Broadly speaking, we don't recommend adding ads until you qualify for Mediavine or Raptive (formerly AdThrive).
Why?
The pay out just isn't worth it.
While it can be enticing to think you can start to "cover costs", there's always a trade-off. In this case, the trade-off is a worse user experience and pagespeed performance.
Mediavine themselves admit this: https://www.mediavine.com/seo-and-ads-fact-vs-fiction-and-how-mediavine-optimizes-both-together/
This performance penalty can mean that it takes longer to qualify for a real ad network.
This doesn't just apply to slower pagespeed load times, the poorer user experience means that visitor is more likely to bounce and less likely to visit another page. Both of these issues means that you're displaying fewer ads for them over time.
Jump to:
Adsense
NEVER EVER RUN GOOGLE AD SENSE ON YOUR SITE.
This is an absolute no-go. The payouts are hilariously bad and if your account is ever closed you're permanently barred from joining Mediavine or Raptive.
If you have Ad Sense installed, immediately remove it.
Economics
If you had ads for a year and generated $50 per month for 12 months, you would make:
12 x $50 = $600
But let's say this delays you qualifying for a better ad network by even one month, because of the performance penalty.
A single month on a good ad network will generate $1000+ at the beginning, rising quickly as the ads are optimized.
This means a single month on a good ad network is worth as much as an entire year with adsense.
Looking at the big picture, it doesn't make any sense to install adsense (or gourmetads) on a blog, ever.
That's why, broadly speaking, we don't recommend adding ads until you qualify for Mediavine or Raptive.
Update 2020/07/01: Mediavine recently raised their minimum to 50,000 pageviews/month to deal with the volume of applications.
This means that you can consider SheMedia or Ezoic (with their "site speed improvement" costing $20/month) if you're unable to hold off waiting for 50,000 pageviews.
The better thing to do is work on cranking out as many high quality recipes as you can, as quickly as you can, and building up your backlinks so that you can hit that 50,000 visits/month ASAP. That should be your only focus when you start.
Creating just 2 high quality (keyword researched) recipes per week for a single year will get you to 100 posts, which will get you onto a quality ad network within 18-24 months.
For context, the top bloggers put out a recipe per day (5 per week) on average.
Risks
On top of low payouts, pagespeed issues, and delayed qualification for high quality ad networks, low quality ad networks sometimes carry completely unreasonable risks:
While we firmly believe that you should understand any contract you enter into and fulfill it, this is a perfect example of why you shouldn't sign sign up for a lower quality ad network in the first place.
What are the CPMs
While these numbers are completely anecdotal based on conversations we've had directly with users, and true only at a certain point in time, we've been told that the RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions) work out to roughly:
- Mediavine: $20-$30
- Note: as of 2024/2025 it's not uncommon to see RPMs of $50 or higher, depending on time of year
- Raptive: $20-$30
- Note: as of 2024/2025 it's not uncommon to see RPMs of $50 or higher, depending on time of year
- Monumetric: $10-$15 (make sure to enable their "Pagespeed" feature!)
- Ezoic: $10-$20
- Make sure to enable "Leap"
- SheMedia: $10-$25
- GourmetAds: $5
- BlogHerAds: $5
- Adsense: $3
Note: every network measures and defines RPMs different - the numbers above are what we've been told by bloggers on those networks in casual conversation.
RPMs also vary depending on:
- Where your visitors are form (North America traffic is much more valuable)
- What your content is about (some content attracts higher value visitors)
- Time of year (holiday season sees a surge due to advertising spending competition)
- Type of ad unit being displayed (video pays higher)
- Type of device
- How much of your content the visitors views (ads must be loaded+viewed to count)
Switching ad networks
We get asked about which ad network has higher RPMs: Mediavine or Raptive. The truth is that there's no clear winner, and there are tons of examples of sites earning more or less when switching.
The majority of improved RPMs that people report when switching ad networks is due to taking a fresh look at technical issues, fixing them, and then making changes to improve RPMs that have negative impacts on user experience. This has basically nothing to do with the ad network and everything to do with re-optimizing for ads, which you can do without changing ad networks.
At Feast, we're big fans of Mediavine, but have many clients on Raptive without any issues.
Do Ads hurt pagespeed?
Yes! All ad networks, including Mediavine, will hurt your pagespeed.
This doesn't mean that you shouldn't display ads however. The question you need to ask is whether the penalty from having a slower website, is worth the revenue generated by those ads.
In the case of Mediavine, Raptive and Monumetric, the answer is yes.
Note: for all these ad networks, you need to "opt in" to enable lazyloading - this is known as "Site Speed Accelerator" in Ezoic.
Raptive has a specific form to request this.
Mediavine users can find this in their settings in their Mediavine Publisher Dashboard.
For any other ad network (including Adsense), the answer is no.
Jump To Recipe buttons
Your ad company may make a recommend to remove the "Jump to Recipe" button, or alter it to make it less obvious, in order to increase revenue.
This can absolutely boost revenue in the short term, by forcing/tricking your readers to scroll through ads in order to get to the recipe.
This will absolutely piss off your users however, because nobody likes scrolling through ads. It 100% negatively impacts your sites user experience.
Our stance is that removing/hiding the "Jump to Recipe" button is not worth the short-term gain, and that you should focus on building long term loyal customer base that will earn you more in the long run.
Anecdotally, we've talked to non-bloggers who have simply said that if the Jump to Recipe isn't immediately visible when a page loads, they immediately leave and go to the next site. Search engines monitor this kind of visitor behavior known as "bounce rate" and reward sites that do not have "high bounce rates" with better ranking.
Ads are only one way to monetize a website and putting all your eggs in one basket (revenue stream) is a recipe for disaster.
We leave it up to you to decide what your priorities are and what you choose to do.
Default closed on Advanced Jump To
The Advanced Jump To is our optimized Table of Contents block.
Some ad companies defaulting this to closed (there's a setting for this in the Feast Plugin) in order to prevent users from scrolling past the ads, because this effectively "hides" the Advanced Jump To so that people miss it.
Once again, defaulting the Advanced Jump to closed will improve ad revenue in the short term, but is a bad user experience and will negatively impact your brand in the long term.
Our strong recommendation is to use the "max height" feature in the Feast Plugin to restrict it to 200-300px tall, and not default closed. This will be a better user experience and support long-term loyalty in your visitors.
We leave it up to you to decide what your priorities are and what you choose to do.
Sidebar
Our default setup, and recommendation for the sidebar, is to keep it short and not stuff it with excess content. This is because the sidebar sticky ad unit on desktop is a high earner and you want it to show up quickly.
Our recommended setup includes only:
- author bio
- trending recipes (4 total)
- seasonal recipes (4 total)
While there's a place for CTAs (call to actions) for courses or members or cookbook sales, just beware that the longer the sidebar, the lower your earnings. See the Modern Sidebar for full details.
Body font size
Generally speaking, a body font size of 18-20 will make the content more readable on a mobile screen, and spaces content out more so that ads are better optimized.
18px is generally best, however 20px is acceptable on some sites and fonts. Feel free to test this yourself on your own site and choose whichever works best.
You can edit your body font size here.
Video Ads
Video currently has the highest paying ad rates at the moment, anywhere from 20-50% higher than regular display ads.
As far as we're aware, only Mediavine currently has a usable video ad player.
Randal Oulton says
Just to add grist to the mill of anecdotal numbers, with Monumetric my experience has been $19.00 / RPM.
Randal Oulton says
Thanks for heads up BTW about Mediavine, Adthrive, and Ezoic, I've been getting solicitation emails from them for several years but I wasn't sure about them. So have just been letting the emails pile up... I will def consider their emails now.
Skylar says
Thanks for sharing this Randal!
Bia says
Thank you for this! I currently use Adsense on my website and want to uninstall it. Could you please clarify what you mean by if the adsense account is closed, you're barred from mediavine or adthrive?
Skylar says
If you get banned from adsense for violating their policies, you become ineligible for ad management from Mediavine or Raptive because of quality/safety requirements on the backend. It's not that Mediavine or Raptive ban you, it's that you simply can't qualify.
We have no knowledge whatsoever of what adding or removing adsense entails and what issues you may encounter with it unfortunately. That's why we just recommend not using it in the first place. You'll want to speak to someone more knowledgeable about this.