Mediavine Updates May 2021 with Eric Hochberger: Mediavine On Air Episode 9

* Editorial note: Since the airing of this episode, “Grow.me” has been rebranded to “Grow.” *

Welcome to another episode of Mediavine On Air.

We recorded our Teal Talk season 3 finale in late May with Mediavine CEO and Co-founder Eric Hochberger. The topic was Mediavine Updates and the hour was PACKED with anything and everything that’s happening in the blogging industry.

We talked about Core Web Vitals and Google’s upcoming Page Experience algorithm shift, we covered third-party cookies and our first-party data solution Grow.me + the Google bird, FLoC. We also dished on Jump buttons and SEO, our forthcoming solution for smaller websites and of course, would any episode of Teal Talk be complete without Trellis talk?

We covered all of these topics and more during this episode, answering all audience questions. (If you want to ask our guests your own questions, you’ll have to tune in Live.)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Helpful Resources

Link document with links discussed during the live and others.
What is Grow.me? — Learn why Grow.me is important especially when third-party cookies go away.
Grow.me FLoC — Testing Underway at Mediavine

Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING] JENNY GUY: Hello. Hello, everybody. How’s it going? It is Thursday, May 27, which means not only that it’s time for another episode of Teal Talk, but it is the Friday Eve of Memorial Day weekend. Summer is here.

I don’t know if you guys– Eric, was this a thing with you when you went to college and it was Friday Eve and your weekend began on Thursday? Like, whatever classes you had on Friday were just, why.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You had classes on Friday? That sounds terrible.

JENNY GUY: Usually, like, one. It was like a lecture, like a big one.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh yeah.

JENNY GUY: But Friday eve, you went to the bars on Thursday when you were legal, right? That’s a thing?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I was never legal during college. True story. I know.

JENNY GUY: Oh, wow.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I know.

JENNY GUY: We’ll uncover more on that later, guys.

Hi, I’m Jenny Guy, your Teal Talk host. How is everyone doing today? Hello, Sarah. Hello, everybody else as you’re coming in.

Are there any plans for Memorial Day weekend? I can’t believe it’s already Memorial Day.

I have a couple of recipes that are calling my name that are not good for you but will taste amazing. And last night I came to a very important decision regarding my summer plans. The word is charcuterie. Slice it, stick it on a plate, enjoy. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, elevensies, It’s never a bad time for charcuterie.

So my important question for my lovely audience today– where do you like to get your charcuterie supplies? Do you get from local? Do you order online? Do you have recipes for your favorite accouterments? Tell me in the comments and help me make my snack dreams come true.

In other news, today is our Teal Talk season three finale. How the heck did that happen? I don’t really know. Three whole seasons of me getting paid to talk to experts from around the industry and ask them my questions, and more importantly, ask them your questions.

And for our season three finale, we couldn’t think of a better person who our audience has more questions for than my guest here today. It is Eric Hochberger, Mediavine CEO co-founder, programmer, Shih Tzu lover, and one of my most favorite guests. Eric. Welcome to Teal Talk. Thank you for making time for us today.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thank you for having me. I feel like I’ve had a season finale before but I love it. Appreciate it. I think you have– you always like– it’s tradition.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, good.

JENNY GUY: It’s traditional.

I have a ton of questions for you. I know our audience has them too. Feel free to fire away whenever you guys have them. We will get to them.

But firstly and maybe most importantly, Eric, charcuterie thoughts. Do you have them? Favorite purveyors, favorite items.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I’m actually trying to think about this charcuterie for breakfast. So it’s just breakfast meats and cheese. OK, yeah. No, I can get behind this, like, 100% in. I don’t think I’ve ever had a charcuterie that early.

JENNY GUY: I feel like brunch charcuterie, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, I mean the little brunch buffet. There’s definitely the makings of charcuterie there. Just maybe it’s up on the buffet. I’m trying to picture for myself, making one. This is where you’re getting me confused.

JENNY GUY: But have you ever just like– in the summer, say that it’s hot, and you don’t want to turn anything on, and you don’t want cereal, is there any reason you could not just have some delicious meats and olives in your refrigerator that you can just cut up and put on a plate eat?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I’m in. And that sounds like a great breakfast for the children as well. They would love it.

JENNY GUY: It’s easy.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: This is easy. This is breakfast all summer. I’m in.

JENNY GUY: You can make it like mustard’s, you’ve got the olives. If you want to grill up some veggies, you can have those in the refrigerator. I just think it solves all the problems that you might have in life.

OK. I’m going to just jump straight– and people are saying, oh, breakfast charcuterie equals European breakfast. Rolls and jams and Nutella, cured meats, fruit yogurt. Yeah. Yes. Let me hear it for all of that.

I actually am a infamous insomniac. I don’t know if we were talking about that here. But last night when I couldn’t sleep, I was looking up different places to purchase artisan meats. So that was what was occupying me last night when I was not sleeping. So I’m here for all of your suggestions. this is my charcuterie summer and I’m very, very excited about it.

I’m going to go ahead and just jump the gun and jump all of the things, and let’s start out, Eric, by talking about our theme framework, Trellis, which we always have questions on. And I knew we would inevitably have a question on here, which is totally valid because we talk about it and have been talking about it for a long time. So could you give us some updates on what’s going on with everybody’s favorite theme framework?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We’re going to start it right off with Trellis. We’re not going to wait till OK, it comes in–

JENNY GUY: What I wanted to do–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –five minutes in. OK.

JENNY GUY: –was, like, ease you into it by talking about charcuterie and then just go bam, Trellis.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, OK. Perfect. Perfect accoutrements–

JENNY GUY: Accoutrements for charcuterie is Trellis.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I would agree.

No, so we have some pretty exciting news with Trellis recently. We just released– I believe it was yesterday– the latest version of Trellis, which is 0.13.1 Those numbers don’t mean anything to you. The important thing is that they have fixes for CLS and Core Web Vitals in them. And so we’re really excited because a lot of our internal testers that have been using it for the past week or so are now starting to pass Core Web Vitals. So a big handful of them. So we already have a bunch of Trellis sites passing Core Web Vitals, but this is going to hopefully be the next wave of anyone who has any remaining CLS issues. It won’t fix every single CLS issue, obviously, but it will get you passing Core Web Vitals, which is all that matters.

JENNY GUY: OK. So we have a new release. It came out yesterday. For our beta testers who are blowing up the comments and saying, I love it, it’s amazing, I love it. What do they need to do right now?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So if you are a beta tester and you feel extra beta-y, update right away. Because that is one of our warnings during a beta test. When a new release comes out, that’s what you’re doing, you’re helping find bugs, so there may be bugs.

But 0.13.1 will definitely bring I think a lot more fixes than just CLS as well. So if you’re having other issues with their site– I know I’ve been playing with it on my personal blog that has no actual posts or updates on it– but I’ve just been playing with it for a chance to play with Trellis. And it fixed the one issue I had on that site. So I do think 13.1 is going to have some good fixes as well. But update. That’s the best advice we have right now. Update to 13.1.

Update to the latest version of Trellis Images, which also came out, to make sure you’re generating WebP versions of all your images. And hopefully. This should get you passing Core Web Vitals, which I think is what everyone wants in time for the update next month.

JENNY GUY: OK. well, I’m not going to let you off quite that easy, on Trellis. Before we move on to a larger Core Web Vitals discussion, which we are going to, I think we would all love to know is Trellis going to be open to anyone who wants it soon?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: And that’s a fair question. And I know we’ve already gotten that in the comments. And if we don’t address it, it will come. So it is coming soon. I know we wanted to get it out in time before the page experience update. Luckily, that is a slow rollout so even if it does launch sometime in June, it does not mean it is impacting your site right away. Remember, the last slow rollout, they took up six months for a lot of us to start even getting notices. So I don’t think anyone should fret.

But our goal with Trellis is getting into your hands once it is in a stable position– or as stable as it can be– and what we really refer to as stable, is when we change things, such as what’s called the API or the back end of Trellis, such as filters, all that kind of stuff inside of WordPress, if we change that on a bunch of live sites or in a version, a bunch of live sites are going to be altered. So what we want to do is get that as stable as possible before we release it to the masses.

Because once we open it up, we know that it’s going to increase the number of people running it by a large percentage. So our hope is our next version, which is 0.14, with that, is when we’re hoping we can open this thing up. So that is coming soon. Because 13.1 is now out, as of yesterday. So now that our beta testers will hopefully get their hands on .14 next, that’s when I think everyone else can know that good things are coming.

JENNY GUY: OK. Amy Pelsner says– after that, we’re going to talk about child themes, but Amy Pelsner says, “How do we update? I see the update on the images in the plugin but not an update for just Trellis itself.”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It should be under, I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong, someone in the comments who knows WordPress a little better than me, it should be when you go under appearance there, themes, as opposed to under plugins. But I am far from a WordPress expert. Just set up my first WordPress site in years.

JENNY GUY: If you keep teasing it, we’re going to have to share it with everyone. That’s what’s your making happen.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I mean, it’s terrible. It’s EricHochberger.com. Anyone is welcome to go to it. There’s just no content on it. So it’s fine. Yeah, someone in the comments, I think, could give a better instruction on update. JENNY GUY: Yes, and if people are having issues updating, they should email into Trellis at Mediavine.com, correct?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Definitely.

JENNY GUY: You can also post in the Facebook group. We can probably put together a post in the Faceboo–

Oh, Amy says you’re spot on. That’s exactly where it was.

Brock says just click updates. Fantastic.

OK. Follow up question on Trellis. In terms of child themes, we’ve had a lot of questions in the past about having third-party developers developing on top of Trellis. And I was told by our new VP of product, which we’ll talk about a little bit more later, that part of what we’re doing in terms of making this more stable is enabling third-party developers to come in and build things on top of the framework. So can you talk a little bit more about that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again, what we were talking about before is once we release this 0.14 and we make a stable API, then anyone who has developed a theme against it won’t have to update their theme again. So I think a lot of developers have been waiting for this, and that’s what we’ve been getting the hands on, was a early version of this 0.14 to a bunch of these developers that are waiting on a little bit of documentation.

And this has been on us. We need to work closer with the developer community now that we’re getting closer to launch. So we’re really hoping to get more third-party theme support out. I know there’s already a couple of them out there. A lot of people have done custom themes. Very exciting stuff but we want to make sure we get some major theme developers behind this so that we can give you guys the variety you want.

JENNY GUY: And again, when you load the Mediavine corporate site, you are looking at a custom build on top of Trellis. It is on Trellis. It doesn’t necessarily look like some of the themes that you’ve seen, but you’re looking at Trellis, so. Should be exciting.

Gavin says, “Loving Trellis, just installed last week. Is it possible to see status of Trellis image conversion?”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: At the moment, no. But that’s a great piece of feedback. I think right now it just kind of works– when you try to make it as simple as possible. You turn it on, it just kind of works in the background. And especially make sure you’re running the latest version that just came out because I know that fix issues with a few hosts. Make sure you’re running that one, and then it should just, hopefully, automatically happen. But that’s a good point. There should be a good way to check on that.

JENNY GUY: Trellis Images is the best, says Elaina. Elaina’s updating. Other people are– so excited, I’m able to catch a Live for once. Love Trellis, says Kelly. Gavin says, loving Trellis. We’re getting a lot of Trellis love. And we are happy to hear that. And we are very excited that coming soon, this summer, we’ll be able to release to everybody. And it’s going to be awesome. We’re very thrilled about it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: And Jenny gave you a date. Perfect. Summer. I don’t know, but.

JENNY GUY: That was not a date. I said summer. I said summer. That’s broad. So broad.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: This summer. Next summer. No, I’m kidding, guys. I’m joking.

JENNY GUY: All right. So Sarah asked a question about Core Web Vitals. But before we get to Sarah’s specific Core Web Vitals question, can you give us a little overview about what Core Web Vitals is, and why everyone is freaking out about it? We had a Live on this a couple of months ago, Google, luckily, was also freaking out a little bit and postponed the date. So tell us what Core Web Vitals are and why everybody cares.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So there’s a new Google algorithm coming– or new signal to the Google algorithm– called page experience, and of that, they’re now revamping the way that they define Pagespeed. And there’s now actual defined metrics, which is very exciting. There’s three of them that we need to worry about. There are three acronyms.

There is LCP– Largest Contentful Paint— that’s says how quickly the largest object in the first screen view loads.

The First Input Delay– you really don’t have to worry about that. We like to call it a freebie because almost everyone we see is passing it. It’s like putting your name on the SATs. You get one out of three. Most likely, if you have a fast site, I shouldn’t say everybody hits that one. And that’s just how quickly the first time someone taps on your site or clicks a link or clicks a button, how quickly it responds. You should be passing that one if you have a fast site.

And then the third one is the big one, which is Cumulative Layout Shift or CLS. And that’s the one that people are running into issues. And that’s how much your paid shifts around as it’s loading. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of page speed tricks, like lazy loading of images, of ads, or whatever it may be, that cause your page to shift. Or deferring of CLS, all sorts of geeky things I could talk about, but CLS is one of the hard ones to hit.

And you need hit all three of them, and all three needed passing. It’s a pass fail. So it’s been a challenge.

JENNY GUY: It has been. And we also have some conflicting stuff going on out there in the groups, which I know is shocking because everyone always agrees on Facebook groups so I’m not sure why anyone would be different in this circumstance. But we have some conversations happening around saying that it’s not necessarily that important that Core Web Vitals aren’t that important, that trying to pass them is impossible and therefore it’s not worth trying. What are our thoughts on that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I think we probably overstress as publishers to hit every single thing that Google tells us to hit. I mean, with good reason because so much of their algorithm is secretive, the second they tell us here’s one of our signals, here’s how to pass it, we all obsess, right?

It is just one of many factors. So if you have great content, there’s still a chance you can rank, obviously, without passing Core Web Vitals. Most major news publications are failing Core Web Vitals, a lot of your competition is probably failing Core Web Vitals. So if you’re both failing, that’s fine. You guys will probably not have your rankings individually moved relative to each other.

But there might be some of your competitors that are passing, and they were close with you within ranking. Those people might jump ahead of you as a result of this. So you’re going to see small ranking fluctuations. It’s not going to completely alter your life. Your site won’t completely change in traffic come June or July. So I think that’s probably why people are saying it’s not the most important thing.

But it is something you have direct control over, and I can promise you working on all of those Core Web Vitals will also improve your revenue, your user experience, and everything else. So time you’re putting into it, isn’t just for Google. It is also for your site and for your revenue.

JENNY GUY: It’s specifically things that are impacting the experience of every person that comes to visit your website.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right.

JENNY GUY: Like, it’s the stuff that we all have private conversations about at Mediavine. It really pisses me off when X happens when I’m on a website. That’s what these things are addressing. The reason why we click the Back button. These things are talking about that when you visit a site. So it’s really cool that Google has actually given us metrics. They’re hard but they’re goals.

OK. We have a couple of questions here. Sarah’s original question was for Eric. What does it mean if I seem to be passing Core Web Vitals on mobile but not desktop, according to Search Console. We have a couple of those.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, that’s pretty common. So we see that actually a lot, so. We’re also monitoring, by the way, everyone’s Core Web Vitals in the back end. Pretty fun fact, everyone’s Core Web Vitals are actually public in the API so you can go and pull anyone’s Core Web Vitals. You could do a Pagespeed test on anyone’s.

So we’re just kind of monitoring and seeing how many people are passing. And it’s an impressive number, we think relative to the rest of the web. I keep seeing different stats, but now the latest one is less than 3% are passing all three Core Web Vitals.

JENNY GUY: I found that the other day too. Yeah.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That seemed like a crazy low number. I thought it was closer to 20 was the original numbers people were saying. But it’s very low. And we’re seeing a higher number than that, obviously, here at Mediavine. Especially since our Optimize Ads for CLS fix went out. It’s possible. We know there are hundreds of sites that we have seen doing it here at Mediavine.

So you can see in the groups, people are posting their passing scores. You can see The Hollywood Gossip is. But with many of them, we only see them passing mobile and not desktop, to get back to the original question, which is actually OK. Because Google is initially rolling this out for mobile first. They did say that page experience is coming to desktop later so you should certainly still work on it. But the good news is you bought yourself another few months of stress free because you don’t have to fix it yet.

JENNY GUY: OK. So desktop and mobile are two different beasts, we know that. Mobile is more important because that’s where the majority of lifestyle sites traffic is coming from. Google is prioritizing it in terms of their ranking factors. We know all of that.

Now, when we talked about the three acronyms, the one that is most impacted by Mediavine is CLS because as ads load, based on our lazy loading, all the things that we do to help make sites fast and help ads suck less cause issues with CLS. There is a feature that Mediavine has put out, which is not related at all to Trellis, it’s just for all Mediavine publishers. Can you talk about those features that we provide to everyone?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so first off, the reason why LCP and FID– the first two are not a problem at Mediavine– is from those first two Optimize for Pagespeed settings we released I don’t know, two or three years ago now at this point, make sure you’re running those because that is the only way you’re going to pass those first two Core Web Vitals.

If you’re running those, then one of the things is because we always lazy load. But because more things are lazy loaded when you’re running those settings or in general, actually, here at Mediavine, you will see what’s called CLS. And again, that is what happens when an ad loads and moves the rest of the page below it.

So if you Optimize Ads for CLS, which is just a quick little checkbox or a toggle inside of our dashboard, it will basically reserve the space needed for each ad to load. So it’ll put a little gray box where the ad would be, or where the ad is going to be.

Make sure you’re also running, by the way, PSAs, our public service announcements, so that there is not just a blank gray box so there’s no ad to fill there. Instead, there will be one of the awesome PSAs you can help support.

And there’s a second option as well, and that is the Optimize Your Sticky Sidebar, which is essential if you want to be able to pass desktop CLS. So you’re actually going to want to turn on both if you want to make sure you’re passing mobile and desktop for CLS. And it’ll be very challenging to pass without those options.

JENNY GUY: But just to be also perfectly clear, what those settings will do is help you with your ads. That is not the only thing that is causing these issues. So just because you’ve checked those doesn’t mean– it just means we’re taking the things out of the way that ads are causing.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. We should note, so Mediavine I never loads ads in the first screen view. That has been something I’ve been pretty adamant about since we started Mediavine because my background is SEO. And one of the big things in SEO is not having ads in the first screen view. Google literally says this as one of their ranking factors, the Page Layout one.

So make sure when you’re measuring your site, you’re looking at the first screen view for CLS in the lab results of PageSpeed Insights, if you see any number above zero, that’s your site, not your Mediavine ads. Mediavine ads will cause no CLS in the first screen view because we load no ads in the first screen view.

So what you want to make sure you’re doing is passing that, and then you more than likely will pass CLS for your whole site, as long as that number is zero for the first screen view, again, if you’re running the Mediavine Optimize Ads for CLS. Because then as a user scrolls, if the first screen view had no CLS, chances are the rest of your site is not going to. And I say that with a big caveat because other things can cause CLS throughout your site, even if your ads are solved.

JENNY GUY: Also, if you’re doubting whether or not, or you have someone that you’re working with, that’s telling you it’s your ads that’s causing your CLS, and you did not pass Core Web Vitals, you can kill switch those ads and run a test and see if that’s what’s causing it, correct? Eric, how do you do that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You can add what’s called a query string parameter to the end of the URL. So that’s a question mark, test equals kill switch. And it will show your page without running anything to do with Mediavine. Our code just aborts, our code does not run, no one can blame anything related to Mediavine at that point. It’s then your developers turn to actually fix everything.

JENNY GUY: And that will show you the list of what you need to have them do.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Correct.

JENNY GUY: OK. We’ve got a whole lot of questions going here. I wanted to finish Core Web Vitals before we started attacking all of the other things. But here we go.

Here’s a Trellis question. It’s from Maria. Do you do you recommend paginating comments on Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So the way Trellis works is it actually lazy loads all of your comments as is, so I don’t think pagination is going to have much of an impact because of the way that we lazy load comments. At least it shouldn’t. It’s almost like a infinite scroll experience.

JENNY GUY: Trellis child theme question from Sarah. I think you said something about not needing to update the child theme. My team is concerned about updating Bamboo because we have some customizations.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: The only reason you’ll need to update it if you’ve already customized it, is if you want any of the new Bamboo features or any of the features that come out in Trellis that are new at this point. So you just want to have your theme developer take a look at the changes we’ve made– you don’t have to update it– and just see if they want to incorporate any of those.

JENNY GUY: OK. This is the quick one. So it says does your website have to use WordPress. I think that he means to work with Mediavine. We’ve been answering this one for years. Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So almost every single ad feature we build at Mediavine are for all sites. And we do that on purpose because well, our own sites currently are still not on WordPress. The Hollywood Gossip itself is not on WordPress. And guess what, we wanted to make money. So all the features we build, as much as we can, are never built for WordPress specifically.

When it comes to Trellis though, that is one of our WordPress plugins, or in this case a theme, so yes, that will require WordPress but the Optimize Ads for CLS, as we mentioned, that will work on a non-WordPress site.

JENNY GUY: And to work with Mediavine–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: And again, we have proof, The Hollywood Gossip.

JENNY GUY: It is. What is The Hollywood Gossip on, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: The Hollywood Gossip is on a CMS that I built that I guess we just call EricPress–

JENNY GUY: We do.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –at this point. We do. It wasn’t the original name of it, but it’s an adorable nickname that has stuck. It’s pretty fast though, still, kept up with the times even though I have little to no time to update it. Passes Core Web Vitals, all that matters.

JENNY GUY: EricPress, it is not coming soon to a store near you.

Rob Gates, we have a couple of questions on this one. Brock asked one, and we have one from Vadar. Any update on accepting smaller sites? I have one at 19,000 sessions that I’m dying to get into Mediavine.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So we have a new ad offering coming for publishers under 50,000. The goal for the initial launch is to be for 25,000 and above. with plans to lower it. So hopefully by the time it comes out, you’ll be at 25,000, you will be eligible for that one. We don’t have a defined date yet, but we are working on everything that we need to to be able to launch that new ad offering. So that involves a new application process that you’ll see launching soon, which includes some changes that Google is having all channel partners make so not just Mediavine but everyone who monetizes with Google.

So we’re making sure that we have everything in place before we launch this new offering. And it’s still, hopefully, this year is the goal.

JENNY GUY: Yes. We are working towards that. And we will definitely keep you updated on it. I can promise you, personally, that as soon as that is available, we will be screaming from every possible rooftop there is. Rest assured.

Adrian says, “When is the option to use your own banners in the PSA spots.” Can you explain, just real quickly, why we want to use PSAs in the first place with regard to Core Web Vitals, Eric? Just one more time.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so again, we, basically, reserve the space that you’re going to need for an ad. So previously, we have never done 100% fill. We do that because we set a minimum price for your ad inventory, or what’s called a floor, and we set a different floor based upon a whole number of factors to make sure though that your inventory is worth what it is. It’s one of the reasons why Mediavine ads are the highest paying in the industry. So you want us to have that, trust us.

But the problem is one of the things is we used to just hide the spot if an ad wasn’t loaded. But then what happened was our good friends at Google said you can’t collapse after the page load or that will cause CLS. so what we have to do now with our CLS fix is reserve the space. So whether an ad is going to render there or not, we have to take up that space. We can’t collapse it. So you want to make sure you have a PSA, or an ad serving in that place, and that’s why you should opt in to one of ours.

As far as your original question goes, when we’re going to give you the ability to upload your own banners, I know it’s coming soon, but just being realistic knowing all the other things that are happening, you’re going to first see, let’s say our ad offering for smaller publishers, more than likely coming before the ability to upload your own house ads.

JENNY GUY: Speaking of that gray box, says Michelle Price, “Thank you, Eric, for sharing the CSS to change it to a white box yesterday. It looks so much better on my site.”

For anybody wondering what options we now have for PSAs— and we are adding them constantly– we have some to help to call specific attention to the situation in India right now with regard to COVID. As much as we want it to be over, it is not over. It is definitely not over there, and the need is dire. So those are right there. They’re in your dashboard, turn them on.

We have the United Way 411. We have Ad Council, which includes Alzheimer’s, Empowering Girls in STEM, high blood pressure, teen suicide prevention, and texting and driving prevention. We have Cookies for Kids’ Cancer, we have Operation Gratitude, we have encouraging pet adoption, adopt don’t shop. We have again, our general COVID-19 and then we have No Kid Hungry.

We are adding more and more. We have another exciting one coming out for June for Pride Month so stand by for that one. There are tons of options. And if you have specific organizations that you are interested in us pursuing or talking to, email into Shine@Mediavine.com. We are here to take those suggestions and do what we can to make it happen. The Shine Team is working hard on that one.

Elena says, “Thank you so much for all you’re doing to support us. I turned on all the things.” We love that. Thanks, Elaina.

Kelly said, “Feel free to ignore if this isn’t relevant.” It’s so relevant, Kelly. We would never ignore you. I just disabled the non-sticky sidebar ad because it was jittery and moving the widgets up and down before loading the ad. Is this a common problem? I wasn’t sure if the revenue hit was worth possibly passing CLS?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So one of the things we’ve actually done with Trellis is– much like we do the placeholder ads inside of your content now with the Optimize Ads for CLS– is Trellis will reserve the space starting with 13.1 for those sidebar ads. And so you could do the same if you’re not running Trellis on your own site. You’d have to email into support if you want advice, or you could check out how we do it on one of our Trellis sites.

But basically you would set a height in your theme for where that widget would be. And that would probably be your only way to solve CLS with it. Otherwise, just by the nature of it being an ad up high, it’s going to cause CLS otherwise. So I would probably remove it if it were me or ad that height.

JENNY GUY: Amy says, “I could be dreaming, but I thought you said on a talk a few months ago that you’d make a guide on how to make a custom home page with Trellis and Gutenberg Blocks. Just wondering if that was still coming.”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Just a dream. No, we’re working on it. It’s our dream too. I promise you. So what we have is– I’ll just spoil it now– we have a plugin called Trellis Blocks coming out. And Trellis Blocks are going to be, basically, Gutenberg Blocks that are built and designed for the Trellis child themes.

And one of those things is going to be home page layouts. Because this is actually just built into WordPress, you can select from an option, and it will basically give you a sample template you can use as a homepage. So we decided rather than doing a guide, we were going to make it a little more built in, a little better. So Trellis Blocks, hopefully coming soon.

JENNY GUY: Eugene says, “Wondering, why is RPM this time of year so high, like $65 to $68. It’s not the end of the quarter, but still.”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I have been internally nicknaming it Mayvember, and I’ve been trying to figure this out myself. It’s a good time of the year right now. We have a lot of optimisations that have obviously gone in. And I mean, some of it is obviously seasonal, we’re right around a holiday coming up and then it will, unfortunately, after Memorial Day drop a little bit. Just the nature. We have that cool little chart we should link to on the blog. But yeah, some of it is just literally things are killing it right now. We have a lot of great stuff we’ve been releasing over the last several years that are really paying off.

JENNY GUY: We actually have that, guys. That it’s the extension, VP of Ad Ops, Brad Hagmann’s Ad Revenue by the Seasons. It’s a daily heat map for 2021. We have a chart for it. He recommends that you print it out and put it on your refrigerator. But you do whatever you do, whatever makes you happy. Our designers made it and it shows you the different heats for when things are hot. And we’re in a hot time right now.

OK. Kippy says, “So you will be offering new Mediavine users for only 25,000 sessions.”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That is going to be our goal. It’s not going to be the same Mediavine ad offering. It’s going to be a new ad offering. It won’t be significantly different, powered by the same tech. You’ll hopefully be able to make around the same amount of money, but they’re going to be slightly different ad offerings. But the goal is yeah, that’s going to start off at 25,000 sessions a month, or at least pretty quickly after launch.

JENNY GUY: Brock says, “Will they include Schema FAQs?”

I’m not sure what “they” are but–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Probably the Trellis Blocks, I’m guessing when we said that one. So right now I think there’s just so many different ways to do FAQs. I know Yoast, and there’s a whole bunch of ones that people already use. I don’t know if that was one of the first things we tackled.

We actually built this for Create, true story. And never even released it just because we weren’t sure if it was necessary. Just because there are so many other people that built ways to do facts. Something that might come to one of our plugins, for sure, but I would recommend looking into one of the other ones right now.

JENNY GUY: Mayvember is now trending in our comments. So we’ve created another term. So also charcuterie summer. It’s a really eventful Live.

Adrian says, “When are integrations coming for Grow.me? Will it allow webhooks or Zapier only?”

So this is a great segway– thank you, Adrian– into talking about Grow.me. So let’s talk about that. He wants to know more about what the integrations are coming for Spotlight widget and Subscribe.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Spotlight Subscribe, subscribe widget, whatever you want to do. So just the quickest of overview for Grow.me, if any of you somehow missed us rambling about it for the last, I don’t know six months. Grow.me is our answer to help you build first-party data with the end of third-party cookies. So incredibly important that everyone adopts Grow.me as soon as they can, It’s in beta.

Give us your feedback, such as Adrian’s, where we had a lot of people that love our what’s called our Subscribe, or our Spotlight Subscribe, which is a non pop-up like experience that, as you scroll on a page, it kind of grays out the rest of the page and highlights the subscribe sign up.

And it converts incredibly well for an inline widget. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Not quite up to modal or pop-up levels because that is very hard to beat without stopping the user dead in their tracks and making them basically fill that out before they move on. We don’t love that experience, so we built what’s called Spotlight Subscribe.

Currently, it gives you the email addresses of people that sign up in a CSV– or a file you have to download– and then upload to your mail provider. We quickly got the feedback from our publishers. They did not love that time-consuming process.

So what we’re building right now is a Zapier– Zapier to make you happier, I have to say that in my head every time– a Zapier integration is going to be our first one. And that’s just because that will get us the most number of providers right out the gate. Almost everybody has a Zapier integration that we can have people uploading to all of their different ESPs within hours of when we release the feature versus trying to have to match each and every ESP.

And webhooks is going to be a similar thing. It’s very technical. And I’m not sure that everyone will even have the same standard so it just might be a little more involved. And so I can’t promise webhooks are coming, I can’t promise any direct ESP integrations are coming. But Zapier is coming very soon.

JENNY GUY: Awesome. We have some great feedback here. I love Spotlight Subscribe. I can’t wait for the integration with email services. The newsletter conversion is amazing. Just need a integration to Mailchimp. Love Spotlight Subscribe. I love the Grow.me sign up option. It’s the only option I use now, says Nikki.

This is a great question. My feedback– well, it’s not really a question, it’s a statement that I will turn it into a question. My feedback is that I’d like to be able to get Grow.me on my non-Mediavine new site.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, no, we’d love to be able to get it there. Our goal is, generally, with Grow.me is to get it on as many sites as possible in the future. We think, as it becomes more ubiquitous of a reader experience or readers are used to seeing it across the entire internet, it’s going to do better. There’s a lot of value to a reader in having a Grow.me account, or there’s going to be. And it’s only increased the more sites that are running it.

So our goal is to have Grow.me on non-Mediavine sites in the future. We can’t promise you when that’s coming, but right now during the beta, it’s exclusive to our Mediavine publishers because we’re giving it to all of you guys for free. And obviously, we have to figure out ways to monetize Grow.me when it goes beyond Mediavine publishers.

JENNY GUY: So this is a question for all the audience, Grow.me users. What features are your audiences engaging with the most? What would you like to see us add to the product moving forward? We’re getting a lot of love for Spotlight Subscribe. And a lot of great conversions. We are working on different integrations for that one. It’s coming up as soon as we can. But we would love to hear more from you guys and hear more what your suggestions are.

We haven’t said third-party cookies in this Live, but maybe we should. That’s why we care about this. That’s why it’s important is that– we don’t need to say it again– they’re going away. We know. And so it’s important that we are building out this feature set now with your feedback knowing what’s going to work for your audience.

I would like to talk about a blog post that we had go out a little earlier this week. It is about the results we’ve been seeing with what used to be a pretty controversial feature for us and now isn’t so much anymore, which is Jump to Recipe or Jump to Card. We have a pretty awesome solution for that that will not destroy viewability and revenue. So I would love to talk about the arrival unit and what’s going on.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so I think one of the great things about– you’ll see in the blog posts– is that we built a handful of optimizations, not just the arrival unit, to make sure that when a reader clicks Jump to Recipe, it’s not destroying your site’s viewability. Because if you destroy your site’s viewability, you hurt your long-term earning potential because buyers don’t come back to buy on your site if you have a low viewability.

And that’s what we were seeing happening. Our food blogs had about a 50% lower viewability than non-food blogs, if you can believe that. And so it was very much hurting their earning potential. So we built exclusive technology, thanks to the fact we lazy load your ads.

When someone clicks Jump to Recipe, we actually don’t load the ads in the content they’re skipping. A few ads may get loaded because it happened at the very beginning of the article, but most of them are going to end up just not loading. So we don’t load an ad that a user would never have seen. And then they get down to what we call the arrival unit. So that’s an optional ad unit that performs incredibly well, especially if you have a short-form recipes that don’t have a lot of other ad units in them.

And then we added– in addition to that arrival unit, which is a great performing ad unit– the ability to serve multiple ads in the card. So that works for Create, for WB Recipe Maker, and for WB Tasty. So basically the three largest recipe cards are all now optimized by this ad technology.

And the exciting findings– I’ll spoil the blog post– when a user clicks Jump to Recipe, you make 15% more revenue if you’re running all these optimizations. 15% more revenue. You used to make less revenue and hurt your viewability. Now your viewability is no longer impacted because we removed those ads. And you make more thanks to all those ad optimizations.

So we are finally of the opinion, yes, you should in fact turn it on. You won’t necessarily make more money even though those users are making you more. You’ll end up making around the same amount of money is what our findings are. It just basically shifts your revenue from content ads over to recipe ads.

JENNY GUY: OK. So this used to be controversial, largely for us, because of what the impact was on viewability and revenue. The other side of that coin was that we were never able to, as a company founded on SEO, conclusively prove that a Jump button has a good impact on SEO. What is all of the impact on SEO? Because those are the things I keep hearing about, people talking about in all the groups is SEO, my SEO, and then even using the arrival unit is bad for SEO.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right. Well, first I just want to start this off because this is an interesting controversy that doesn’t make sense. Google doesn’t press buttons. Google does not click buttons on your site. You can read directly on Google’s website, you can hear from John Mueller and other Google employees, that will say Google will not click on your buttons. So quote, “Google will not click on buttons.” The exact wording from them. So Google is not clicking on your Jump to Recipe.

So when people say there’s an SEO benefit, what they’re really saying is the improved user experience is going to indirectly help your SEO. Why? Because more users who enjoy your site are more likely to share it on social, they’re more likely to link to it, they’re more likely to do things that will actually improve your SEO long-term. So the adding of a button does not impact your rankings directly.

Because again, Google does not click on buttons. I can’t say this any more times. The arrival unit– the argument, I guess– is that if it’s enough of a worse experience than not running the arrival unit, maybe some people won’t link to your site. I encourage you to use the arrival unit on your site and then compare it to not running any Jump button at all. That’s what you should be comparing.

Is a Jump button with arrival unit a better user experience than no Jump button? It is 1,000% better. Is having arrival unit versus no arrival unit a better user experience? That’s the argument of just not running ads at all. Turn all ads off your site and maybe you’ll have a better user experience, 100%. But you’re not in this business to just give out free content.

So everything you do has to be a pro and a con. You have to weigh these things. It is a balance between user experience and revenue. In our case, we are very confident the arrival unit is a better user experience than, again, combined with jump than not jump. And not a significantly worse one than running a jump without arrival. So we would recommend running it. Especially if you have short-form recipes, you’re going to see a big jump in your RPM.

JENNY GUY: Gavin says, “Loving the Jump to Recipe link. Vastly improved user experience for people who do not want to read all the content. Will see in time it does to RPMs.” Definitely.

OK. Here’s a great question. Should we make our Jump to Recipe buttons prominent again?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I think when we first added Jump to Recipe with Create, we didn’t have all of the ad optimisations in, we had a bunch of them and so we had kind of that more subtle option. I think it was called like the text link, and I think that was the one we were encouraging, which was go a little more subtle, right? Your readers who want to find it, will find it.

At this point again, those people make you more money when they click it, so don’t worry. If you want to go with a more obvious button, it’s not going to have a bad impact to your RPM. Again, assuming you’re running the multiple ads per recipe card and you have the arrival unit on. All those numbers can’t not be guaranteed if you run only one ad in your recipe card, you turn off the arrival unit.

JENNY GUY: All right. Adrian said– Adrian is really killing it in terms of segwaying from point to point. I’m very appreciative. And he’s a great co-host. Adrian says, “You already have a lot of upcoming amazing features announced. I wondered if there was anything that wasn’t yet announced.”

JENNY GUY: Well, actually Adrian, let’s start out with something called mobile in view.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s a great idea. Thank you, Adrian, for that segway. That’s great.

All right. So we have a pretty cool new feature that we are beta testing right now on just a handful of internal websites. It’s something we’re calling the mobile in view. And it’s built to improve the viewability, hence its name, of your in content units and your recipe units throughout the mobile experience only. I should mention that.

And the way it basically works– and you can check it out now in The Hollywood Gossip– you go on your phone. As you’re scrolling using that placeholder, that gray box that we added for Optimize for CLS, we now use it as kind of a sticky rail, which is a gross word, I guess I probably shouldn’t have used. But basically the ad will stick throughout that gray box. So as you’re scrolling, it will stick to the top for a little bit.

That is coming out, hopefully, in the next month or so. One of the things we have to do is there’s a lot of things obviously that are fixed or sticky on your page right now if you’re running Grow.me, if you’re running the video player, if you’re running our adhesion, and we want to make sure that we create a good user experience.

So one of the things we’re working on with the in view is making sure that all of your Mediavine fixed or sticky options all play well together. And so that’s one of the things we’re working on. So we’re asking right now, actually, for beta testers, if we want to share the link for people to sign up and help us test the in view to make sure it works across all different sites out there because it does require some wizardry that our programmers came up with. And we want to make sure it doesn’t conflict with your site. And again, all those other sticky options we want to make sure it’s working well.

JENNY GUY: So just a quick caveat, we are sharing the link for beta testers. You will be able to see a beautiful example of what the unit looks like when you click on to this Google form that we have created. Caveats– just because you sign up does not mean that you will be a beta tester. There are a ton of different things that go into making our testing profiles so we can’t guarantee that you’ll be in just because you sign up, but we do appreciate you. If you’re willing to do this, please do sign up. And the feature might not work with every single site because of CSS-related issues.

So as Eric was explaining, there are a million different variables here that can cause something to not be the best fit for your site. However, we put the link in there. Hop in– it’s not a Google form, it’s an Airtable– go to the Airtable survey and drop your information in if you’re interested in signing up. We would love to have you.

OK. So let’s go back to another thing that we have that we will be kicking out next week. It is called the desktop interstitial. It’s another controversial thing. We just keep dropping them.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh man.

JENNY GUY: Talk about the desktop interstitial.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We’re doing all the fun stuff today. Thank you, Adrian. I’m blaming Adrian himself for all these.

JENNY GUY: He actually wanted to just clarify that he is a paid Mediavine shill for anyone wondering.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, perfect. OK. Then why’d he bring desktop interstitial? No, I’m kidding.

So we had the mobile interstitial that we released a couple of months ago now, maybe a few months ago, maybe longer– time is whatever. As we said, lost track of it a while ago. And basically, what it is after a user clicks a link on your page or goes to a second page view, there’s now an interstitial or a full screen ad between the page views. This is Google Search compliant on mobile because they are built by Google themselves. They perform incredibly well.

So if you have a site that gets a lot of second page views, some people are making just a ton of money on the mobile interstitial. And so Google saw this as well, and they released now a desktop version. And so Mediavine is going to make that option for publishers that still have desktop traffic. There’s like five of you out there. If you still have a lot of desktop traffic and you happen to get second page views, this is, again, that same kind of opportunity. You might be able to expect like a 7% to 10% increase to your desktop RPM. If you get those second page views, on a lot of them, it’ll be even higher. And if you have a lot of desktop traffic, this can be some serious money.

However, caveat– it is not the best user experience. I will be honest, I don’t love interstitials. I’m sure most of your readers don’t either. I think the thing we hate the most here are email, subscribe pop-ups and that kind of stuff. Interstitial is certainly no better. It’s the same kind of concept. It stops your flow dead in the tracks. And you have to acknowledge it, it’s why they perform so well. But you’ve got to make that decision for yourself. We just want to give you the option.

JENNY GUY: Just to be perfectly clear on all this, you said Google is doing this? Because there is a whole lot of Google not lovingness not that long ago.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so to be clear, Google has only ever cared about mobile interstitials. They’ve always allowed desktop ones, which is why we’ve always had kind of desktop pop-ups. So this would have been compliant no matter what, but it is still built to Google’s standards for mobile interstitials, which are only at between page views. So you can never do it on the first page view, you can do it on the second page view, you could do it between the page views, which is technically, I guess, between.

You can do it for a lot of reasons– to have a pop-up, you can do a CMP, or our cookie consent when you first get to a site in Europe, you’re allowed to do those for pop-ups. there certainly are exceptions, but the interstitials are 100% to Google standards because well, they made them themselves.

JENNY GUY: OK. We’ve got Ellen saying she’s got 20% desktop traffic here. So it might be worth, you know? You don’t know. It’s up to you. It’s your call.

Michelle says, “Is there any updated data on the mobile interstitial like you have for jump to recipe? I had added it but I saw my session count go down significantly, so I took it off months ago.”

ERIC HOCHBERGER: We never saw a real significant drop to sessions. But we can pull that data. That’s a great question. We’ll compare people running the mobile interstitial to non over the same time period and see if we can find any factors. That’s a good idea for a blog post in the future.

JENNY GUY: OK. We have someone say, “I hated the interstitial. I felt like it froze on a weird ad page it was very confusing to our users, seemed extremely spammy and people, including myself, just Xed out.”

I mean, that’s kind of what it is. It does go to an odd page, and it does make you go, “What is this?” I’ve done it myself as a user on my phone. What is this? So I think that some of the weird confusion about what it actually is will probably dissipate as more people are using it, but that won’t necessarily take away the personal “blah” when you run it. That’s a technical term.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Well, it’s optional. And certainly not under recommended here at Mediavine.

JENNY GUY: Yes, not recommended, just an option that we’re presenting to you because it was presented by Google. So we’re saying it’s there, and these are the results that we seen from it.

We got it nominated for an award. I think most people saw it, but in case they didn’t, we’re just going to talk about our nomination. We’re happy just to be nominated. It’s like an Oscar for us. It is a first-party data strategy. Grow.me was nominated. It’s a brand new category from DIGIT-A. Eric, tell us a little bit about why Grow.me getting nominated was important to us.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So first off, it was also DIGIT-A’s first year of having a first-party data award, or first-party data strategy. And the reason why is because first-party data has always been a thing we’ve talked about in the industry, but now it is, probably, the most important thing we’re talking about in the industry. Because when third-party cookies go away, first-party data strategy you are going to be who basically survived, or who make the most money in the future. So it’s incredible to be recognized for this just because we were the only ad management company– and really, the only independent publishers, I think, there’s one other publishing company that even is there– and that’s just to show you how few other people have first-party data strategies right now, or how many other publishers.

So we’re excited that we’re getting industry recognition, but even more exciting is the fact that Grow.me is an actual first-party data strategy available today that you are running as publishers. When other people are still just talking about it on the internet, we’re building stuff, and we’re building it with you, our publishers. That’s more exciting than even the nomination.

JENNY GUY: What is the advantage to turning on Grow.me now? What’s the point when there are still third-party cookies out there?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. So well, first off, I love our favorite playground we have, which is Safari, besides the privacy playground, but the Safari test is live today. Safari killed third-party cookies years ago.

So running Grow.me today will make more money on Safari. And even having first-party data on a website or on Chrome where there are third-party cookies is still worth a little bit more so it’s not going to hurt you, it’ll only help you. First-party data is good. It’s, a lot times, a lot more reliable than third-party data as well.

So running Grow.me, what it will do for you today, besides increasing your revenue a little bit from when users log in, it’s also going to help you create relationships with your readers. And that is really what first-party data is about, it’s about first-party relationships.

So that’s what the Subscribe widget is. That’s what recommended content is. It’s personalized to the reader when they log in. We recommend content from your site that will be interesting to that reader. We’re building a lot of features like that. We’re trying to provide more value to your reader to encourage them to log in.

We have to give them reasons or a value exchange of why they’re willing to give us their data, they need to be rewarded or given something in exchange. That’s the idea of a privacy centric web. People will choose to give up their data. We want to make sure they have a reason to.

JENNY GUY: Exactly. And forming that relationship now and building that first-party data store now is only going to be good, as opposed to starting from scratch when the cookies go away. If you’re starting now, you’re giving yourself a ramp up time to build. Yes, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, I mean, the best time, obviously, to start a first-party data strategy would be when you created your website. The second best time is today. As the expression goes or butchering of that expression, what you’re going to want to do is turn on as soon as you can.

Because everyday you’re building that relationship with the readers. Everyday that someone subscribes, you’re getting another Grow.me user to log into your website, and hopefully stay logged in as they continue to come back to your site. And they’ll have other reasons again to log back in.

That is what Grow.me is doing. It’s building additional features. So if you start today when the third-party cookie drops, it’s not going to be a fall for you. It’ll probably be equal or a raise if you start building meaningful relationships with the readers today. If you start the day before third-party cookies go away or the day after, it’s going to be a fall and then it’s going to be a climb back up.

JENNY GUY: Adrian just did it again. So I’m going to go ahead and just– I had a follow-up question–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Just hire him, let’s do it

JENNY GUY: –but he did it already. So you believe FLOC and major other initiatives will fail, and it will end up depending on the publisher’s first-party data? Didn’t say that, Adrian. Here’s what we are saying.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So even Google themselves– and every time they introduce FLOC or the Privacy Sandbox or talk about it– read every blog post of theirs– they talk about first-party data and talk about how it’s the most important thing. So the idea is you’re actually going to want both. Even Google says you want both.

We are big proponents of FLOC. We are probably the biggest proponents of FLOC and Privacy Sandbox there is. We were the first live test of FLOC. That’s actually live today. You can read the press release.

We partnered with the Media Grid, one of the ad exchanges or RSS feeds we work with. We actually send FLOC IDs as users are coming through Chrome, even as third-party cookies exist today. So we can help test the pipes, as they say in the industry, are making sure that people are able to transact on this.

We believe in FLOC wholeheartedly. We believe in the Privacy Sandbox. But that’s only part of the solution. It’s important to note that that won’t fully replace the value of third-party cookies. And that’s where things like first-party data come in.

Some advertisers will want to be able to target different things. FLOC doesn’t give them the full targeting that they had with third-party cookies. First-party data does, and sometimes it gives them more power. So you want to combine the two efforts, so.

JENNY GUY: So yeah, guys the answer is like, we don’t know. Neither does Google. Nobody knows exactly how all this is going to shake out. So Grow.me is designed to not only build that first-party data to solve, but it’s also designed to create a better user experience for your readers, to make it more enjoyable for them to browse.

And all of this is hedging against having to do what drives us all crazy about the New York Times, which is a paywall. So we’re trying to keep from having to do that in order to keep you guys still able to monetize your websites, monetize the traffic that you’ve worked so hard for, with a privacy centric web.

But we don’t know what it’s going to be, and I don’t think Google knows either. We’re all just kind of experimenting, moving forward, and we’re hedging our bets by building up our own solution at the same time. Is that accurate?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, and to be clear, it’s not even just Privacy Sandbox and just first-party data. We’re also working on solutions like contextual. There’s going to be other solutions that our industry will come up with as well. So it’s a handful of things, and we have our own prototypes we’re working on internally, secretly here, and not so secretly when we’re members of the pre-bid Single Sign-On committee.

There’s so many different ways that we’re all coming about this as an industry, the best thing we can do as your ad management company and you can do as a publisher, is going as many roads as possible. So whichever ones end up making it, we’ll be happy that we bet on all of those horses and not just one. And in this case, first-party data is the one that you need to help the most with, and that’s what Grow.me is for.

JENNY GUY: What is contextual?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Great question. Contextual is kind of the old school way of doing ads. So how AdSense works, where it basically reads the content of the page and picks ads based upon that particular page’s contextual. So the key words you may be using, or what you’re writing about– the theme, the categories– ads will serve based upon that.

JENNY GUY: Adrian said, “Last segway. Amazing webinar. Thank you.” Adrian, you’re the real MVP of this hour. Thank you.

And thank you guys for being here. We are almost out of time. It always goes fast when we’re together.

I wanted to quickly say next Wednesday– it is Wednesday, not Thursday, I’m saying it mostly for my benefit, not yours, because I will not remember. Wednesday, June 2 is the first episode of the Summer of Live. We are so excited we’ll be going live every week over the summer. It is at 3:00 PM Eastern– that stays the same– 2:00 PM Central.

We’ve got Amy Liccardo on and she’s talking five Pinterest secrets and how to gain traction from them. It is going to be amazing, and it’s going to be informative. And who doesn’t mind talking about Pinterest. So we will be here next Wednesday for that.

Eric, before we end season 3 of Summer of Live, are there any fun Mediavine goodies that you can tease before we say goodbye? Any cool summer releases– or fall– that you might want to share?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, now I feel I got to bring another one, another big secret. No, I think another fun thing that we’re working on is a solution for publishers that don’t produce their own video right now so that you don’t have to rely on emailing in and having us create a featured video for you. We have a pretty cool solution coming that we’re hopefully, again, going to be releasing in the next few weeks or months that will make you a lot of money if you are not currently running video today.

JENNY GUY: So that is exciting. And also coming soon, more exciting things, as Eric said, that our double secret happenings that we will be revealing over the course of the summer.

We are so happy that you guys are here. We want you to have an amazing Memorial Day weekend. Please join us for the Summer of Live and have a safe and wonderful holiday.

Eric, thanks again for being here.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Thank you, Jenny. And thank you everyone for listening, especially Adrian for leading the conversation for us.

JENNY GUY: Adrian, totally lead the conversation.

We’re going to share, also, our link document in the notes, which will have all of the relevant links from this Live so you can click around, read, get more information. And if you have questions, of course, we’re always here. So thank you so much, everyone. Have a great day.