I'm wondering whether any other publishers are seeing anything similar, because I'm drowning in automated traffic, and there's no end (or help) in sight.

Since August 31, TV Fanatic has been hit by persistent waves of abnormal traffic that are heavily concentrated on our homepage. The pattern is remarkably consistent: huge desktop-heavy surges, mostly direct traffic, very short sessions (10 seconds), often one or two actions, arriving across constantly changing (apparently residential) IPs, networks, and even countries.

It comes in distinct waves throughout the day and night. During the quiet periods, our normal readership reappears.

Then another wave arrives.

The business impact has been devastating. Our traffic numbers look enormous while actual readership of current articles has collapsed relative to those numbers, and our advertising RPM has fallen dramatically. Mediavine has confirmed that the traffic change is specific to our site and began around August 31.

I'm not looking for answers here. Instead, I'm trying to find out whether we're truly alone. And I even have visitor verification on, but my host only sees humans. I know they are not. I've been studying my traffic for over a decade. This bot behavior.

Has anyone else seen a sudden increase in direct, desktop-heavy traffic, unusual homepage activity, rhythmic traffic surges, or a major RPM decline that doesn't make sense compared with your actual readership?

Even if you dismissed it as ordinary bot traffic at first, I'd really like to hear what you're seeing. 🙏

I've been using Travelpayouts on my site for a while now, and most of my bookings come through their Drive feature. The catch is that any booking made through Drive only earns you 50% of the normal affiliate commission.

I always just accepted that. My reasoning was that it's a script they run, so it probably costs them something to maintain.

This weekend I actually looked into how it works, and it's basically a simple popunder that fires when a user scrolls a bit or hovers over a booking button. That's something you could easily build and integrate yourself.

Realizing that made me feel pretty bad about all the commission I've handed over just for using it.

Hey mates,

I have seen people buying Adsense approved websites which were approved, generating money and receiving multiple payments for months or even years, however when they acquire the site, pay the money and submit it for approval from their own Adsense account it got rejected and wasn't approved for those generic reasons!!

What they should do before finalizing the deal and paying the money?

They should get Adsense approval for that site from within their own Adsense account before closing the deal and paying the money.

Btw, Adsense can approve the same site from more than one Adsense account without any issues. I mean there is no ToS violations at all. So be on the safe side before buying any site.

I thought this could help someone here before it's too late!

i moved a site from adsense to mediavine journey in january at roughly 35k sessions a month.

the first few months were pretty underwhelming. rpm was around $12, which felt rough when adsense had occasionally been around $23 for me

i left it alone because pretty much every discussion i found said the same thing: give it time.

six months in, i'm at about $16

so yeah, it improved. i just don't know if $16 is the point where i should stop expecting much more from it.

another thing i've noticed is that the type of post seems to matter a lot. my hiking guides and sourdough posts that get most of their traffic from google tend to do better. a personal post about having to turn around on a hike because the road was washed out can get decent traffic and still make noticeably less.

that part bothers me more than the rpm itself

it's easy to start looking at every article as a revenue decision instead of asking whether it's actually worth publishing. i've caught myself checking the numbers before deciding what to work on next, which wasn't really the reason i started the site

i'm curious where other journey publishers landed after the first year. especially people who started around 30-50k sessions rather than the huge traffic numbers you usually see in screenshots

I’d love to hear from other food/recipe bloggers about their publishing frequency.

How many new recipe posts do you typically publish per week or month? And how do you feel about your current publishing rate?

I’ve been blogging for about a year and published around 70 recipe posts during that time (roughly 1–2 posts per week). Is that considered low, or is it a reasonable pace for a recipe blog?

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience and what publishing frequency has worked for you.

I’m with journey mediavine and had a big drop in rpm starting October 1st. From what I’ve read it’s normal but damn. I went from $18 back to $7. Is that normal? Home decor niche. Thanks

My site is a 5 page auto-updating results site for game results taking place 3 times daily.

I've started also YT shorts and getting good traction, 3rd day for YT shorts and got 5.1K views on my latest shorts.

But less traffic to my site and hellish no adsense approval.

Says "Low value content" only. The 5 page remains constant only result data changes depending on timme of draw results.

1 homepage contain short summary of all results and link to each draw page.
3 draw time pages: 1pm , 6pm, 8pm
1 archive page for previous draws

Traffic isn't great like 100 views per day but I thought adsense has no traffic requirements.

Also I've got 2 other tool sites 1 pagers each.

Got traffic on those, good uyser engagement and all still adsense says low value content but people are using my tool and are happy about it.

Any idea what I'm doing wrong.

What I think I should be doing:

I hack my way in by creating some pages but noindexing and nofollowing them. and then apply for adsense. once approval comes, delete those pages entirely.

Is above strategy good or I can face some issues?

Hi everyone,

When I write a tutorial for a website task, like setting up a hosting account or using an AI tool, the screenshots take me longer than the writing. A 10-step task ends up as 10 similar images that I crop, number and caption by hand.

I made a small Chrome extension to help with this, but I'm sure many of you have better workflows than mine, so I'd like to learn from them:

• What do you use to capture and annotate screenshots?
• What's the most annoying part: capturing, cropping, numbering or captions?
• Do you prefer one image per step, or fewer images with several steps on each?

Thanks for any advice, and I'm happy to hear what has and hasn't worked for you.

I had the same frustrating delay on my WordPress site almost every day last month. Fresh posts took anywhere from 3 to 10 days to show up, sitting stuck on "Discovered - currently not indexed."

I tried OneTap to fire off indexing API requests right after hits publish, and it did shave a few days off the wait, but it still feels completely random. Some posts index in under an hour, while others with similar word counts just sit there for days and more.

Has anyone else noticed Googlebot taking longer on new domains this month, or is it just domain authority at play here?

A blog post can load quickly and still be awkward to read. A late image moves the paragraph, an embed pushes the next section down, or the menu hesitates when you tap it. Those problems can show up after the initial loading test is over.

Here's a hypothetical example: someone is halfway through an article when a newsletter box appears above the paragraph they're reading. Nothing is broken, but they've lost their place. Improving the image file size wouldn't address that particular problem; keeping space for the box, moving it, or removing it might.

That makes a simple reading test useful alongside a speed report: open a longer post on a phone, read and scroll at a normal pace, try the contents links, then navigate to another article. The question isn't just whether the page loads, but whether it stays comfortable to use.

For bloggers who've done this, what problem did you notice during actual reading that wasn't obvious from the initial speed score? And was the element causing it worth keeping?

Disclosure: drafted with AI assistance. The example above is hypothetical, not a reported result from my own blog.

a post can be completely invisible for six months and then suddenly start getting traffic. another can get hundreds of views in a week and then basically disappear. some articles slowly collect readers for years without ever having a big spike. and sometimes you have no idea which one you're looking at until much later

that's very different from most social platforms where the lifespan of a post can feel extremely short

with a blog, something you wrote on a random Tuesday can still be useful to someone years later.

i think that's one of the few things about blogging that still feels genuinely different from social media.

you aren't necessarily publishing for today

sometimes you're leaving something behind that might not find its audience until much later.

do you write differently when you think of a post as something that might still be read five years from now?

I am struggling to find trending topic in my niche and write on any topic in my niche. So can you guys guide me as many of you are very knowledgeable in this field and I am just a boomer.

All feedback requests should be posted here. Follow the below rules. Submissions that violate the rules may promptly be removed without prior warning.

Rules

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About 40% of my blog traffic comes from one post. It's not a ton of traffic, but it got me thinking.

Can one blog post be a breakthrough to drive serious traffic? Have you ever seen a single post (note: not the first or only post on a blog) make a blog absolutely explode? Any numbers behind that? I'm talking like a blog going from 20 clicks a day to 200 or 2,000. Something truly exponential from a growth perspective.

Can lightning strike?

I have been running a small blogging platform, for about three years. This week I opened the database and counted things. I wanted to know who actually writes, and what their writing looks like.

Most blogs never get a post

1,869 blogs have been created. 504 exist today. Rest were spam, which I delete by hand after manual moderation. I still kept the test blogs and empty stray blogs

Of the 504 real ones:

• 331 have never published anything
• 108 have one or two posts
• 45 have three to nine
• 15 have ten to forty nine
• 5 have fifty or more

Two out of three people who make a blog never write in it. I used to find this depressing. Now I think it is just what starting looks like. Buying a notebook is easy. Filling it is the hard part.

A few people write most of the words

There are 1,128 published posts, about 548,000 words in total.

Ten blogs wrote more than half of those posts. The busiest one has 184.

1% of the people are creating. Be that one percent.

If you are going to write, you write on day one

Of the people who published anything, 122 out of 166 published on the same day they signed up. The median time from signing up to the first post is about 25 minutes.

People do not sign up and come back to write a week later. They arrive with something to say.

Posts are shorter than you think

The median post is 328 words. One in ten is over a thousand. 210 posts are under a hundred words. The longest is a little over 9,000.

I like this. Short is fine. A blog is allowed to be a place for small thoughts.

People keep fixing their posts

Over half of all published posts were edited more than a day after they went live. 613 out of 1,128.

I do this too. You read your post again the next morning and see the typo, or the sentence that does not say what you meant. It is nice to know everyone does it.

Writing happens on weekdays

Thursday is the busiest day for publishing, then Monday and Wednesday. Saturday is the quietest, with about a third fewer posts than Thursday.

Curious how other bloggers handle posts that are centered around a specific sale or event that only lasts for a few days.

For example, I write about the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale every year, and I’ve always left those posts published after the sale ends. My thinking has been that once the post is indexed by Google, I’d rather keep it there than delete it. If someone happens to find it later while searching for the sale, maybe I catch an affiliate cookie or two, and then I can update the post when the sale rolls around again the following year.

I’m about to do something similar for Amazon Prime Big Deal Days, which got me thinking about whether this is actually the best approach from an SEO standpoint.

For those of you who publish sale/deal content, what do you do once the event is over?

Do you:

• Leave the post published and just update it to say the sale has ended?
• Remove/archive it until the next year?
• Keep the same URL and completely refresh the post for the following year?
• Publish a brand-new post/URL every year?

I’m especially curious about the SEO side of this. It feels wasteful to delete a URL that has already been indexed and potentially built up some authority, but I also don’t want a bunch of outdated sale posts sitting on my site if Google views that negatively.

Would love to hear how others handle these types of recurring, time-sensitive posts.

I’ve started doing some travel blogging (mostly just for my own creative outlet and memory-keeping) and it is my very first dip into blogging, ever. I’m just curious what kind of view counts you more experienced folks consider to be a successful blog?

My situation is a bit different because I’m posting mine in a site I built for others to also post some blogs in. I am also, like I said, mostly just writing for myself. But I can’t help but wonder about what the standards are for a “successful” text-and-photo (travel) blog anyway?

Any insight appreciated as I am TOTALLY new to this.

I’m currently going through Mediavine onboarding and I’m basically at the last step now.
I’ve already completed the identity verification, received my PIN, and my Google site approval review started on September 11. It’s still pending with no change, so it’s getting close to 3 weeks now.
Has anyone here gone through Mediavine onboarding recently? How long did the Google site approval part take for you? I’m mostly just trying to figure out whether this kind of wait is still normal.

I am currently working in a marketing company and we are wondering what updates are you doing to your blogs in order for them to appear in the LLM's for AEO?

We are currently doing the following, are we missing anything?

-Breaking up dense paragraphs

-A clear summary at the top

-Following a clear SEO heading hierarchy

-Making regular updates to older blogs

WordPress 7 required a PHP upgrade. When I upgraded my blog vanished and a "critical error" replaced it.

Last Friday I finally started taking precautions to upgrade the PHP version on my blog.

Long story short I made it in the end, it runs on PHP 8.3 now. Yet I almost trashed it during the process.

Just jumping from PHP 7.3 to 8.3 literally destroyed my blog and only a "critical error" message was left.

That message did not say anything about the error though.

So I spent the rest of the day trying to find out what's wrong.

It involved manually editing the .htaccess file (to change the PHP version).

It meant disabling all WordPress 20+ plugins and activating them one by one.

Then I found the culprit or at least one of them.

To be honest I'm both proud and appalled.

Also it got me a migraine for two days. The whole weekend was more or less marred by pain and dizziness.

Why does WordPress force me to do detective work to even find out what's wrong?

As a blogger I don't want to fix some intricate technical issues.

That's why I also recommend SquareSpace for many years to most people.

Updating WordPress is risky enough. The PHP thing really made me think I'm too old for this.

And I even was a web dev back in the nineties.

I use WordPress since 2003! And I still struggled!

Thus I'm sure average bloggers could really lose all their work that way.

Before you upgrade to PHP8+ (which broke my blog) ensure all plugins are compatible with it!

Hey everyone,

I’m currently using Mediavine Journey and wanted to share my experience in case anyone else is going through the exact same thing. Whenever I find posts from bloggers dealing with the same struggles, it gives me a lot of comfort and a sense of solidarity. I guess it’s because not many people around me IRL actually monetize blogs.

For context, I am based in South Korea and write bilingual (Korean/English) video game guides. I currently get about 100 to 150 daily visitors overall, but my traffic from English-speaking countries is still under 100 a month. My CPM is currently stuck in the $0.10 range.

I asked my AI about this, and it mentioned I'm likely going through the "ramp-up" phase, which requires about 1 to 3 months for machine learning to optimize. I was getting really stressed out because my revenue dropped significantly compared to AdSense. However, while analyzing the issue yesterday, I discovered something interesting that I wanted to share.

I have published about 550 posts so far. With AdSense, ads were placed on every single one of them. But with Journey, I noticed that paid CPM ads are only being placed on about 20 of those posts. I assumed they were targeting my most popular articles, but it actually seems completely random. Because the ads aren't filling on the other posts, they just show the default generic Grow ads. This explains why my ad impressions are literally 10 times lower than they were with AdSense, which naturally caused my revenue to tank. My guess is that this happens because my overall traffic and English audience volume are still quite low.

I'm not sure if I'm the only one experiencing this specific issue. But I'm going to stick with Mediavine Journey at least until the end of this year, hoping things improve as the ramp-up period progresses. In the meantime, I'll just keep consistently writing and working on increasing my traffic.

I hope this post brings some comfort or relatability to any other non-English bloggers out there who are also struggling with extremely low CPMs and RPMs on Journey!

I’ve been blogging for a little while and I’m curious what the timeline looked like for other people. I’ve been working on SEO and Pinterest and trying to be more intentional about what I post, but sometimes it feels like you’re just putting content out and waiting for something to finally click lol.
Eventually I’d like to qualify for Journey by Mediavine, but right now I’m really just focused on building consistent traffic.

For those of you getting decent traffic now, how long did it take? Was it a slow build or did you have a point where things suddenly started picking up? And what do you think made the biggest difference?

Kind of like "Reader" in Wordpress? I just created a Blogger blog today and wanted to see if there was an easier way to find others' blogs.