Why Was My Blog Rejected by Mediavine?
Written by Casey Botticello
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Mediavine is arguably the top display ad network for most bloggers. But the application process is extremely competitive.
This article will explore some of the reasons websites are rejected by Mediavine, based on my experience getting 5 sites approved and having done dozens of blog consultations for confused site owners who need help reapplying.
While every rejection is unique, once you’ve analyzed enough websites, it becomes clear why an otherwise high quality website gets rejected.
Need personalized help getting your Mediavine site approved? Schedule a site consultation with me! I’ve helped countless site owners figure out the precise reason for their blog rejection (& how to fix it).
Reasons Mediavine Rejected Your Blog
1. Not Meeting the Stated Traffic Requirements
One of the biggest reasons bloggers are rejected from Mediavine is that they fail to meet the ad network’s traffic guidelines.
This may sound obvious, but since many older Reddit posts, articles, and videos discuss how they were accepted despite having had less than the 50,000 session requirement.
The reason for this is Mediavine has changed it’s site requirements over time, and used to accept sites at lower traffic thresholds.
This is no longer the case!
Mediavine’s traffic requirements are firm:
2. Not Enough Tier 1 Traffic
Tier 1 traffic is traffic that your website receives from the countries that are the most lucrative. These include the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
Mediavine is somewhat flexible on the exact amount of traffic, but the unofficial traffic threshold I’d suggest is at least 40% of your total traffic.
If you have a relatively low amount of tier 1 traffic, you may get accepted, but also receive an email noting that you should not expect RPMs as high as other publishers:
Don’t be deterred by this message!
As shown in the screenshot above, I’ve personally received this message in the course of getting multiple sites approved. And this site ended up earning extremely high RPMs!
It’s also worth noting that Mediavine does accept sites that without tier 1 traffic, but this is only for select countries, and on a case by case basis. Some of these countries include Germany, The Netherlands, France, and Sweden.
Successful applicants in these cases typically have 70-90%+ traffic coming from one of these non tier 1 countries.
3. Uneven Traffic Distribution Among Pages
Even if you do exceed the 50,000 session traffic threshold, and your audience is mostly from tier 1 countries, you need to make sure that your traffic is not too concentrated on just a single post.
While there is some flexibility in this, my general suggestion is that no single page should account for more than 20% of a site’s total traffic. Ideally, this ratio would be less than 10%.
It also matters which page is receiving a disproportionate amount of traffic. For example, if your website’s homepage gets a plurality of traffic, this can definitely be reason for rejection. Similarly, if you have a “tool” or “calculator” page receiving tons of traffic, this can lead to a rejection.
4. Wrong Type of Content
One of the reasons Mediavine is able to pay such high RPMs to publishers is they try to only accept longform, original content.
So, some of the types of content that might get you rejected for Mediavine include blogs with:
- Heavily plagiarized or unoriginal content (your site cannot be made up completely of round-up posts that link to other sites without any input from you)
- Short form posts (posts can range in length), but they should generally be at least 400 words long (typically, closer to at least 700-1000)
- Controversial Niches (gambling, drugs, MLM, or anything illegal)
5. Non “Brand Safe” Content
One of the reasons Mediavine is able to pay such high RPMs to publishers is they adhere to strict advertiser guidelines, about what topics they consider brand safe. This is because advertisers will not pay as much (or at all) if they feel like their ads might be placed by content deemed offensive.
One of the things Mediavine (and most ad networks) do is run a Keyword Anti Targeting scan of your website. This basically allows ad networks to review the text in your blog quickly, and flag the use of keywords and phrases that they consider high risk.
Of all the reasons for a publisher to be rejected by Mediavine, this can be one of the hardest to decipher, since unlike the previous reason (blatantly illegal topics), this can be triggered by problematic keywords, regardless of context, across just a few pages on your website.
I’ve helped a number of bloggers who were perplexed by their Mediavine rejection, and this is definitely the most overlooked of the rejection reasons discussed here.
6. Rare Cases
There are a number of other reasons publishers can be rejected by Mediavine. While these are far less common, some of these reasons include:
- You are not in good standing with Google AdSense (if your AdSense account has ever been banned)
- Site layout is incompatible with Mediavine ads
- Anomalies in Google Analytics (extremely high or low bounce rate, session duration, user retention, and sudden spikes in traffic)
- Site is too new (Mediavine requires all sites to be at least 4 months old / have this recorded history in Google Analytics).
Sample Mediavine Rejection Messages
Thanks for reaching out – I’d love to provide some insight. During the review process, we noticed that most of your traffic is currently being directed to your homepage. In order for us to earn our best for you, we require your traffic to be more evenly dispersed amongst your content. Mediavine has always had a “publisher first” philosophy and we would never take on a site or ask you to sign a contract when we know going in that we just will not be able to perform well for you. Thank you so much for your patience through the review process.
I am reaching out to let you know that we are not going to be able to move forward with your Mediavine Application. Our vetting process for sites is one of the strictest in the business, and after a thorough review, we are sorry to inform you that it’s not going to be a good fit.
Thank you for your patience while our team thoroughly reviewed your application. At this time we will not be moving forward with working together on your site.
When you apply to Mediavine we aren’t just evaluating one piece of your traffic, but rather how all of the pieces work together. We (and our partners) evaluate your content, your traffic sources, bounce rate, time spent on page, layout, reader demographics, countries of origin, and several other things.
Even if you are willing to accept lower CPMs and fill rates, over time this will hurt your bottom line overall, and that’s not something we would ever want.
We really try to make sure we put the publisher first, even if that means we can’t work together. Our contract requires exclusivity, and that’s just not a thing we can ask for if we know from the start that we aren’t going to be able to do our best for you.
We want you to be able to make the most that you can from your traffic – and we hope that you are able to find an agency that is better suited to monetize your site in the countries that make up your top traffic sources.
Thank you so much for sending in your analytics!
Unfortunately, we won’t be able to work together at this time.
In our experience, having a lower percentage of traffic coming from premium countries (US, UK, Canada, Australia, etc.) can lead to lower CPMs and fill rates, which can affect your overall earnings and RPM. In our technology, we operate specifically with a price floor for our auction above 30 cents, because we have found it mitigates bad ads from the network while also providing better income for our publishers.
Unfortunately, for the percentage of your traffic coming from countries that would never begin a bid that high, it essentially means that we wouldn’t be monetizing that percentage of your traffic. Ads simply will not serve.
Mediavine has always had a “publisher first” philosophy and we would never take on a site or ask you to sign a contract when we know going in that we just will not be able to perform well for you.
We hope you are able to find a solution that specializes more in monetizing traffic from that region of the world, even if it means that we are unable to work with you.
One of the main issues was some of the words on your top posts have the potential to cause problems with brand safety.
Advertisers are looking to spend on brand safe content. You can get an idea about what they do and do not want to spend on by reviewing Google’s Publisher Restrictions. We do work with many partners that are not Google, but everyone spends through MCM (Google’s ad server), and most advertisers and exchanges have similar rules. Some take it a step further.
Advertisers use complex algorithms that comb pages for certain keywords, images, and topics, and if those things are present, they just won’t spend. If monetization with display ads is the goal with your site, we’d recommend creating content that falls within these brand-safe guidelines. Otherwise you’ll always be making less than you could be.
Conclusion
Getting rejected from Mediavine is tough. And oftentimes, the feedback provided by Mediavine is hard to parse.
The good news is there is usually a clear reason a site was rejected from Mediavine. And in many cases, there are changes you can make to your site, which will allow you to get accepted when you reapply.
If you need help identifying these necessary changes, feel free to schedule a blog consultation with me!
