When Good Plugins Go Bad

Last week we made a pretty big mistake that we’d like to apologize for. We are so sorry.

We’ve always done everything in our power to operate without the need for admin access to publishers’ websites unless absolutely necessary.

As we’ve grown, so has the need for technological innovation to improve ad performance, which at Mediavine is more than just a way to help you make the most money possible – it is part of a holistic approach to site-wide functionality and health.

Creating WordPress plugins that are as useful to you as our ad tech is has been a goal of ours for years.

We started toward this goal with the Mediavine Control Panel, which, among other things, allows you to easily install our script wrapper and make sure your ads are always up to date.

As anyone who uses WordPress knows, it is important for plugins to be regularly updated to make sure they are in sync with other WordPress updates. Last week we released an update to the control panel to add some new functionality.

Unfortunately, this did not go as planned. We released multiple versions of our control panel plugin with unexpected bugs that took down sites and required admin-level access to fix.

Those who have been with Mediavine for some time know that this is not how we work.

We value transparency above all and we can’t apologize enough for these errors that caused so much stress and additional work for our publishers. We’re extensively reevaluating internal processes to better understand how this broke down and to ensure it never happens again.

Now that the dust has settled, we’ve been able to look at the data, and thank the universe for the existence of caching.

While many people had their sites go down, the impact to ad revenue shows us that sites actually weren’t appearing as down to most of the internet that was trying to access these sites, thanks to caching.

For most blogs, the impact on earnings weren’t even noticeable and were on average less than 10%.

But this isn’t just about the impact to earnings.

It’s about the time and effort we caused you, your hosting company, and anyone that tried to access your site while all of this was going on.

Anyone who experienced a website outage as a result of installing this plugin will be credited with 3 days of average income.

This will be three times the daily average of your past 30 days’ revenue, and will appear as a credit in your dashboard for the month of July.

If you needed developers or tech support to get your site back online, from your host or anyone else, please let us know at publishers@mediavine.com so that we can help make this right by covering that cost too.

All of us at Mediavine are humbled by your continued support and are always striving to improve, especially when we fall short. This will be no different.

We are incredibly sorry again for the stress and technical headaches this caused. As always, please do not hesitate to reach out to us with any concerns or questions. We are always here for you.