Putting together our annual year in review post is low key one of my favorite things. As one of the four Mediavine co-founders, I can tell you that no two days are the same and from day to day so much happens that sometimes you just forget the crazy good stuff that happened even a week before.
As I gathered the highlights of 2019, I was simply blown away.
Not only are there big, BIG things to mention, but there are items worth mentioning from every month of 2019 and sometimes even multiple things in a single month.
You guys, the Mediavine team has been SO busy this year doing all kinds of awesome things and we must first say thank you – thank you to each publisher that trusts us as a valued partner to help them create a sustainable business.
It gives us the opportunity to do things we couldn’t have imagined or dreamed of four short years ago.
As of this writing, Mediavine boasts 5,900+ publishers, 67 employees, three WordPress plugins (Create, Grow and the Mediavine Control Panel), more than 70 pets we obsess over (including 41 dogs, 19 cats, a sometimes dog named Bean, a Great Dane farm, a Shih Tzu Rescue, a snake and some chickens) and one really awesome WordPress framework that we promise will be in a wide-release beta soon.
It was also a big year for events. This year we also hosted not one, but TWO conferences — Chicago in June and Austin in November.
We also sent our publisher support team to 3 cities to host lunch and learns with our publishers — something we plan to do even more of in 2020.
We sponsored 18 publisher retreats and our team traveled to 17 blogging conferences around the country and one in the UK.
Releasing this option became a big advancement in pagespeed for any Mediavine publisher that takes advantage of our video offerings.
We introduced the partner to our Optimize Ads for Mobile Pagespeed setting. Releasing this option to publishers gives them the choice to stop loading any ads in the first screenview — or until a reader interacts with the page. It’s huge for speed gains.
This is the ad that sticks to the bottom of your browser window. We streamlined the visuals, making these ads more compact and minimal, for a better experience, especially for mobile accessibility.
Streamlining our video player from a code perspective as well as a visual perspective means a better user experience and faster feature releases. This one thrilled not only publishers, but our engineering staff too!
We released Create in October 2018, and it was the first plugin to ever offer support for How-To Schema. By May 2019, Google began parsing How-To Schema, offering rich snippets to sites taking advantage of this type of schema for the first time. It's a whole new way to take over search results and bring people to your site!
Trellis went blog official for the first time. We've got this framework live on around 10 sites right now, and they're seeing fantastic improvements in speed and ad viewability alike. We're excited to move to an open beta in the new year.
Our Director of Marketing Jenny Guy’s Facebook Live series, Summer of Live, ran its second season. In 13 episodes over 13 weeks she interviewed every kind of guest that can help you improve your business. All the videos are available on our YouTube channel if you missed any, or want to watch again!
Google Video Sitemaps make it easier for Google to find and learn about your videos, making it possible for them to index videos faster. If you're uploading videos to Mediavine, we will auto-generate this for you. It's super easy to do.
Sellers.json is not just interesting to say — it's yet another way the ad industry is doing their best to ensure ad quality and control across the internet. We adopted this initiative immediately to make sure Mediavine publishers are always up to date when it comes to their display advertising.
Comscore rankings are a huge deal behind the scenes of digital advertising. Being in the top 25 across the internet means it's even easier for us to get advertisers to understand why Mediavine publishers are the best websites to advertise on. As of this writing, we're now a top 21 property, and we keep rising as more quality sites join the Mediavine family.
Our commitment to providing more ways for publishers to speed up their sites continues with the purchase of Social Pug. Buying one of the most popular plugins among our publishers allows us to immediately release speed fixes for issues that plague social sharing plugins to the largest number of our existing audience, along with a whole new one that will adore having a faster site and more options. Plus, the Grow development staff immediately jumped from a team of one to a team of many, making innovation even faster to accomplish. Not to mention, it's got just about the prettiest logo we've ever come up with, next to Create's.
Our partners at GumGum have been working on a keyword matching technology for a long time, and we're thrilled to partner with them in testing. We're confident Verity will bring a ton of value to advertisers and our publishers, putting more money in everyone's hands.
December has also brought the addition of Featured Video Playlists, a way for you to choose not just a featured video, but an entire playlist that will play on posts where there isn't a video already embedded. Best of all, it remembers where people left off if they move to another page, making for optimal user experience.
2019 has been epic for all of us at Mediavine, and we really can’t thank each of you enough for making all this possible.
We hope that you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!
Look out for Eric’s post in 2020 about what’s coming next to Mediavine.
You won’t want to miss that and also our biggest event yet, MVCon20 in Baltimore, which tickets are on sale for right now!
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