Mediavine Requirements in 2024: What You Must Know (And How to Reach Them)

If you are reading this, you want to know the exact Mediavine requirements to join their network and start making money with your blog, right?

Mediavine is one of the most popular display ad networks for bloggers who want to earn passive income through placing ad units on their websites.

Compared to most of its competitors, Mediavine offers some of the highest potential earnings, a guided onboarding process, and top-notch support.

But in 2020, Mediavine dropped the bomb nobody was expecting: their minimum requirements for publishers were raised to a whole new level.

In other words: it’s now more difficult to get accepted with Mediavine and start earning money from their display ads on your blog.

In this post, I’ll walk you through all the new Mediavine requirements your website needs to fulfill to join.

I’ll also show you some hands-on strategies and ideas to help you achieve those requirements faster. You can start growing your website traffic instantly with my proven strategies – make sure to steal them today!

And if you’re not sure if Mediavine is the right ad network for you, I’ll show you the best Mediavine alternatives – including the ad network I have used for both my biggest blogs with great results.

Let’s get started!

Please note: This post contains affiliate links to products I use, trust, and recommend. If you choose to purchase a helpful product using these links, I may receive a small commission for referring you – at no extra cost to you. These funds help me keep this blog up and running.

What is Mediavine?

The first thing you need to know is what Mediavine is exactly.

You may have heard that it’s a display ad network for bloggers and content creators, but it’s so much more!

If you are not familiar, I’ve written a full guide on how to make money with display ads on your blog. Check it out for some juicy monetization tips!

Mediavine is one of the best-performing partners you can find to monetize your blog with display advertisements.

Compared to most other networks, Mediavine boasts some of the highest RPMs in the industry.

Their team is continuously working closely with publishers to improve the tools they offer to bloggers like you and me.

Also, Mediavine has a vast pool of helpful resources for educating their publishers to improve their ad performance.

Even if you haven’t joined yet, you can find a ton of useful FAQs and articles in the Mediavine help docs.

All in all, Mediavine is an all-in-one partner for making sure you can earn passive income from your blog.

They give you the tools to achieve your blog income goals more easily without feeling left alone or lost at any point.

What are the new Mediavine requirements?

Now that you’re familiar with how Mediavine works let’s look at what you need to do to get accepted to their gang.

Here’s a short overview of the most important requirements for your Mediavine application – let me walk you through them in more detail below:

1: Self-hosted blog or website requirement

First and foremost, you need to have a self-hosted website or blog with your own domain name.

Mediavine doesn’t sites from free blogging platforms or URLs from Instagram or anyt other social networks.

2: Minimum traffic requirement

Now, let’s talk about the #1 Mediavine requirement that’s the biggest hurdle for most bloggers to join their network.

To get accepted to Mediavine, your website needs to have a minimum of 50,000 sessions monthly according to Google Analytics.

Until June 2020, the minimum traffic requirement used to be 25,000 monthly sessions.

Since then, your website needs to have at least 50,000 sessions per month before you can apply to join Mediavine and to get you approved with all of their ad partners.

Yes, sessions, not page views.

If you’re looking at page views, that’s most likely between 60,000 and 80,000 per month.

If you’re just getting started with blogging, 50K sessions is a lot of traffic.

If you’re not quite there yet, there are a few easy but powerful ways to grow your website traffic fast.

I use Pinterest to drive massive traffic to both my blogs. If you’re serious about growing your website traffic, use my popular Smart Pinterest SEO guide to steal my best-kept traffic secrets right away.

Also, check out my proven Pinterest traffic strategy to start growing your traffic right away.

And don’t forget to grab your FREE Pinterest Marketing Quick Guide below:

3: Minimum traffic requirement for 2nd website

Let’s say your website gets accepted to join Mediavine. Congrats!

But what if you’re running a second website and want to join Mediavine with that one, too?

Until June 2020, your second website only needed a minimum of 10,000 sessions to join.

But now, your second site also needs a minimum of 50,000 monthly sessions.

This is definitely a sign of Mediavine having enough websites in their network already. They’re now merely focusing on working with larger sites overall, whether it’s your first or second website we’re talking about.

However, if you’re eligible for the invite-only Mediavine Pro program, you can apply to add an additonal site to Mediavine at just 25,000 monthly sessions.

4: Traffic source country requirement

Apart from the minimum traffic requirements, Mediavine also wants most of your traffic to come from the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. This is simply because these are the highest-paying ad markets worldwide.

Thus, Mediavine has the largest pool of high-RPM ads to display on your site to people visiting from these countries.

If most of your traffic comes from, say, Asia, Mediavine may reject your application.

5: Content requirements

Obviously, your website needs to have high-quality, original content.

More specifically, Mediavine requires you to have content in a lifestyle niche.

The best blog niches and categories for joining Mediavine are:

• Lifestyle and fashion
• DIY and crafts
• Parenting
• Food and drink
• Health and fitness
• Travel

However, even if you’re outside these niches, you should still apply. Just make sure your content isn’t about any of the restricted topics listed in their terms of service.

Mediavine is all about maintaining their integrity and reputation, so your website simply needs to fit their idea of quality.

If you’re a blogger, your blog posts need to resonate with your audience. The more your readers engage and interact with your content, the higher your chances of getting accepted.

During the application process, Mediavine actually screens your most popular blog posts. Because the more people engage with your content, the more they will also engage with ads.

Also, your website can’t show any signs of security threats or be flagged as dubious by Google.

6: Google Analytics 4

To join Mediavine, you must be running Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for your website domain in order for your application to be processed.

7: Good standing with Google AdSense

And finally, Mediavine requires that your website has a good standing with Google Adsense.

In other words, your AdSense account should not have been flagged or suspended ever. Issues with AdSense usually mean that your site is spammy or not fit for Mediavine’s ad partners.

For more details, check out the detailed Google AdSense program policy.

Why did Mediavine requirements change in 2020?

Back in 2020, Mediavine’s minimum traffic requirement doubled from 25K to 50K monthly sessions.

Why?

When an ad network raises its traffic requirement, it’s because they can.

Let me explain:

Every website Mediavine works with means manual labor for them.

And the higher the traffic for every website, the higher the return from that labor.

Thus, working with low-traffic websites means the average ad income per site is lower overall.

But increasing the average income per website means Mediavine can squeeze out more revenue from each hour of work with their publishers.

Hence, their team will most likely offer better tools, support, and ad performance to their publishers in the future.

How to apply for Mediavine?

Now that you’re familiar with all Mediavine requirements, it’s time to apply to Mediavine here!

To apply, you’ll need to fill in these details:

• Website name
• Website domain and URL
• Whether you’ve applied before
• Whether you own other sites with Mediavine ads
• Current ad network (e.g. Monumetric, Ezoic)
• Session count for the last 30 days from Google Analytics
• CMS or website platform (e.g. WordPress, Squarespace, Wix)

Once you submit your application, Mediavine will review your site to see if it meets their requirements.

If it does, you will be accepted into the program and you can start monetizing your blog with Mediavine ads. Great job!

What if you don’t have enough traffic to join Mediavine?

So you’ve been working hard to publish high-quality content and grow your traffic to meet the Mediavine traffic requirements above?

But now that the bar is raised to 50K sessions monthly, joining their network seems like a distant dream in the future?

Until now, getting your website accepted into Mediavine was a big milestone for many new bloggers. In a way, their network is perceived to be the best one out there.

The new developments in their requirements make it a lot harder for beginner bloggers to get in. And for some of us, the fairly high minimum traffic bar is now even more daunting.

But while the new Mediavine requirements mean that you need to work harder to grow your traffic, it’s not the end of the world.

Because firstly, having a long-term goal (such as joining their ad network) keeps you focused.

And second, there are other ways to monetize your blog, too.

Here’s what you should do:

Now, if your traffic is well below the 50K minimum, let’s look at two essential things you should do right now:

1. Grow your traffic with proven techniques that work
2. Find a high-paying Mediavine alternative to join instead

Let me explain:

1: Grow your traffic

First, don’t give up on your traffic strategy. Remember, you don’t need traffic just to join Mediavine in the long run.

You also need traffic to turn your blog into a profitable online business – with or without their ads!

Thus, make sure you keep using smart traffic strategies to grow your page views.

Here are a few of my favorite traffic techniques you can use instantly:

Focus on SEO:

Search engine optimization or SEO may sound a tad technical, but it’s one of the most powerful ways to grow your traffic in the long run.

Here’s what you should do:

Fist, find low-competition keywords with the free version of KWFinder.

Their tool is super easy to use, even if you have very little experience with keyword research. I use it for all blog posts I write.

You can use KWFinder to discover keywords that have a high potential for monetizing your content quickly.

Once you’ve found the right keywords you want to target, create top-notch articles that genuinely help your readers. Hence, you should know enough about the topic you’re writing about to share your own success story with them.

Ready my guide on how to write the perfect blog post for a helpful checklist for your writing process.

Finally, optimize your blog post with the Yoast SEO plugin. It helps you improve your article structure, headings, paragraphs, external links, and more with clear and concise suggestions based on your selected keyword:

Check out my free SEO for beginners guide for a handful of practical SEO tips for bloggers.

Explode your traffic with Pinterest:

Pinterest is currently my #1 quick traffic source for my new blogs.

Why should you use Pinterest, too?

Because you will see blog traffic much faster than from Google SEO.

Also, Pinterest traffic usually ramps up over time. All you need to do is follow best practices for Pinterest SEO and stay consistent with your pinning.

And finally, Pinterest wants to send traffic your way!

The platform runs on high-quality content that users want to engage with. Thus, if you learn the basics of how the Pinterest algorithm works, you will see results quickly.

With that said, Pinterest is actually very similar to Google. It’s not a social network, but rather a visual search engine.

If you know the basics of Google SEO, you won’t have trouble learning how Pinterest works.

Grab my Smart Pinterest SEO e-book to learn all you need to optimize your Pinterest traffic strategy step-by-step.

Start an email list:

Google SEO and Pinterest are great ways to attract new visitors to your website.

But how do you get them to return to your site in the future?

The answer is:

With email marketing.

Building an email list is the easiest tool to turn new visitors into a loyal audience.

When you convert your visitors into email subscribers, they will:

• Consume every piece of content you publish
• Share your blog posts on social media
• Be more likely to purchase your products

Hence, if you’re planning to create your own digital products to make money, you must have an email list.

Get started now with my step-by-step tutorial on how to start an email list for free.

For even more hands-on techniques to drive more traffic to your website, check out my 7 quick strategies to grow your blog traffic faster.

2: Find a high-paying Mediavine alternative

Even if you are close to the good old 25K traffic milestone, you still need to double your traffic to get accepted with Mediavine.

If that’s the case, I feel you. It can be extremely disappointing.

But even if you’re well below 25K sessions monthly, there’s something I suggest you do right now:

Find a high-paying Mediavine alternative.

That’s right! You can join another ad network while you’re working towards that 50K mark.

There are a few good display ad networks for bloggers you can join right away. And some of them don’t even have a minimum traffic requirement.

Here are my favorite Mediavine alternatives for low-traffic blogs:

1. Monumetric – 10K monthly pageviews required:
   I use Monumetric for both my blogs and I couldn’t be happier! You only need a minimum of 10K monthly pageviews to join, and they will do all the heavy lifting for you. The only downside: there’s a $99 setup fee. But remember, you will earn that money back with your ads rather quickly.
2. Monetag – no traffic requirement:
   Monetag is a quick and easy ad network to sign up with and to set up for your website. Moreover, they offer a good selection of ad units you can try to see what works best for your site.
3. Ezoic – 10K monthly pageviews required:
   If you’re past the 10K pageview mark but don’t want to pay the Monumetric setup fee, Ezoic is a great alternative. Their RPMs are much higher than AdSense, but you need to take care of a few technical things yourself.
4. Media.net:
   If you’ve just started your blog and your traffic is still quite low, I recommend joining Media.net to start making passive income quickly. Of course, your ad revenue will be relatively small in the beginning. But it’s worth your time to set up your display ads asap so that you’re not missing on any blog income. Media.net is easy to set up, and you can customize your ad units to match your website design.

For more ideas, check out these best 10+ ad networks for bloggers.

General FAQ: Mediavine requirements for publishers

Final thoughts: Mediavine requirements to join

I hope you found some helpful tips in this Mediavine requirements article!

What do you think? Will you be joining Mediavine anytime soon?

Or did you find a good Mediavine alternative already?

Please share your thoughts in the comments!

If you want to make money with display ads, your #1 goal should be to constantly grow your website traffic. More visitors mean higher pageviews, which translates into more passive income for you.

But on the other hand, keep in mind that display ads aren’t the only way to monetize your blog or website.

In fact, I highly recommend using multiple monetization methods to diversify your income sources.

I’m a huge fan of display ad income, but up to 70% of my blog income comes from affiliate marketing.

Also, creating and selling my own products has helped me grow my blog income quickly.

Thus, display ads only make up about 10–20% of my blog revenue. I’ve been using Monumetric since 2019 – read my Monumetric review for all the details.

If you meet the Monumetric minimum requirements, I really recommend joining them today!

So, what will your monetization strategy be like? What are you going to do differently in the future with the new Mediavine requirements?