Happy New Years from Mediavine

As 2016 and this Q4 comes to a close, we wanted to thank everyone for an incredible year.

This past year has seen explosive growth for the network. As a business built entirely on word of mouth, with absolutely no outbound marketing, we know that’s because of all of you.

We can’t say it enough. Thank you all for continuing to speak so kindly of us on your blogs, in Facebook groups and in private to your friends. You have truly made this network what it is.

Okay, sappiness is over. I blame the holidays and this time of the year, which inspires reflection (and sappiness).

Now on to a slightly less fun thing to talk about; Quarter 1, and January.

As many of our veteran bloggers know, with Q4 coming to a close, it also means the end of year advertising budgets are depleted. All of 2016’s money is now spent, and 2017 begins a new budgetary year.

That’s about to leave us with a very painful January, especially after such an impressive last few months.

From January 1st onward, we’re into a completely new budgetary year for the advertising industry. Historically, we’ve seen rates drop as much as 40-60% from the end of December.

Although no two years are the same in this crazy world of programmatic advertising, that likely will mean RPMs that drop in half or more. We want everyone to be prepared for this.

This is not isolated to Mediavine. All ad networks, and indeed, all forms of advertising in general (including print magazines) experience this, and have, since visual advertising and budgets were invented (think of Don Draper making this announcement if it’s easier to take).

We like to think it doesn’t hurt quite so bad if you know it’s coming, so this is our blog post warning.

We’re also want to give an extra warning to all of our fitness, health food and whole food bloggers, and everyone else who experiences a nice pick up after those New Years resolutions are made.

We know this is the best time of the year for you for traffic, but it does unfortunately come at the worst time for ad budgets, because budgets are decided on how readers spend money, and in the first part of a new year, people tend not to spend much.

We just want you to remember the positives – this is a chance to get a new audience to come to your site. Use this as a chance to build up your newsletter and social media followers that will hopefully remain with you for many Q4s to come.

If we can all get past the January blues, we know we have an incredible 2017 ahead of us. Just some of the things on our roadmap for upcoming year.

• More optimization to the Mediavine Video Player. In addition to some new features, we’ll be adding the ability to report bad ads, working on even better ad performance, and even helping you get more video content to run on your blogs
• Official Google AMP support will be launching! We’re already beta testing this with some publishers and on our own sites. Once we solve a few performance issues, we’re looking to get out of beta in Q1.
• Updates to the Mediavine Dashboard! Our industry-leading dashboard will get even more features including additional health checks, improved video analytics, and so many more ways to check on your site and ad performance.
• Optimizing existing ad units even more. More $$$ via performance tweaks coming to our existing ad units including the adhesion, read more and all of our standard ad units.
• So much more we can’t wait to share with you over the year!

2017 is going to be an incredible year for Mediavine as we continue to grow the network both in terms of publishers and in terms of resources available here at Mediavine. We’re growing our team to support our growing Mediavine family.

We want to thank you all for being a part of this.

We wish everyone a very safe and happy new year.