Ezoic Review 2024: Will it Increase Your Blog Revenue?

Are you wondering if Ezoic is a good ad network for you? This Ezoic review is the right place to start figuring that out!

Ad networks are one of the many ways bloggers can make passive income.

Everyone seems to be chomping at the bit to join an ad network the moment they start blogging. It’s why many turn to Adsense, even though it’s not a good money maker, nor is it good for your site speed.

That’s why I first turned to Ezoic 4 or 5 years ago. I wanted to see some money coming out of this blog I was sinking 80+ hours a week into. 

I rejoined in November 2022 as a test of their changes over the years with one of my baby niche sites. 

Now that I make multiple 6 figures of passive income from my main travel blog annually, and have experience with 4 different ad networks, I know a lot more than I did when I signed up early on in my blogging journey. 

I want to help you not make the same mistakes I did when it comes to monetization!

In this review, I’m going to cover whether or not Ezoic is worth your time and money by looking at its speed performance, rankings impact on core web vitals score as well as payouts per click. 

At the end of it all, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about whether or not Ezoic is right for you!

What is Ezoic?

Ezoic is an ad network, similar to Adsense and Mediavine. They serve ads on your site, share the revenue with you, and offer some additional features like Ezoic Leap, an AI Ad tester that optimizes your placements and Video Tools. 

You may ask, “Nina, why do I need an ad network?”

Ad networks are a great way to create passive income. 

It takes the stress out of finding sponsors and running ads yourself.

Basically, they create a bidding room for ad placements on your site, which sponsors can then buy as they feel. This is done via Google Adsense (as it is with every network I’ve encountered), but in a way that you never notice it.

You just get to notice the dollars rolling in each month.

Ezoic Ads Review

Let’s dive into my Ezoic ads review and exactly how it works. I don’t think it’s fair to just say “it’s great!” or “it’s crap!” unless you learn about all the features first. 

How Does Ezoic Work?

Let’s look at the inner workings of Ezoic. 

Web Monetization Features

Ezoic has a Chrome Extension that lets you try different ads in different places. It’s pretty easy to drag and drop them into a template of your site to see where you want them to go. 

It can test lots of things at the same time and figure out which ones make more money or are better for your website. 

You can pick goals like making more money or making sure visitors have a good experience. 

Ezoic will also try thousands of ad networks and make sure you get the best deals for each visitor.

Ezoic Ad Tester

Ezoic uses an AI feature to access the Google Ad Exchange and find the best ads for each site and each visitor. 

It allows the ads to run in a more personalized way, which can drive up bids from the sponsors. 

This helps sponsors also figure out which spot they want to purchase on your site. They likely want the highest converting one and will pay the most for it, but if you don’t know what that is, then you can’t serve it to them.

The artificial intelligence reads your site with 8 lines of code to figure this out. 

Header Bidding

Header bidding isn’t about a spot in your header. It’s a code in your header that creates a virtual auction on your site for sponsors to bid to be placed on your site.

This results in you making the highest revenue, as it’s not just a fixed fee being handed out to anyone. 

According to Ezoic: “Our machine learning takes into account all of these things (fill rate, click-through rate, viewability, backfill, refresh rate, size, location, header bidding time-outs) to ensure the best balance of UX and revenue.” (UX = user experience) 

Big Data Analytics

Big Data Analytics is Ezoic’s analytics portal. Unlike Google Analytics where you just see pageviews, here you can also see the revenue attached to it.

Mediavine has a similar function in their dashboard, as did SheMedia when I was with them. Essentially it lets you see which posts are getting what traffic, their revenue from ads, and sometimes extra info like time on page – depending on the platform you’re using.

With Ezoic, you can filter these by date, writer, ad sponsor, size of ad, and location of ad. 

I enjoy the real time revenue reporting, which I haven’t seen in any other ad network before. 

I’m not sure how this will be impacted by the change to G4. 

SEO Tag Tester – DEFUNCT

With Ezoic’s SEO Tag Tester, you can use AI to maximize the page titles for your website URLs – and best of all, it is totally free!

It trials two different titles and descriptions to show to Google to see which one will convert better. 

NicheIQ 

NicheIQ is basically a knock off of RankIQ from what I can tell (or maybe it came first? I can’t find any data on their start dates).

Basically, NicheIQ is meant to be a keyword research tool for organic rankings, not Google ads. 

It has a broken link checker, lets you test titles and descriptions on Google to see what converts better, find underperforming content to audit, get analytics, and suggests topics based on your niche.

None of these things need to be done in Ezoic in my opinion. Analytics should stay in Google Analytics. Broken links can be found at brokenlinkcheck.com for free. Testing titles and descriptions is fine but since Google often changes them it’s not hyper-relevant, and you could do this with A/B testing through your SEO plugin or blog theme.

The topics are interesting, but with AI now able to product topic maps with the click of a button, I would not get Ezoic just to use NicheIQ. 

Flickify

Flixify is Ezoic’s video creator tool. It’s an AI that takes any article and turns it into a video.

This was super forward-thinking when it launched, but now there are dozens of AI softwares that offer this for free without you needing to join an ad network.

When you are ready to create a video in Flickify, you can customize everything from the narrator’s voice to the soundtrack to which style of stock photos/videos they pull. You can even upload your own media!

It’s great to have this inside Ezoic if you’re an Ezoic publisher.

If not, you can use another AI like Fliki, or Synthesia. 

Humix

Humix is a lesser-known function of Ezoic. 

It’s a video management tool. I kind of think of it like Youtube, except it’s hosted on Ezoic.

Similarly to something like Loom (which you’ll recognize if you’re in my Private Jet SEO membership, as it’s how I answer all questions), you get a unique video player for your site. I don’t customize my one in Loom, but you have the option, just like with Humix.

It can also import videos from Youtube.

Humix works with Ezoic to optimize your video for ads. Mediavine has a similar tool.

Essentially, they’ll add ads into your video either mid-feed, before, or after (think of it like the ads on Youtube or in a podcast episode). 

I like that it has an SEO option to add keywords and categories to help your rankings.

Since Google loves videos embedded in content, this is a great option to make some money from those videos you’re adding. 

Much like Youtube, you can use other creators’ videos and they can use yours as well. Although it’s unclear to me from my research whether or not you make money off of others using your video as I use other video platforms for my sites.

This is great for vloggers.

Ezoic Leap

Ezoic is pretty notorious for wrecking pagespeed. So they came up with a solution: Ezoic Leap.

The issue is, Ezoic Leap is a cache plugin that must be used with Ezoic Cloud. So if you already have a CDN or it’s built into your hosting (like mine is with Lyrical Host now), you can’t use it.

What does Ezoic Leap do?

It caches your site, optimizes the CSS, reduces image size, and lazy loads images. 

I’ve seen anecdotal evidence that it can help people’s sites; however, it seems to conflict with a large number of publishers.

My current host doesn’t work with it, although my old one did. My cache plugin doesn’t work with it. Although it optimizes images to some degree, it doesn’t seem to convert them to Webp like Shortpixel so that’s another conflict. And if you have cloud-based hosting, you’re SOL.

If you join Ezoic and complain about site speed, you’ll have hundreds of die hards jumping down your throat about how you need Ezoic Leap. That’s all well and good if it can work with your site, but it shouldn’t be a necessity.

Mediavine doesn’t break my Core Web Vitals or drop my speed significantly, and I didn’t have to install any special plugin for that to be the case. 

Although Leap is free, I see a lot of issues with it being required by Ezoic for things to run smoothly. 

Ezoic Gatekeeper

Get a pop up cookie consent and other consent management with this feature of Ezoic. 

There are free plugins that do this, but hand on heart I use Mediavine’s auto-populated one so I totally get using the one that comes with your ad network.

Ezoic Levels

This is where Ezoic gets touchy. 

So although getting into Ezoic has no minimum pageviews, there are levels to “unlocking” higher payouts and support.

This is why Ezoic gets better and better the higher your pageviews are, but at the beginning it’s pretty rough going.

Here is a breakdown of the levels and what you get with them:

Ezoic Levels	Monthly visits	Monthly Revenue	Added Benefits
Access Now	< 10,000	Not Required	Core Ad Partners, Free Courses, Basic Support, Live Webinars, Help Community
Level 1	> 10,000	$50	Core Ad Partners, Basic Support, Group Onboarding, Live Webinars, Live Chat, Waitlist for Premium, Help Community
Level 2	20,000	$200	A+ Ad Partners, Dedicated Rep, Onboarding Asst., Premium Priority, Live Webinars, Live Chat, Help Community, Book Consultation
Level 3	50,000	$500	A++ Ad Partners, Dedicated Rep, Onboarding Asst., Premium Access, Live Webinars, Live Chat, Help Community, Business Reviews, 1-to-1 Help, Event Invite
Level 4	250,000	$2,500	A++ Ad Partners, Dedicated Rep, Expert Access, Onboarding Team, Premium Eligible, Live Webinars, Live Chat, Help Community, SEO Experts, AdOps Experts, 1-to-1 Help, Event Invites, Ad Sales Team (limited)
VIP	Limited Availability	$10,000+	A++ Ad Partners, Dedicated Rep, Expert Access, Onboarding Team, Premium Eligible, Live Webinars, Live Chat, Help Community, SEO Experts, AdOps Experts, Dev Experts, 1-to-1 Help, Event Invites, Ad Sales Team (limited)

Ezoic Site Scores – NOW DEFUNCT

Ezoic Site Scores are basically tips to improve your site. You get little badges for each one you complete. The goal is to complete them all and that should (according to Ezoic) improve your pageviews so you’ll make more money. 

Ezoic Cloud

Ezoic Cloud is basically a CDN like Cloudflare. Rather than having your user’s request to access your site ping from your servers where your host is based then to the ad bidding area then to javascript to pull the ad, then back to your user (gah that sounds so long!), it goes user -> Ezoic cloud -> site with ads on page. 

It’s also supposed to be more secure from hackers. 

Ezoic Requirements

If you want to join Ezoic, you must be approved by AdSense. That’s pretty much it in terms of requirements.

There’s no traffic requirement.

Your website must have information on it. It cannot be a place to buy things. You need to be in good standing with Google too.

Ezoic Set Up 

Getting started with Ezoic was one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had with a company.

I don’t remember it being nearly as hard before – and that was still crazy difficult.

Seriously, Google Adsense is better at setting up than Ezoic!

Once you apply, you basically get in no questions asked. Then they try to upsell you to their paid subscription (which might be able to get you a higher RPM but it’s unclear if it’s enough to cover the cost until you’re Mediavine level traffic).

I declined and continued setting things up.

People say “it’s great that it’s a self service publisher!” … I disagree.

I’d much rather something easy to integrate and not to have to set the ad placements or do the evaluations myself. 

You have to point your nameservers to them.

Then you are also supposed to set up their Ezoic Leap CDN and cache integration. Which I couldn’t do because my host, Lyrical, has one built in – it’s faster than Ezoic’s when I did tests.

I wanted to leave that on, which means Ezoic became more complex to set up. Thank God for Lyrical actually doing the set up for me so I wouldn’t have to.

Then it came time to install the ads.

You go through a “course” of sorts to set things up. The info is vague and out of date.

And half of it doesn’t occur, then has no resources to help you fix it.

I got to the point of being able to populate my ad spaces. They have an auto-populate feature via their layout tester.

It wouldn’t work.

I tried the manual placement.

That didn’t work.

I tried for 6 weeks to get this thing set up – 6 FRICKEN WEEKS!

In the end, I needed to use the Ezoic Google Chrome extension and even then it wouldn’t fully take the ads for days. It was incredibly frustrating for something everyone says is “so easy”. 

Setting the ad placements was also annoying because, to be honest, I don’t know where the best spots are for ads. I want someone to tell me these things, not have to randomly attempt it all.

You then decide if you’re going to turn off any objectionable content (aka. booze, drugs, alcohol) and toggle that off. I recommend doing this to protect your brand, even if people claim you might make more money from it (I did leave it on once and didn’t notice a difference). 

Now there is also a WordPress plugin, but as SEOs know we want as few plugins as possible. However, this is common amongst ad platforms to be honest as they’re more focused on their ad units set up than on your site speed it seems. 

New Feature: AccessNow

Ezoic now has an automated set up feature. I haven’t tried it myself nor do I know anyone that did.

Their email announcing it opened with: “After extensive research, we found that the number 1 reason publishers left Ezoic is the complex setup process.”

I’m glad to hear they’re listening to this – but the main issue most of us actually have are speed issues and ad population issues.

To set it up, you need the Cloud integration (so it won’t work with Lyrical Host) and then they’ll do the rest.

“Ezoic’s new automated setup takes all the hassle out of getting started on our platform. There is no more required video course and everything from ad setup to caching configuration is handled by us, to give you more time to focus on what’s more important to you!” – Ezoic Announcement Email April 18, 2023.

I’m interested to see if this helps others, but I won’t be trying it until I see a more efficient code for the ads.

Ezoic Extension

The Ezoic Chrome extension helps you decide where to put ads on your website and how big they should be. You don’t need to change any of the code on your page.

Then you can remove the extension and it’ll stay in place. 

Ezoic Dashboard

Your Ezoic dashboard is where you’ll see how much money you’re making from ads, which ad networks are showing up the most, and what kind of results you’re getting from SEO Tag Tester.

You can also use the dashboard to tweak your settings for different page types, as well as adjust ad placement if needed. 

The most important thing is how much money you’ve made, and this is where you’ll come for that. 

Ezoic EPMV

Most ad networks run on RPMs (revenue per thousand impressions), but Ezoic uses EPMV. 

EPMV is earnings per thousand visitors rather than impressions. This makes them look a lot higher than RPMs, but it’s because it’s a completely different calculation.

I do think it’s a better system as long as it’s clear it’s different – like with FB ads, you look at your conversions from clicks and from impressions separately. 

Ezoic Payment Options

Unlike Google Adsense, Ezoic has a $20 USD minimum threshold. Which is SOOO much better.

I still have $83 locked in Google Adsense from 3 years with them and from a failed foray into monetized Google Web Stories. 

You can get paid by check, Wise.com transfer (my #1 choice), Paypal, direct deposit to a US bank via Payoneer, or international wire transfer via Payoneer (has a conversion fee). 

Select your payment method and it’ll keep pulling that info over and over again.

Ezoic Payment Date

Ezoic operates on a net-30 system (aka they pay 30 days after the money was earned). Payments typically go out on the 27th and 31st of each month. 

This is when they send the money, but it can take longer to receive from a wire transfer for example. 

Ezoic Earnings Calculator

Check how much you could earn with Ezoic at the EPMV revenue calculator here.

Ezoic Revenue Share

Ezoic takes a 10% revenue share.

What’s a revenue share, I hear you asking?

Basically if Sponsor X pays $100 to have some ads on your site, Ezoic takes a 10% cut of that. Think of them like your Momager taking their cut from your earnings.

This might seem like a lot but it’s actually pretty low.

Adsense takes 32%, SheMedia takes 25%, Mediavine takes 25% to start (with less when you meet certain thresholds), and Adthrive taking 25% as well. Monumetric takes 15-30%, but it’s unclear when they vary their share amounts. 

Ezoic Core Web Vitals and Site Speed

The first thing I checked after ads were running on my site was site speed.

This site had a speed of 1.6 seconds for new users, passed core web vitals, and has 98/100 on pagespeed insights before I added Ezoic.

Then I added Ezoic, and speed PLUMMETED.

It’s current stats are:

Speed = 8.4 seconds

Core Web Vitals = Failed

Pagespeed Rating = 32/100

(Tools used: Pagespeed Insights and Webpagetest.org – both free)

This is a site with literally a basic Kadence theme that I customized with few blocks. It has a lightning fast CDN and a great cache. It has 5 plugins, all optimized for speed. And all images have been compressed (I think there are 5 on the homepage).

It has 0 reason to be loading that slowly.

When I checked the code issues, it was all coming from CSS and Javascript, etc. running from Ezoic.

It seems like from the code that they place the bidding center for your ads on your site, and then connect publishers regardless of whether or not they bid so that their code runs too. They even host the video processor in your coding so any video ads are basically loading like you’ve uploaded them to your backend.

It’s a NIGHTMARE of slow speeds.

And seriously sloppy coding.

Ezoic Support

Why did it take 6 weeks to try to get ads running on this site?

Because Ezoic has 0 customer support unless you’re on the paid plan.

There is a community forum that is impossible to post on. And that will only get you the wisdom of the masses – not actual Ezoic tech help.

Their help section is woefully lacking of actually helpful articles.

It was so frustrating I wanted to give up so many times.

But at this point, I was in it for the experiment.

And I’m not good at letting anything go – it’s why I’m still calling embassies in the UK to try to figure out their service dog travel laws to go to Europe with my dog this summer.

Eventually, I managed to get Lyrical’s help getting the ads to show and then had to manually place the ad locations on my site. It had to be done on soooo many pages.

I will never take the set-it and forget-it beauty of Mediavine’s ads for granted ever again!! Their customer service should inspire Ezoic. I hate that you need a certain traffic level for an account manager. 

Ezoic Premium Program

Ezoic Premium is a paid subscription program that is available to customers who are Level 2+. 

You will be able to get higher CPM rates for ads sold, better ad reports, a quarterly site review with an expert, 100 free videos monthly with Flickify, and unlimited NicheIQ topic suggestions. 

There’s a Pro subscription that basically just gets you support for $5.99 per month. Premium on the other hand costs a lot more. 

It’s a weird pricing structure that is not clearly stated anywhere. 

It looks like there are three levels: Starter (starts at $14/mo), Growth (starts at $28/mo), and 3 Star (starts at $70/mo).

You can pay monthly or annually. 

The best review I found of this is from Fat Stacks here. In 2020, he was paying over $9k (usually $14k) per month, leaving a profit from ads of just $3,150 (I’m nearing that on Mediavine with one site and I pay $0). 

You can get a free trial of it though to see if the higher revenue does increase your ad earnings or if you’d end up paying more than you’d earn. 

Ezoic Affiliate Program

Total transparency, I’m using Ezoic affiliate links in this post. 

Why? Because it exists and if I’m driving you to them, then I’ll share the link. However, I am not writing this for the affiliate commission (it’d legit be the worst post if I was pushing for affiliate commissions when it’s pretty clear my view of this program). 

Affiliates with Ezoic earn 3% of the ad revenue from the people they referred for life.

I think this is why so many bloggers share this program so extensively.

Yes, it has some pros. Like the fact that it’s not location specific and has no barrier to entry. But the number of people who hype it over Mediavine confuse the shit out of me – especially when I know their sites and know they can get into Mediavine.

It often feels like people promote it to others just so they will get the commission, and not because they actually believe in it. 

I find it a bit weird for an ad network to have an affiliate for this reason, to be honest. 

Like share your links, but let’s be up front about why we’re pushing stuff.

It reminds me a bit of the Elementor and Divi craze. A great affiliate program meant everyone pushed it out there, and it wrecked thousands of sites. 

I’m still unraveling that damage with many of my clients.

My Ezoic Review: Earnings for 3 Months

I first tried Ezoic in my 2nd (maybe crossing into my 3rd?) year of blogging (I’m on year 6 right now).

It was CRAP.

The site speed was terrible. The ads made no money and they broke the entire site structure. And it was nearly impossible to get paid.

I kept it on longer than I should have – a couple months – before kicking it to the curb.

From there, I became ad celibate as I waited to hit the Mediavine 25k sessions goal.

You might be saying, “25k sessions? Nina, it’s 50k!”

Yeah that’s how long ago this was. Back when Mediavine seemed to let anyone in (jk, 25k sessions is still hard to get). 

In 2022, people started talking about Ezoic again in a positive way.

Digital Nomad Wannabe had used it on her Dive Into Malaysia site experiment. Aisha Preece started using it to monetize her smaller sites and help people get paid early on from their site. Big names on SEO twitter were saying they preferred it to Mediavine 😱

I know – I was shook too!

I figured I owed it to Ezoic to give it another try.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in the last 20 years of therapy it’s that people change.

And I guess the same should be assumed of ad networks.

I signed up my new niche destination site that I’m planning to build and sell for $50k this year.

Since a site’s sale evaluation is 35-40x its monthly income for the past 6 months, I figured I should get it some monthly income.

If all these people were to be believed, surely it’d be bringing in enough to at least cover its freelancer costs, right?

Wrong!  

About the Site:

The site is a niche city in Canada.

When I joined Ezoic it was at about 8k pageviews. It’s down to 4.5k as of last month.

Traffic is mostly US and Canadian.

Set Up and Speed:

The set up went horribly.

But the main thing that pissed me off was how adding Ezoic ads completely wrecked my site’s speed.

It ended up cutting my sessions in half over the 3 month trial. 

RPMs/Income:

I could forgive slow site speed if it made me $$

Mediavine slows down my site a bit – adding about 0.5-0.75 seconds to my site’s load time.

But it doesn’t add over 5 seconds to the load time!

So how much have I made from Ezoic: $36.08 in the last two months (January and February 2023).

That’s with 6k pageviews last month and 4k this month. My average RPMs – which is basically just how many $ you earn per 1,000 people on your site – is $0.46 in the last month. My EPMV was $5.53.

On my highest day, I earned just over $1.

On average, I make about $0.40 daily.

Less than $30 a month is SO not worth the speed loss.

Especially if it’s going to be slowing me down, hurting my rankings, and delaying my ability to get the sessions I need to get into Mediavine.

In fact, since adding Ezoic, my traffic has nearly halved – and not because I had seasonal content up. My rankings have fallen a bit in line with that site speed change. 

“Wait 60 Days”:

I’ve heard people say to wait 2 months (some say 3), to allow the RPMs to even out. Most claim it will improve.

So I waited the 60 days, and every day the RPMs have been going down.

I think Ezoic really starts to kick in when you have more pageviews and are closer to Mediavine – since they want to do their best to not lose you to Mediavine.

But at this beginner stage, it’s not nearly enough to make me consider it even on the same playing field as Mediavine!

Is Ezoic the Best Ad Network?

Ezoic vs. Adsense

Ezoic is much better than Adsense.

Ezoic pays out at $20, not $100. It is not as slow as Adsense. And it tends to have higher RPMs.

I always earned more with Ezoic than Adsense. From everyone else I’ve spoken to, this has held true across the board. 

Ezoic vs. Monumetric

Monumetric has a 10k minimum traffic level, requires WordPress sites or Blogger sites, and has to have 50% traffic from the US, UK, Canada and Australia.

It also has a $99 set up fee (every time you sign up).

Ezoic on the other hand has no minimum traffic requirement, can be set up solo (although I recommend paying to set it up), and traffic can be from anywhere.

I’ve not found anyone who used both and has a clear indicator of differences in RPMs between the two.

Ezoic vs. SheMedia

SheMedia has a 25k pageview requirement, however I applied with the same site I used for the Ezoic trial (after it wrecked my pageviews) and was accepted at 5k pageviews.

SheMedia has a required 1 year contract, where Ezoic does not.

Similarly to Ezoic, I’ve seen a lot of people suffering dropped rankings and terrible site speed because of their ads.

Between the two, I’d pick Ezoic since it doesn’t have the mandatory 1 year contract, although I’ve been told they’re getting more lax about people leaving that contract early. That wasn’t the case when I left in December 2021. 

Ezoic vs. Mediavine

Mediavine requires 50k sessions to get in and the US should be your top traffic source (if it’s not, there are some work arounds but typically only if it’s predominantly a Western audience).

My RPMs with Mediavine were 474x what I made with Ezoic. Even if we consider the changes in Ezoic’s Levels, this is a lot more than I’d have made with Ezoic for the same site. 

Ezoic however, doesn’t have a minimum traffic threshold and they let in sites with non-US audiences. If you’re at 50k sessions and can’t get into Mediavine, Ezoic will be much nicer than they are to a 10k pageview site. 

Ezoic vs. Adthrive

Adthrive requires 100k pageviews and a primarily Western audience for you to get accepted. They are comparable to Mediavine in terms of RPMs. 

Niche Site Lady compared these two a while back when she switched to Ezoic for a couple months. She did make a bit more with Ezoic (her pageviews are about 800k per month), but switched back because she found the ads spammy, the speed slow, and had issues with the set up stuff.

Like me, she prefer a done for you approach to ads. 

Is Ezoic Worth It?

Ezoic is worth it if your traffic is over 40k pageviews or you need the $15 a month from under 10k pageviews just to eat.

Otherwise, I say don’t bother!

Unless you’re near Mediavine level, you won’t be making over $100 a month (think about it, I’m at 4k pageviews last month and I made less than $15. So x10 to get to 40k pageviews and you’ll only just be making $150. When I joined Mediavine at 60k pageviews, I made $1,500+ that month).

The only reason I’d use Ezoic is if, like Digital Nomad Wannabe, my site was over 50% Asian traffic – aka. Non US like Mediavine requires – and I really wanted ad income. Even then, I’d wait until I had a lot of traffic to try and get what they claim is then better support and higher RPMs.

I’d stick it out for a higher level of ad network or go for the Ezoic premium services (which means a higher traffic level). 

Who is Ezoic For?

Ezoic is for bloggers and website owners who have lower levels of traffic. It’s best for sites on WordPress. 

Ezoic Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Mobile friendly
• You have full control
• Tons of ad networks
• Higher earnings than Adsense
• You’re in control of ad placement
• Pays more than Google Adsense 

Cons:

• No support unless you’ve got higher pageviews or pay for premium
• Terrible site speed
• Doesn’t work with some hosts or other CDNs/caches
• Takes time to reach full optimization (they continue to say this even after 3 months)
• Lower RPMs than Mediavine

Ezoic Case Studies

Case Study 1: Kara of Trying to Unwind

Kara tried Ezoic on their blog and shared their stats with me from July 2022 to February 2023.

Their site, Trying to Unwind, gets 97% US traffic and is in the RV travel niche.

Kara helpfully shared their pageviews and revenue for this period.

They wanted to note that there are times they had to turn Ezoic off due to functionality issues that forced them to delete the ads to try to fix issues. (You can see this reflect in their September earnings and reported pageviews, according to Ezoic).

They also turned off Ezoic entirely from May 2022 to August 2022 because of a traffic decrease (which wasn’t fixed by removing the ads, so they turned them back on).

Month	Pageviews	Revenue
July 2022	5,373	$35.13
August 2022	7,949	$70.60
September 2022*	113	$0.26
October 2022	11,167	$180.80
November 2022	8,009	$145.86
December 2022	9,466	$148.18
January 2023	12,461	$160.35
February 2023	8,674	$114.00
Total =	63,212	$855.18

Case Study 2: Amanda of Mae’s Miles and Music

Amanda shared their Mediavine reports with me from October 2022 to February 2023 for their site Mae’s Miles and Music.

Their highest revenue day on November 7, 2022 was $7.62. They note that their traffic grew substantially in the months after this, yet their revenue was always less.

I believe this could have been them suffering from lower RPMs in the post Christmas period, but it’s hard to say as ad networks aren’t very forthcoming with RPM explanations.

“Mobile traffic was a disaster. Ezoic just stopped populating ads on mobile, and no one would respond to my question in the community thread regarding the issue. I was still getting 1-2 cents randomly with mobile,” says Amanda of their Ezoic experience.

Since mobile was about 80% of their pageviews, this was a significant ding on their revenue from ads.

Although Amanda saw higher RPMs than I did on my test site, “my $50/month payments weren’t worth stunting my websites growth in my opinion,” they say.

When I asked them if they would share some screenshots of their traffic, we discovered that Ezoic’s reports of their pageviews were wildly different than those in Google Analytics. For example, in January 2023, Ezoic reports 4,218 pageviews where Universal Analytics reported 16,614 (I know reporting can be a bit off, but seriously??! That’s 1/4 of the traffic!).

“The ads were seriously spammy looking… And they placed one above the title of every post that I could never turn off no matter what I tried,” Amanda said. “The whole ‘Access Now’ for publishers under 10k sessions is a joke. I had 13,000 sessions in January but without recognizing my mobile traffic I was trapped without any real help from Ezoic.”

Without significant pagespeed issues reporting on their site, Ezoic still managed to muck up their ad experience.

Over the period of October 2022 to February 2023, Amanda made $164.01 from Ezoic ads before they removed Ezoic from their site.

Case Study 3: Maria of Lifestyle Traveler

“After joining Ezoic in October 2021 with a small travel website (less than 10 000 pageviews at the time), I spent five months trying to fix Origin and Access Forbidden errors without success.

Ezoic does have a solution for these errors.

I did all that, switched from shared hosting to Namecheap VDS so I could whitelist those IPs myself. Messaged Ezoic and Namecheap back and forth.

And… it didn’t help. I kept getting a 403 ‘Access Forbidden’ error. So I removed Ezoic from my website.

It felt like I was focusing on fixing the issue instead of growing my website. At that time I was also doing outreach and got a lot of messages like this – ‘I can’t access your website. Is this the correct url?’.

Overall, it was a disappointing experience as I didn’t get to see the full potential of Ezoic.

However, it would be fair to point out that I did not have any speed issues. I’m using a very lightweight theme and the speed was decent.” – Maria of Lifestyle Traveler

I think it’s interesting that these case studies have varying issues. It seems like it’s not just one clear cut error with Ezoic that’s messing people up – which would likely be easier for them to identify and repair or for SEOs to come up with a solution.

Maria shared her October 2021 to April 2022 reports with us. During this time they made a total of $224.17 with 26,398 total pageviews. Their best month, revenue wise, was February 2022 with $70.64 earned for 7,323 pageviews.

Case Study 4: Josanne of Adventuresome Jo

Josanne runs a Canadian blog, like my test site. Adventuresome Jo is about Canadian outdoor adventure travel rather than a single city though.

They used Ezoic for three months from December 2022 to February 2023. During this time, revenue and traffic both decreased.

While I would expect lowered RPMs to result in less revenue, the traffic decrease following it is a bit odd. I can speculate that it might have been due to seasonal traffic, but I can’t be sure. (Josanne speculated this as well in their notes.)

“I have a small newish site, but traffic was slowly increasing until I started using Ezoic. I went from 300-500 views daily to maybe 20 or 50 on a good day. It was very discouraging!” Josanne told me.

Like my test site, she found pagespeed issues to be a major hurdle.

“Using PageSpeed Insights, my score was usually in the 80s and 90s. However, after putting Ezoic ads on my site, my score dropped below 20. I had pages at 93 or 98, and they scored as low as 16 after adding Ezoic ads. This, too, was very discouraging. 

I also tested with GTmetrix with the same results. Every page I tested was scoring an E or an F.

Ezoic tried to work with me, using their Leap app to increase the speed, but nothing worked. I also use WP Rocket, and the two plugins seemed incompatible. I kept having issues with images not loading, drop-down menus not working, or my translated pages not loading (showing as a white page). Caching was also an issue.

After a few weeks of playing around with the settings of both Ezoic Leap and WP Rocket to try and fix it, I gave up. 

I reverted to AdSense. My traffic is slowly going up again.” – Josanne of Aventuresome Jo

Since removing the ads from Ezoic and going back to Google Adsense, Josanne now scores an A on GTmetrix. andgets 94 mobile speed scores on PageSpeed Insights.

Beyond the speed and traffic, Josanne also had issues with the population of the ads with Ezoic:

“There are other things I did not particularly like about having Ezoic ads on my site. They generate placeholders for the ads on a site. Some ads appeared between the header (H2 or H3) and the paragraph. I found that weird and ineffective for the user/reader experience. 

I worked with one of their techs to try and avoid this, but it was never resolved. I felt this was not an important issue for them and not worth fixing. I resorted to creating a group block to group my headings to the first paragraphs, which was time-consuming and frustrating.”

I totally understand this issue and had something similar in my first go-round with Ezoic years ago. It’s one of the things I love about Mediavine – I have never had an ad populate between a header and the first paragraph beneath it.

However, I will say that I do group all of my header elements anyway manually regardless now.

Josanne ended with this interesting tidbit as their traffic has increased since leaving Ezoic:

“I also wonder if my traffic is going up since reverting to Adsense because Google is pushing my site (especially with Discover) since I am once again using their platform to advertise… big question mark here! 

All in all, I did not have a good experience with Ezoic. I was hopeful as I do not have many options since Mediavine or AdThrive seem out of reach regarding session requirements. Ezoic seemed like a good option, but unfortunately, the headaches were not worth it. For now, AdSense is the easier option.”

I hadn’t considered that Google might prioritize sites using Adsense, since other networks technically run through Adsense and Google still makes money. But I wouldn’t put it past Google!

Case Study 5: Macy of Macy Michelle

“I have been with Ezoic since October 2022. Overall, my experience with Ezoic has been decent. The most frustrating aspect of working with Ezoic is the lack of support. It can take days to get a response – even for a massive issue like my site being down. Ezoic has not slowed my page speed down (I was worried about this), but I have had countless technical issues. 

Luckily my host is amazing and they have been able to help me resolve many issues caused by Ezoic. I have tried reaching out to Ezoic, but I only have access to their community support and I never get a response from them when I post there. 

For me, Ezoic has always been a short-term solution. As soon as I am eligible, I will be switching to Mediavine.” – Macy of Macy Michelle

Macy’s support concerns are my #1 issue with Ezoic. I think every other issue would be solvable if their support was actually responsive and helpful.

“I currently get around 17,000 sessions per month. The highest EPMV I have seen with Ezoic was $14.90 for 1,095 daily visits. Lately, my average EPMV is $4-$6.”

For a site with 4x the sessions of my trial site, I would expect a higher EPMV – especially as Macy isn’t hindered by a lower RPM audience the way my trial site is.

Even without the video features of Ezoic, I would expect a higher EPMV.

“I also had a heck of a time getting Ezoic set up. Everyone makes it sound so easy, but even following their course instructions exactly, I was still struggling. This was another time that would have been very helpful to have customer support! 

I was eligible and invited to move to Ezoic Premium and I chose not to. I didn’t want to be locked into anything and my sights are set on Mediavine! 

Overall, it is encouraging to see my site bring in revenue via ads. But I find that using Ezoic requires constant monitoring on my end and the lack of support is beyond frustrating.”

Macy’s point about constant monitoring really stopped me in my tracks. I mean, with Mediavine, I have never once felt the need to check in “just in case”.

Sure, I open it up regularly since I have a daily income tracker for money manifestation – and at the beginning to do a happy dance because HOLY SHIT I’M IN MEDIAVINE sort of a thing.

But I’m not looking for things to be broken ever. And I’ve never found anything broken either when I do my income checks.

The reason so many people (especially in the niche site world) hype ad revenue is because it’s supposed to be the most passive. It’s a set it and forget it strategy for income, that doesn’t require fiddling with boxes to make them convert, replacing sold out products or products that don’t exist anymore.

For Ezoic to be making ad revenue an active form of income immediately takes away the appeal of ads for niche site owners.

Case Study 6: Theivanai of The Football Fairy

“I joined Ezoic in August 2021, and I was really excited that I was accepted. I applied through the Access Now Program,” says Theivanai of the Football Fairy.

“I spent a lot of time working on their recommendations, but they were still not helpful. Till now, I have not even passed the three-figure mark. I just gave up but am still on it because it keeps me motivated. I am earning pennies at least.”

I totally understand the desire for any ad network for the sake of any income.

When I started blogging, I joined Adsense to make literal pennies a month for the sake of feeling like this whole thing wasn’t a waste of my time and I wasn’t a failure.

I’m not saying that’s why Theivanai or anyone else does this, but it’s why I did it.

Any income = good income to baby blogger Nina.

So it sucks even more when it’s probably hindering you from getting the traffic you need to get to Mediavine or Rapture (formerly Adthrive) traffic.

“Recently, they have improved a lot by introducing the text-to-video app Flickify and NicheIQ to check for keyword difficulties, speed, and customer service through a community page.”

I understand the appeal of new features but really features mean little unless they’re converting. So I’m interested to see if they result in more income for bloggers like Theivanai.  

“I would not say it is all bad, but I could not seem to be earning as they say. I know some other bloggers do well even though the site is new. Maybe I am losing out somewhere.”

My first reaction to this is to tell Theivanai that you’re probably not doing anything wrong and that those other bloggers are either 1) lying for the affiliate program referrals or 2) have a paid plan or a deal with Ezoic to get higher rates (I’ve seen both happen with beginner bloggers and with niche site “experts” on Twitter).

It’s incredibly frustrating because it makes bloggers feel like they’re the problem, when it’s the ad network and this paid premium structure that is the true issue.

I’ll be the first to say that even in Mediavine, others do wayyy better than I do with ad revenue. Any ad network can result in low and even no earnings for sure.

But when the trend, even of people who seem to like it, shows low revenue, it makes me question the efficacy of the network.

“I still have hope with Ezoic for this site of mine, which is my first, to improve soon in terms of income, but I would not do it for another site of mine if I decided to start a second one.

I also noticed they now have a monthly plan. So, if I take the monthly plan for which I need to pay, only then can I earn well. If that is the case then I do not have the budget for it.”

Theivanai shared their traffic and income with me. In the last 30 days (as of April 22, 2023), they had 401 visitors and were making $1.31 in earnings.

On their highest day, they made $0.05.

Some may argue that that’s more than they’d make with Adsense, which is probably true. And that it’s great to be able to make any money from that traffic level, which again I agree with.

But when having Ezoic on your site could be causing technical errors that could have your site go down, prevent rankings and keep traffic low, and cause undue stress checking on it all the time, I don’t think it’s worth it.

Affiliate marketing will pay you way more than ads for a site with that level of traffic. My friend, Aisha Preece, has monetized sites at 1k pageviews for $100 with affiliates.

Her affiliate marketing course is a great place to learn how you can do this too – and it’s more affordable than Ezoic’s premium plan.

Case Study 7: Brodi of Our Offbeat Life

Brodi’s travel blog earned $338.52 with 29,461 pageviews on Ezoic in one month. Her average EPMVs were $11.49 – almost double that of anyone else in this review.

However, still less than 1/3rd of what my RPM’s average in Mediavine (and that’s with Brodi having a higher US traffic ratio than I do on my travel blog).

“I used Ezoic for three months on my family travel site, from January 17 through April 16, 2023. At first, my site speed wasn’t really impacted and my earnings were excellent. In the last 30 days, my traffic dropped over 25% and my earnings were less than half of what they were in my first month.

I contacted Ezoic about my earnings concerns and don’t feel its an over exaggeration to say the responses were poor at best. I didn’t feel heard or listened to at any point. That experience led me to remove them from my site without even having another network set up to replace them. I realized I’d rather be ad-free than use Ezoic any longer.

As soon as I removed Ezoic from my site, my traffic immediately began to rebound. Within days, my Google Analytics showed a substantial traffic increase. (See photo. The red circle is the day I removed Ezoic from my site).” – Brodi of Our Offbeat Life

The mentality of “this is so bad I’d rather make $0” doesn’t surprise me. It was my own mentality when I removed Adsense, Ezoic, and SheMedia the first time on my travel site (at separate intervals, obviously. I didn’t have all 3 running together).

Unfortunately any form of monetization beyond products (and even those have issues), can cause traffic problems.

Affiliates keep getting hit by product reviews. Although, to be honest, they have easier fixes than a bad ad network.

But ads can cause some serious problems, especially if the network isn’t supporting you and work with you to fix them.

I’m glad Brodi has seen an increase in traffic, and I am happy to report similar increases for my trial site.

I think her data is a great example of sometimes an ad netwrok isn’t worth the limited income. (Tbh, I know some bloggers who maintain this even at 600k pageviews, like The Broke Backpacker. Ads aren’t for everyone).

Brodi also shared the RPMs of a specific post about Mexico City, showing that while the pageviews grew by 1.77%, the RPMs nearly halved in the latter period:

Case Study 8: Linda of Hiking the Alps

Linda is our first non-English speaking case study. She was able to work with the German department of Ezoic for support, while her blogs do run in English.

“I started with Ezoic in June 2022 and was thrilled: Right after signing up, the German-speaking support got in touch with me and helped me a lot. I got feedback on my questions within a few hours and even tips on features for the setup that I had forgotten. 

Also the earnings of just under $350 a month and my ePMV of nearly $20.00 were great. The only thing was that my PageSpeed slowed down drastically. 
PageSpeedInsights was showing a green 98 before Ezoic, with ads I was down at about 35!

I hired someone from Fiverr to improve that, as Ezoic support just kept guaranteeing me that everything was great and the numbers on their Dashboard “Leap“ would look perfectly fine. 
The $100 I spend on Fiverr got my PageSpeed up to 45….

When in late summer my traffic slowly decreased due to seasonality (I have an outdoor and hiking blog), I got rid off Ezoic after 3 months.

Immediately my PageSpeed increased again to 98.

As I had heard that in the fourth quarter was the best for ads, I did re-connect Ezoic at the end of November. Quite simply, as the account still existed.

Not even one week after re-connecting I was invided to join the Ezoic Premium program.

Unfortunately, the income was anything but good. My ePMV was only about $5.50 and the income in December was accordingly only $65.00.

In January, the income even dropped to $42.00.

As my site was slow and ugly with ads again, the desicion to get rid of Ezoic once and for all was not difficult.

Mid-February I finally switched off Ezoic once and for all, not worth it at all anymore.” – Linda

Linda’s experience is really interesting because she was making better money than most with really strong EMPV at first.

It’s so unfortunate that even when she rejoined, the EPMV was so low even if her speed was back up. Yes it could have been a seasonal traffic dip causing it, but that should only account for lower earnings, not a lower EPMV.

Linda shared their December comparison with July for 2022 showing their revenue, EPMV, visits and pageviews. While the pageviews in July are about 7,000 more than December a (33.75% loss), their revenue is an 80.90% loss for the period and their EPMV dropped by 72.83%.

This proves if anything that ads are not the “safe” earning option people claim they are, at least not if you’re not with the right ad network.

FAQs:

Conclusion: Is Ezoic a Good Ad Network for Bloggers?

Ezoic is a great ad network for bloggers with low traffic. It can help you make enough money each month to pay bills and buy food if you have less than 10,000 page views. 

But if you want to earn more, it might not be worth your time until you get more website visitors. 

If that’s what you’re looking for, try taking my Profitable Part-Time Blogger program! 

This guide will show you how to optimize your travel blog content so that it gets 50K visitors per month and earns even better returns from all sources – including Ezoic. In fact, we go far beyond that to help you reach $30k/mo passive income like I have with my travel blog!

Read More About Monetizing Your Blog

• 60 Best Travel Affiliate Programs for Bloggers
• How to Make Money as a Travel Blogger: 15 Ways I Made $30k
• Ezoic Review: Will it Increase Your Blog Revenue?
• Mediavine Requirements (And How to Reach Them)
• Travelpayouts Review: 6 Figure Travel Blogger Weighs In
• How I Made $26.5k on Black Friday by Blogging & What I Learned Along the Way
• Blog Business Planning Workshop: Setting Profitable and Achievable Goals
• How I Made $110k in a Month in June 2023 👀
• 19 Best Ad Networks for Bloggers to Make 6 Figures
• How to Make $6k on a Digital Product Flash Sale
• I Sold a Starter Site For $2k. Here’s Exactly What I Did!
• How to Use Link Whisper to Increase Affiliate Conversions
• Selling Digital Products with Email Marketing for Beginners ft. Kate Doster
• Growing a Niche Site to $50k Series
• How to Make Your First $10 From Affiliate Sales in 7 Steps
• Are ConvertKit Email Ads Worth It? 6 Week Case Study Review

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