Raptive vs Mediavine: Which is the Better Ad Network?

Want a complete head-to-head comparison on Raptive vs Mediavine?

These are two of the highest-tier ad networks for smaller publishers, and after switching my main website from Mediavine to Raptive (formerly Adthrive), I have experience with both networks! 

Honestly, I had no idea how this switch would go. Still, I really wanted to see an apples-to-apples comparison of their revenue share, RPMs, customer service, and overall user experience. 

So, the primary reason was simply curiosity.

But now, I can use what I learned to help brand-new bloggers determine which ad network to strive towards, and established bloggers like myself understand which ad network will best serve them and their businesses. 

I absolutely love running tests. If you’re in my Facebook group, you know I constantly have multiple case studies running and have spent tens of thousands of dollars just on trials like this.

I publish more in-depth case studies and comparisons in my Profitable Part-Time Blogger, which is my main course. You can join here if you want priority access to my recent roundups and trials. 

Which is Better? Mediavine or Raptive?

After testing both ad networks, I found that Rapive is better than Mediavine. My transition from Mediavine to Raptive was seamless, and it only took a couple of months to know that I had made a great decision.

Both ad networks have really high RPMs for tier-one countries, similar user interfaces, and offer detailed insights into how much money each post earns!

Mediavine’s best qualities are its low entry requirements and country-specific info on its dashboard.

However, my RPMs are significantly higher with Raptive (even with fewer ads), the payouts were quicker, and I had a much better experience with their customer service department.

With all that said, I want you to have all the info before making such a big change like me.

So, let the showdown begin!

Raptive (Formerly AdThrive)

Raptive used to be called Adthrive. They did a big rebrand, and there were probably a couple of reasons for this, but I’m glad they did because I always called it by the wrong name before the switch.

I’d constantly call it AdSense (Google’s Ad Network) and ThriveCart (Digital Sales & Courses), which are two very different companies.

It’s nice that I won’t struggle to keep them straight anymore. 

No gatekeeping — I make way more with Raptive than I ever did with Mediavine, and I’m thrilled to continue partnering with them. They are my new favorite ad network, and anyone who meets their entry requirement should consider switching over! 

Entry Requirements

Raptive requires you to have 100,000 pageviews in the past 30 days.

Not sessions. Pageviews. 

They are also more lenient with their demographic requirements than Mediavine. So, if you have a million pageviews, there’s a chance they will make a special allowance for you. You’d have to contact them directly to find out.

I also prefer Raptive’s requirements for additional sites. Truthfully, that’s another big reason I wanted to make the switch. 

The minute a second site reaches 30,000 page views, you’re in.

Plus, if you can hit $200,000/year in ad revenue across all sites, they will let you add new sites from day 1 (even if they have zero traffic. As someone who runs multiple sites, this is amazing!

They also require that you use G4 and are in good standing with Adsense.

Raptive also requires that you create primarily long-form content.

That means you can’t have a bunch of pages with 1-2 sentences and think it will fly. Not only is this spammy, but there’s no space for ads anyway, so forget about profit. 

The other thing to be aware of is that your traffic has to be consistent, along with your primary traffic sources must be Search Engines and Pinterest. You can’t just get 100k page views in 2 days from a viral Reel/Tikton and think you’re going to get in.

Revenue Share

All ad networks take a percentage of your revenue, plain and simple. They have to do this because they need a way to pay for their services. 

I like to think of them as my ‘manager.’

During my research, people kept saying, “Oh, Raptive has a lower Revenue Share.” But that’s not necessarily true. The only difference is that, with Mediavine, you can increase your percentage over time. 

Raptive’s revenue share is 75% across the board. When I asked about loyalty bonuses or the ability to increase, I got a hard no.

However, I love working for Raptive because their pay period is a net 45 days, which is about 20 days shorter than Mediavine’s. 

You get your money a lot faster.

I don’t know about you, but I have bills to pay, so I want that money ASAP.

Average RPMs

Raptive promises in your first month that you will get 20% higher RPMs than your previous ad network. 

So, did that happen? No. 

They claim that they will pay you the difference if that doesn’t happen, but to be frank, I never followed up because that wasn’t really my purpose for switching.

But my RPMs started trending up immediately and kept growing until they were over $33. 

This happened mainly because Raptive was so intentional about working with me to optimize the ads on my site. Besides letting them do their thing and following their suggestions, I’ve hardly made any changes or updates to my main site since moving over. 

I actually have fewer ads now than I ever did with Mediavine, yet I’m making far more money! 

Also, I’m very picky with my ads, so I’m guessing my RPMs could be even higher if I allowed them to adjust the structure of my blog posts. 

In Raptive’s dashboard, you can see your daily sessions vs your earnings.

I recently had my first $300 day, and when I look back at my ‘groundbreaking’ $88 day with Mediavine, I had half the sessions. 

If you’re not great at quick math, I’ll save you some time.

That’s DOUBLE per session.

Yes, I have gotten better at writing for ads, but I’m not doing THAT much. I also took these stats from the same time of year, so I know it has nothing to do with seasonality.

Can I guarantee that you’ll make more? No, but I can tell you that I’ve made so much more with Raptive than I ever made on Mediavine.

Customer Service

I always say that the people running customer support for Raptive are literally angels among men. 

They are so helpful, even when I send them ridiculously inane questions about how ads work.

Seriously, I message them so often that I’m surprised they haven’t blocked me. But they still respond quickly to every single message I send and are so helpful. 

Plus, everything gets resolved almost immediately. 

Compared to the best service I had with Mediavine, Raptive has been even more helpful, which is a huge reason I stayed with them. 

User Experience & Features

When you go into the Raptive Dashboard, it shows your daily, monthly, and last month’s income.

There are tons of cool features, but I won’t discuss them all in this post. If you’d like to know more, I have a complete walkthrough on my YouTube channel.

One of my favorite parts of Raptive is their free content optimizer, powered by SEMRush.

If you’re unfamiliar with Content Optimization Tools, I have a video on my channel where I compare several, such as NeuronWriter, RankIQ, and Surfer SEO. But essentially, you input a keyword, and it generates a report detailing the optimal length, your competitors, and essential words to include. 

So, if you’re writing a post about things to do in New York, it will give you LSI keywords and other important info about the keyword. 

You get 40 of these every month, which is more than enough for me. 

Also, the tool reads and analyzes all your posts each month, which will likely peak soon and should be updated. It’s not perfect, but it usually gives quality recommendations. 

However, I’m all about being unbiased, and while I do prefer Raptive over Mediavine, it’s not perfect, and there are some things I don’t like about them. 

One annoying thing is that I have to contact customer support to change my ad preferences. When I was with Mediavine, I could do this right in the dashboard, but with Raptive, you have to make adjustments through email or the customer support chat. 

Also, I can’t easily see each country’s RPMs. This sucks because it’s extremely helpful to understand which regions bring in the most money, but I can’t see any of that on their dashboard. 

We all know that the US has the highest RPMs, but how can we monitor changes if we don’t have access to the information?

If you want this info, you have to email them, and they will send you a bunch of spreadsheets that are challenging to turn into something useful, but at least it’s something.

I could see that the US and Canada have significantly higher RPMs, which I expected because my general RPMs were trending up, and that’s where I get most of my traffic. 

On July 23, 2023, some of my RPMs were; 

• Canada – 49.82 
• United States – $110.63
• UK is at $28.23

Here’s a Google Sheet if you want to see a full breakdown of the country-by-country analysis. This data is only from one day, so the numbers are not guaranteed.

Mediavine

Mediavine is a huge ad network that every blogger I know is familiar with. It’s seen as the holy grail – like once you get into Mediavine, you’ve made it. You’re a real blogger!

They are a solid ad network to work with, and so many successful bloggers I know will be loyal to them until they die, but they do have some drawbacks.

I got into Mediavine myself in 2022. I spent about a year with the ad network, then switched to Raptive.

These days, it’s safe to say that I’m way less enamored by them.

Here’s everything you should know about working with Mediavine as a publisher!

Entry Requirements

Mediavine requires you to have 50,000 sessions in the last 30 days. 

Not pageviews. Not users. 

Sessions. 

This is a reasonable traffic goal, and I know bloggers who have gotten into Mediavine in 1 Year!

They also require that the majority of your traffic comes from the US. This doesn’t mean you need over 50%, but it should be your top traffic source.

I got into Mediavine with 34% US traffic, 32% Canadian, and 34% other. 

I know people who have gotten in with countries like Canada, the UK, New Zealand, or Australia as their primary traffic source. But it’s always blogs with another tier-one country as their primary audience, and if it’s a non-US country, they may require a slightly higher session count.

They handle this on a case-by-case basis, so if you meet the 50,000 sessions but don’t have the majority of US traffic, you should still apply, and then they’ll work with you individually.  

Mediavine also has different requirements than Raptive for additional sites, too. 

It’s 25,000 sessions, but ONLY IF you are on Mediavine Pro, meaning you have brought in $100,000 in ad revenue over the past year. I asked them for more details, and they told me there are basically zero exceptions, even if you bring in $10,000 on Day 1. 

This is one of the most frustrating parts for me because it doesn’t allow people to diversify their content across multiple sites and niches. 

Like Raptive, you need to be using G4, be in good standing with Adsense, and have primarily long-form content across your website. 

Journey by Mediavine

Mediavine just rolled out a new program, Journey, that allows publishers to display ads on their site with just 10,000 sessions.

It’s brand new, so no one knows much about it yet. What we do know is that it comes with a catch.

To be eligible for ads on your site, you must install their plugin Grow.me and keep it on your website for 30 days. Then, you can apply to their ad network with just 10K sessions. 

Revenue Share

Mediavine has the same revenue share as Raptive when you first join – 75%. 

The big difference is that Mediavine offers bonuses. 

I actually left Mediavine three weeks before I would have gotten my first extra one percent. It’s nice that they offer small bonuses, but 1% per year is not enough to move the needle.

When I did the math, it would have added about $30/month to my earnings.

However, it could make a difference once you hit a certain number of impressions on the ads (i.e., engaged pageviews). 

If you’ve been with Mediavine for 5 years and you can hit 15 million impressions on ads across all sites (per month), they will increase your revenue share to 90%. That’s a significant increase, but most of us are nowhere near that level of reach.

Average RPMs

Once I left Mediavine, I couldn’t believe how quickly they locked me out of my account – It was almost instantaneous. You can’t log in or see any of your past data. 

This is one of the few things I like about Ezoic. I can still see all of my RPMs and data from ages ago. 

Not Mediavine. They don’t even warn you they’re going to lock you out. 

So I had to email them the day after saying, “Hey, could I get a spreadsheet of how things went?” 

Even then, it’s just a spreadsheet of the date, pageviews, session RPMs, and page RPMs, so I had to do all the math to get weekly/monthly averages myself. 

Typically, you can also go into your dashboard and see the breakdown by country. But unfortunately, I don’t have access to that anymore. 

So, let’s talk about actual earnings. 

When I first joined Mediavine in June 2022, my website was flooded with ads, leading to super high earnings, but it was terrible for User Experience (UX).

After scaling those ads back, my highest earning days had RPMs of around $20, and my total income for the first full month on Mediavine was $1,775.56.

After that, I started writing for ads, increased my site speed, and my RPMs started growing. 

By April 2023, I had grown enough to have my first $100/day week. Then, on my most profitable day ever in April, I made $153.85 with 4,420 sessions. 

Hopefully, that gives you an idea of what I was earning with Mediavine.

In my last month with Mediavine, my RPMs averaged $27.25 (per 1000 pageviews). In Q4, when revenue tends to jump a little, I got as high as $29 for a day, but it was usually about $28, which was already an increase from what I had previously seen.

What I do remember is that, at the time, 60 to 70% of my traffic was coming from just North America. Canada was usually the highest, though. My US traffic on Mediavine never got higher than 34%. 

If your site is primarily US traffic, you will make a lot more money than I do. RPMs vary greatly depending on the country your traffic is coming from, but the United States RPMs are always the highest.

Customer Service 

Now, the reason I wasn’t too sad to leave Mediavine was because I was fed up with their customer support. 

Honestly, they were driving me crazy and trying to gaslight me into keeping their plugin, Grow.me.

I was having so many speed issues on my website. There was a massive 28-second delay in my load time, and despite sending them proof that the plugin was affecting it, they continuously told me that the plugin couldn’t be the problem. 

So, I deleted it. Can you guess how much load time I got back? Yup, 28 seconds. 

It is such a bad plugin, and it seems to be the worst for people who are in Mediavine. Oddly enough, it works okay if you’re not on Mediavine yet. 

I was growing like crazy before adding the plugin. Once I installed it, I got stuck at 95,000 page views for months. Once I got rid of it, I hit a hundred thousand page views a month later. 

Before this situation, my interactions with Mediavine were fine. They were always decent to work with, and I know many people who have had great experiences with them. 

But this situation really turned me off.

Once I joined Raptive, their customer service blew Mediavine’s out of the water. They’ve been so kind and way more helpful.

User Experience & Features

The Mediavine dashboard is really easy to use, and I love that they have all the Analytics data, RPMs, and country-specific information right on the main page. 

Outside of that, there’s not much more to say, and I had no other significant issues with using the site. 

Unfortunately, I can’t show you exactly what it looks like because I’m locked out.  

I also don’t feel like Mediavine excels in its additional features. 

Their stuff is awesome, but it’s already free for everybody. I love the Grow Social plugin (now Hubbub), and Create by Mediavinee is great for recipe cards and other templates.

But that’s sort of the end of the free features.

The main paid feature is Trellis, which is basically a WordPress Theme and Page Builder. While I’ve heard great things about it, it’s really expensive. You have to pay separately for every additional site you want to use it for. Also, there’s no free option or discount for Mediavine publishers. 

FAQs

How does each ad network affect your site speed? 

Neither platform has caused significant issues with site speed. Both are designed to optimize site speed to ensure ads load efficiently. 

They also have a feature where you can toggle ‘on’ the cumulative layout shift, ensuring content loads correctly without disrupting the user experience. This was a big issue I ran into when I tried She Media back in the day. 

How Long Does it Take to Setup?

My initial setup with Mediavine took about two weeks in total. Raptive got my approval and was ready to go within a week, but the whole process took roughly a month because I was still in the process of leaving Mediavine.

I also ran into some rocky issues during my first week with Mediavine, but the transition to Raptive was seamless. That’s despite having hardly any Wi-Fi at the time because I was traveling in a van through Banff National Park. 

What is the required notice for leave?

Both companies have a 30-day notice policy. That means if I decided to leave Raptive for Mediavine, I’d have to reapply to Mediavine from scratch and hope for re-entry. That’s also why it took a month to make the switch entirely. 

But you are never ‘locked in’ to a contract that prevents you from leaving. 

When Can I Apply for Mediavine or Raptive?

Both networks have a policy that if you are denied, you must wait a certain amount of time before reapplying, but there is no set amount of time.

For Mediavine, I applied at 46,000 sessions because everyone told me they would take forever to reply, and when they did, I had to say to them I wasn’t there yet. Luckily, I reached 50k sessions right after their initial response. 

For Raptive, I’d suggest waiting until you clearly meet their criteria since they respond quickly. I applied when I was at 103,000 sessions and got in right away.

The Verdict: Mediavine Vs. Raptive

So, is it worth switching from Mediavine to Raptive?

I can’t speak for everyone, but yes. It’s been a phenomenal decision for me and my business! 

I make a lot more money with Raptive, and I’ve been so impressed with the control I have over ads and the amount of customization options. 

However, I don’t like that I can’t see country-specific data on Raptive, and my experience with Mediavines customer service left an awful taste in my mouth. 

So, if you’re a beginner blogger, I recommend joining whichever ad company you are eligible for. If you can get into Mediavine, it’s much better to secure that $1,500 – 1,700 per month while you keep growing toward Raptive’s threshold. 

But for people already in an ad network and wondering if it’s time to make a change, I hope this breakdown or one of the other ad networks I’ve reviewed helps you find the right one for you!

Like this post? Share it with others!