In-Content Ads: Why Mediavine Focuses on Them

As Mediavine publishers know, in-content advertisements have been a major part of our strategy from the day we entered the ad management business.

Just a few years ago, the competition focused solely on sidebar ads, and it was borderline blasphemy to consider advertising within websites’ content.

However, we stuck to our guns, our original group of content creators agreed to allow ads inside their content, and it paid off handsomely.

Why are in-content ads so effective?

1. They’re more engaging

When we run an ad, we do so with three “clients” – our publishers, our publishers’ readers, and the advertisers themselves – in mind. The latter, which pays the bills, expects results.

What ultimately keeps advertisers coming back to Mediavine publishers to buy more inventory are those results, measured by viewability and engagement.

Ensuring viewable ads is fairly simple with our methodology, but the second goal is more difficult, making it the driving force behind the in-content ads you see.

If you want users to engage with an ad, you need to make sure it’s not just “viewed” because it’s shown on their devices (that’s how we measure viewability because we don’t track eyeballs … yet), but actually seen and processed by the reader.

Simply put, in-content ads deliver on this front. If a user sees an ad within the flow of content they’re reading, they’re much more likely to actually stop and absorb it while reading.

2. There are few other mobile ad options

A vast majority of web traffic comes from mobile devices, where there is no sidebar … or much of a header, or footer. At least not one that a user is engaged with.

It sounds simple, but inserting in-content ads is critical to monetization of mobile traffic (80% of Mediavine sites) that wouldn’t generate revenue without it.

3. We are content creators

Mediavine is, at its core, a portfolio of content creators. We don’t run ads on social media, e-commerce sites, or any of the other hundreds of types of sites out there.

We run advertisements on blogs of content creators.

The focus of these sites is content for the publisher and reader, and our efforts are centered around advertisements designed for that experience. That means in-content ads.

This is why we invest so heavily in our in-content ad logic, which determines how we place and optimize these units within publishers’ content.

We’re currently revamping this logic, based on Coalition for Better Ads research, to better serve content creators, readers and advertisers alike, and can’t wait to announce that soon!