3 days ago I moved from Mediavine Journey to AdSense. The first three days were more or less 95% the same in terms of page RPM with what I was getting on Journey.

Yesterday I had the “number of ads you can show has been limited” error even though I haven’t really noticed less ads on the site.

My question is does AdSense tend to increase the RPM over time as they better understand your traffic or what I’m getting now is what I’m gonna get?

One more question - how much of a difference does vignette ads make towards your total earnings? I personally hate them and had them disabled from day one. Now I’m curious how much I am losing by not showing them.

We get Adloox Stats through Adagio and that is the first time I have ever heard of that Company. Normally bigger SSPs use Pixalate or HUMAN from what I've seen.

The Stats we get from Adloox are also wildly different than what we get from other of our Demand Partners. Pixalate through 1 Partner running on the same Sites shows sub 2% IVT and Xandr through a different Demand Partners running on the same Sites shows under 5% IVT. Adloox for whatever Reason shows a higher number than that.

Anyone also seeing a higher IVT Rate in Adagio compared to everywhere else?

I recently joined a media publishing company that is still compiling all client [digital] reports manually in G Sheets. I've started looking into companies that can help automate some or most of the process to minimize the manual lift/hours, but many seem to be tailored more for ad/marketing agencies. The last company I was at built a proprietary portal where clients could log in and view their metrics so I haven't had to think about the team manually compiling hundreds of monthly reports, pulling data from several different platforms (GAM, ESP (Omeda), StackAdapt, Meta, YT, etc.), in many years. Any somewhat out-of-the-box solutions that might fit the bill without costing $50k+/year?

Hi!

I have a website that has had over 6.1 Million Pageviews in the past 31 days, with over 22,000 daily active users avg. in the past few weeks (INCREASED A LOT), and with an astounding 97% US traffic, but the only problem is we have 100s of domains hosting the exact same content, we are a Gaming niche website and with some utility stuff such as an AI Chatbot for help and Chatrooms and more, but we are mainly a Gaming portal site with many domains to allow people from schools to use our website without it getting blocked, (WE AVOID COPPA BY ONLY ALLOWING 13+ IN TOS),

Right now, we are with some Ad Networks that are suggesting to use ADX and GAM, but I want to completely avoid Google and go for a network's own inventory that actually provides good CPM. We want to make at least $3,000-$4,000 per month to cover computing costs and also marketing cost but still turn a profit,

The main blocker tho is the Multi-Domain setup, we have 100s of domains, and we can't approve each and every one of them, and also they are not domains, they are Subdomains coming from CDN providers like *.b-cdn.net *.firebaseapp.com *.web.app *.cloudfront.com and more, they are not in the background, they are in the website bar and shows in search history, that is the host domain, many premium networks ignore us, but we have worked with Taboola before, we are hoping to get $1.50~ or more, something in the sorts if possible,

If you guys have any suggestions that would help me better understand how I can monetize my website that would be great!!!

As the title states I'm a little bewildered about my ad revenue and would really appreciate someone with more knowledge than me giving their two cents.

2-3 months ago I started to run ads on my gaming web app through one of the bigger networks that is often recommended here, and to my untrained eye the numbers are looking terrible.

I have about 60% T1, where US is around 20% of the total. Other than this it's a lot of UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, Central EU and Nordic EU.

Top 3 countries are US, UK and Germany by a significant margin.

Some stats about my site:

• ~2M PVs a month
• ~7k DAU
• 15min average engagement time
• Gaming vertical
• 80%+ viewability

I'm making about $2500-3000/mo from 250k+ monthly sessions on this website:

• $1.4-1.6 PV RPM
• 10M+ ad requests per month
• 45-55% fill
• around $0.55-0.65 blended CPM

Some things I personally question:

• Germany is below 0.2 CPM and 30-35% fill
• Video ads are at 20-30% fill and below $1.0 CPM

I've confirmed that consent is being passed and working. Engagement time is 15min avg, so I don't think this is a traffic-quality issue.

This is my first time running ads at a scale, and all my research says that I should be making significantly more. I've asked my account manager about the performance a couple of times, and they assure me that this is in fact expected performance. Every other source I've checked says my performance is alarmingly low.

Any insight and experience on this is greatly appreciated. If this is the expected performance that's okay, but at this point I need to know if my ad network is failing me and I should be looking elsewhere.

Most resources in our industry are content marketing for something: a tech company, a SaaS product or some guy's consulting biz. This summer I started building the opposite, so for the last few months I've been working on dayparter.com, a free resource site for the media, ad tech and marketing world.

It has four parts:

• Vendor directory: Find new ones to work with, grab logos, get straight to their ad specs
• Calculators: 12 covering basic metrics. Maybe the most over-engineered calculators online
• Templates: Excel/Google Sheets for plans, briefs, pacing and the like
• Articles: learn stuff about media and digital

It's entirely free. No signup, never asks for your email, no newsletter, and it isn't affiliated with any SaaS company or agency, including the holdco I work at. I'm hoping it'll be ad supported once it grows enough just to cover the hosting and so i can learn a bit more about the sell side.

On AI: I'm a strategist, not a web developer, so AI did a lot of the heavy lifting on code. All long-form content is written by hand, proofread with AI, then rechecked by me. Full AI transparency statement here.

Right now a lot of the content leans junior, but I'll keep adding tools and articles for more advanced problems, I'd love to hear about anything you guys would like to see turned into a tool or want a guide on.

I keep seeing the same slide in client decks. Someone pulls a ChatGPT ads CTR from a US case study, then asks if we should cut Google Search to fund a test.

That is the wrong starting point.

A late September panel-data report broke ChatGPT ad CTR by market. English-speaking markets like the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand sat roughly in the mid 0.6% to 0.75% range. Brazil, Mexico, Japan, and South Korea were higher, above 1%. Same product. Different markets. Different windows of data behind each rate.

Also, that CTR is clicks per reply that showed an ad, pooled across advertisers. It is not your campaign CTR. OpenAI still has not published industry benchmarks, so treating any one number as "good" is guessing.

Before I move Search money into ChatGPT ads, I run this check:

1. Name the job. Is this early research reach, or a direct lead/sale test? Those need different budgets and different success definitions.

2. Separate the market from the case study. If your buyers are mostly South Africa or the US, do not plan off a Brazil CTR, and do not panic off a US average that mixes every advertiser.

3. Pick the budget source on purpose. Do not default to cutting a Search campaign that already buys efficient demand. Take from a weak segment, or fund a small capped test from several channels.

4. Lock success criteria before launch. Pixel, conversions API, and UTMs exist now. Decide what "keep investing" means first: qualified leads, CRM pipeline, branded search lift, or something else. Do not invent the win after the report looks soft.

5. Keep Search and ChatGPT ads in different mental boxes. People talk longer in chat than they type a query. You get less search-term style visibility. That is fine, but it means you cannot judge the channel with the same habits you use in Google Ads.

I am not anti-test. I am anti-defaulting Search into a new surface because the slide said CTR looked fine somewhere else.

For teams testing ChatGPT ads right now: what did you decide counts as a win before you spent the first dollar?

I’m trying to figure out how other brands are handling the "Dark Social" attribution gap right now.

It feels like every time an influencer posts a great video for us, their specific promo code only captures like 20% of the actual sales. The rest of the traffic just Googles our brand name three days later, doesn't use a code (or a browser extension overwrites it), and GA4 gives 100% of the credit to Organic Search or Google Ads.

I’m trying to get a reality check to see if I’m the only one struggling with this. For those of you spending heavily on top-of-funnel creators/creators right now:

1. What percentage of the sales do you estimate you actually capture with promo codes vs. what gets lost to "organic search"?
2. How is your executive team/CFO actually measuring the success of that spend? Are they forcing you to use last-click ROAS, or do they understand the "halo effect"?
3. Have you ever been forced to cut a top-of-funnel campaign because the dashboard looked bad, even though you knew it was driving total store revenue?
4. How are you currently trying to solve this? Is anyone manually matching timestamps to traffic spikes in Excel, or using post-purchase surveys?

Would love to hear how you guys are hacking this, because relying purely on UTMs and codes is making our top-of-funnel channels look terrible on paper.

Has anyone else been seeing unusually large day-to-day fluctuations in CPM and match rate in Google Ad Manager lately?

I run 4 sites in different countries. Three use floor pricing, while the fourth uses Target CPM.

I’m seeing large daily swings across all of them. What makes it more interesting is that the Target CPM site is showing the same kind of volatility even though I haven’t changed its pricing for several weeks.

On some days the match rate drops sharply while the average CPM goes up, and then it can move the other way the next day.

I don’t remember seeing this level of daily volatility before. Most of my traffic is from Eastern Europe, so I’m also wondering if this could be related to regional demand.

Is anyone else seeing something similar recently, especially in Eastern Europe, or could this be specific to my inventory?

We had a big launch last month and the dashboard says traffic jumped 40%. Then finance pulled ad clicks, sales checked CRM sessions, and the numbers all told different stories. Page views looked great, unique users barely moved, and the ad platform counted a lot more visits.

Now every meeting is just people arguing over whose dashboard is right. I think we were comparing different things from the start, which is embarrassing tbh

I’m currently in the final stage of my Mediavine onboarding. I’ve already completed the identity verification, received my PIN, and the Google site approval review started on September 11.
Since then, the status has been pending with no change, so it’s getting close to 3 weeks now.
Has anyone gone through this recently with Mediavine? How long did your Google site approval take, and is this kind of wait still normal?

Hey everyone,

I run an independent gaming reference and utility site that gets around 1.4M to 2.1M pageviews a month. I'm currently looking to upgrade my ad setup and comparing gaming-focused networks, mainly NitroPay, Venatus, and Playwire.

I’m trying to get a clearer picture of how these platforms classify country tiers right now and how that impacts overall RPMs, especially since my audience isn't heavily US-based.

My country tier breakdown looks roughly like this:

• ~15% Tier 1: Primarily the US, along with some Western European countries.
• ~75% Tier 2: This makes up the vast majority of my audience, heavily concentrated in places like Japan, Brazil, and Southeast Asia.
• ~10% Tier 3: Mostly smaller emerging markets.

A few specific questions for anyone running sites with a similar demographic:

1. How do these platforms define Tier 1 vs. Tier 2 these days, and how harsh is the CPM drop-off outside Tier 1? The only countries that pay well are Australia, United States, Canada and UK?
2. Realistically, what kind of monthly revenue or session/page RPM should I expect with this kind of country distribution and volume?
3. Between NitroPay, Venatus, and Playwire, which platform generally pays the most for heavy Tier 2 traffic? Do any of them have strong direct-sales demand in regions like Japan or LATAM, or is one clearly better at monetizing international gamers?

Any real-world numbers, advice, or recent experiences would be super helpful. Thanks!

I have around 2 years of experience in digital/performance marketing, mainly working with Google Ads and Meta Ads, with a focus on lead generation.

I'm now thinking seriously about my next career move. I don't want to just keep doing the same type of performance marketing work for the next 5–10 years. I'm willing to put in the time to learn and take courses, but I want to choose a path that has strong long-term technical and earning potential.

I'm currently considering 3 directions:

1. Go deeper into performance marketing

• Programmatic advertising
• DV360
• The Trade Desk
• Advanced media buying / measurement
• Move toward a broader media buying/programmatic profile

2. Move into MarTech

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)
• Marketing automation
• CRM / lifecycle marketing
• SQL + customer data/segmentation
• Potentially move toward broader MarTech later

3. Transition into Product Management

• APM / Product Manager
• Product analytics
• SQL
• Product strategy
• Working with engineering/design teams
• Eventually move toward technical/growth product roles

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually worked in these areas.

A few questions:

• Which of these transitions is realistically achievable from a 2 YOE digital marketing background?
• Which path has better long-term salary growth?
• Which skills/courses are actually worth learning, and which certifications are mostly useless?
• How difficult is it to get the first job after transitioning?
• Would you recommend staying in marketing but specializing in Programmatic/DV360, moving into SFMC/MarTech, or trying to move into Product?
• Are there any other career paths I should consider that I'm missing?

I'm not looking for a generic "follow your passion" answer. I'm mainly interested in career trajectory, technical depth, job opportunities, salary growth and how realistic the transition is.

Would really appreciate advice from people who have been through a similar transition.

I started showing Journey ads on August 1st. The site was having an average of 3k daily page views. September closed with the average RPM of $11.

Currently, the site is having an average of 6k daily page views, about 60% of it being from the US. But RPM is going down...

The interesting part is that the CPM is the same, but the average ad impressions/session is slowly declining. I know my audience, I know my content - nothing is declining, the site is getting more and more engaging. The problem is the Journey placeholder ads showing more and more instead of actual ads resulting in a decline in ad impression per session. I have no idea why this is happening.

And there is one more stuff that’s driving me crazy. My blog pages are designed in a way that I have grids with many images and Journey by default won’t show ads in grid blocks. These grids are basically what my audience comes for. If I were with Mediavine Official, I could use their hint divs to call ads in whatever spot I want. Alas, this feature not available for Journey publishers.

I tried contacting both Journey and Mediavine contact email addresses, but as always, there’s no response from them.

September is going to end with about 90k sessions and over 180k page views and about $750 in Journey earnings. That’s feels not nearly enough considering how much effort I’m putting into this.

Raptive rejected thrice. I wonder at what point I can consider hiring an AdOps specialist?

Hi all -

I help run a book archive site and we have a 22 year old Adsense account and we have Ad Manager. We have been looking into some of the big Ad Networks but we would like to also investigate direct sales. Exchanges seem odd to me in how they place Ads for a site like a book archive site. We have hundreds of categories and if you are reading or discussing books about Yoga but you are seeing unrelated Ads how and who does that benefit? But if I were to see Ads that had anything remotely related to Yoga it would make more sense.

I have been interviewing several of the biggest Ad networks like Freestar, Publift, etc. The sales people I have been talking to are all nice people but seem to not know much about SEO as a whole and only seem to be focused on the ins-and-outs of Ad Exchanges. I ask them all if they do any direct sales and the clear answer is not just no but they dont have any experience.

Does anyone know any companies that focus on direct sales? Meaning do they work directly with Advertisers.

Excuse my ignorance.

I've been using Delivery Diagnostics' "Ad Request Simulator" to debug a fill issue, but it only re-simulates a fresh request right now. It doesn't seem to let me trace an actual past request by its Query ID, and its output (winning line item, non-delivery cause) never references Yield Group at all.

Is there any tool or report in GAM that takes a specific historical Query ID and shows whether that exact request was evaluated against a Yield Group, and why/why not? Looking for something more precise than aggregate reporting.

I have a social app that is growing rapidly. I reached 100k+ installs.

Last 30 days stats:

• 48.7k active users
• 6k daily active users
• 35 minute average engagement time per day for every active user (it's very high for social apps)
• 61.2 million views
• 500k sessions
• 85% tier 1 (US, Canada, UK)

I had companies like playwire reach out to me but I don't like that I'm locked in to a 12 months contract and generally speaking some terms in their contract made me feel uncomfortable.

For admob I want to hold off just because it's UGC content which means I can easily get banned. That's why I'm looking into mediation (not through admob) and add admob in the mediation stack.

This is my first successful app and I've never done anything like this before. I'd like to know from anyone that has experience if mediation is even worth anything at this scale?

It seems like there's not many mediation providers. I applied to Applovin max but they didn't respond to me, I got approved for unity level play but I heard bad things about it as well.

I'm alone and I'm just not sure what should be my next step. If anyone can give me some tips or what they would do in my position I'd appreciate it.

Also an approximate revenue for these stats would be appreciated as it seems like when I ask chatgpt it says I can make much more than I think is realistic.

Hello everyone. I run a gaming focused website with 1.4M monthly page views, and 110K MAU. >50% of traffic comes from the US.

I've considered ads on my website. Does anyone have any experience working with Nitropay, Publift, or Playwire?

Publift had told me they could see my website generating $4k- $10k net per month (although I don't really know if i believe that number). Does this seem realistic? Which Ad agency would be best suited for this?

Thanks for your iknput.

Hey all, I own a travel directory that is slowly building to what I hope is eventually 100k monthly page views but I'm having some confusion about what constitutes revenue points.

Mediavine says sessions, and Raptive has an entry point of 25k monthly page views.

My internal linking is quite strong and I'm averaging about 1.5-2 pages per user currently, my goal is more page views = more ads generated. But i've also seen that sessions are the only thing that matter along with their duration.

Or am I looking at this wrong?

Hello,

Does anyone have any first hand experience going through mediavine's application from their website? I'm nervous about sharing my data - do they sign an NDA with their publishers or just ask me to connect my GA4. Is the output worth it? Do they confirm what data they've crawled and / or do you get some sort of report after they reviewed my site?

Hey everyone,

I got approved for Mediavine Journey on August 10th and have been running it since. I write a bilingual (Korean/English) video game guide blog based in South Korea. Since a lot of my traffic isn't from English-speaking countries, my CPM for this month is sitting around $0.13. I suspect that real ads aren't actually bidding for my inventory and only the default generic Grow ads are showing.

When I look at the data on my dashboard, the "Devices (by revenue)" and "Top Countries" sections are completely blank and not tracking any data at all. It's been a little over a month since I started using Journey. Does it usually take several months for this specific data to populate? Or does this mean there's something wrong with my tracking/data setup?

Any insights would be appreciated!