hochberger
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