We are in RPM high-season but my mid-november RPM so far is significantly lower than expected (prior years), and wondering what others are seeing. (US traffic)

For context I am in the Raptive/Mediavine world, if that matters.

My RPM is at least 25% lower than last November and even lower than the recent quieter summer months. Simply, for me the bottom dropped out of my RPM for november. Curious what others are seeing.

its been a weird month in the USA and thinking maybe Retailers/Advertisers sense uncertainty and are holding back on ad $ right now?

I started building my blog around my passion for a particular niche back in 2023, and it was approved by Journey by Mediavine (Journey MV) in early 2025. The blog started gaining traction throughout 2025.

I never originally planned to put ads on this blog, but I eventually had to because the hosting and domain fees need to be renewed annually.

I manage this blog entirely on my own, primarily focusing on creating content. I rarely check anything else outside of content creation during my free time. Other things, such as basic security measures, were already taken care of during the early days of building the blog.

Recently, however, I've been dealing with a lot of content scrapers stealing my work. And over the past few months, as my traffic started increasing, my blog also became a target for numerous attacks. I've done my best to protect it.

But one thing that has been particularly exhausting is invalid traffic.

My ads were suspended by Journey due to what they called "Invalid Traffic." My Journey Dashboard notified me that there was an issue with an invalid traffic source. Honestly, I didn't know exactly what that meant at first.

And perhaps some of it was my fault, too. I rarely monitored my daily traffic, and I wasn't familiar with the differences between bot traffic and legitimate visitors until I started learning about it and asking experts I know for advice.

I found out that some of the scrapers and bots visiting my site every few seconds are AI bots and they're bad bots. I'm not talking about legitimate crawlers from services like GPTBot or Claude etc, but rather malicious bots.

During my time with Journey, my total earnings exceeded US$5,000.

Over the past few months, I also noticed that my earnings had dropped despite having similar traffic levels and a higher percentage of Tier 1 traffic. I'm not sure why, but I guess that's part of market volatility, so it's not a big deal.

As of now, my account is still suspended. I submitted an appeal and was asked whether I had purchased traffic or used any similar methods. I've never done anything like that in my life.

Unfortunately, I haven't received a response to my appeal yet. They said I would need to wait 10–15 business days, which could turn into nearly a month if we include weekends.

I don't really understand why the process takes this long. But even if my appeal gets rejected, I'll probably just move to AdSense and add this site to my existing account (I already have an AdSense account for my other websites).

The biggest issue here is time.

The time I've spent waiting for a response could have been used to generate revenue through another ad network, such as AdSense.

I genuinely believe I haven't done anything wrong on my end, but this experience has certainly taught me some valuable lessons. I now realize how important it is to continuously improve my website's firewall, security, and traffic monitoring systems.

At the very least, this experience has taught me not to focus solely on creating content. Protecting the website and monitoring where its traffic comes from are just as important.

But since I manage everything on my own, I rarely have time to monitor the technical side of things. Most of my time is spent creating content which is already time-consuming in itself.

Due to Journey MV's exclusivity requirements, I'm unable to add another ad network's script to my site. This means I won't be generating any ad revenue for at least 10–15 days, or until they take action and respond to my appeal.

My advice for those who are just starting with Journey is to prioritize your website's security. These days, bots especially in the AI era, are aggressively scraping websites and this can seriously harm your site's performance and traffic quality.

No hard feelings toward Journey MV. I've had a wonderful journey with them and their support team used to be top-notch. I also used to actively participate in their community, but recently support has been a bit slow and the community no longer allows new threads to be posted. I'm not sure what's happening but I'm still grateful for the experience regardless 🤝

When a client says "our pixel isn't firing", the first job is finding out what the page actually sends. For Google, Meta and TikTok there are helper extensions; for Floodlight, The Trade Desk, Xandr, Criteo, StackAdapt, Adform and the rest it's usually the Network tab.

I built Pixel Debugger to cover all of them in one place. 49 networks so far, decoded in Chrome's side panel:

• Floodlight activity requests (including the semicolon parameter format) and Google's newer collect format

• every request per pixel, including failed or blocked ones, separate from which events were decoded

• exact sent values and IDs, nothing normalized or renamed

• unknown parameters kept visible in the raw payload instead of dropped

• record a journey across pages and export it as JSON or Markdown for the ticket

Browser only: no server-to-server, and a 200 response doesn't mean the platform counted the event.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kknfboekekeaagdoineimnebhlmiohpb

I'm the dev; it's free. If there's a DSP or ad server pixel you'd want added, tell me which.

Hi, after getting fed up with adsense keep rejecting my site for low value content, I applied for Mediavine Journey. They accepted my site but 2 weeks have passed and RPM has been very low.

Is this normal? My 50% users are from USA and UK and website gets around 2K views daily.

At first glance, that looks like a sharp reversal from October's decline. But this month also marks the first time we've included app-ads.txt alongside ads.txt, bringing mobile & connected app inventory into the same view.

That means November is less about supply rebounding & more about seeing a larger part of the market for the first time.

• Across the combined dataset, 591.9k lines were added and 300.2k removed, resulting in a net increase of 291.7k. A significant part of this increase comes from app inventory entering the dataset for the first time. That makes Nov a new baseline rather than a like for like comparison with October's -65.2k. The consolidation we've been tracking across web inventory hasn't necessarily stopped. It's now being measured alongside a much larger pool of app supply.

• Another area worth looking at is how direct & reseller entries changed. Pubs added 226.9k direct lines & removed 92.1k. Reseller additions were higher at 365k, against 208.1k removals. While resellers contributed more additions in absolute terms, direct entries saw fewer removals relative to their additions. For every direct line removed nearly 2.5 were added. The corresponding ratio for reseller lines was around 1.75.

• The growth was also concentrated among mid traffic publishers. They contributed +219.9k net lines, accounting for roughly three-quarters of the total increase. low traffic publishers added another 75.4k, while high traffic publishers were slightly negative at -3.7k. The top 1,000 publishers remained essentially flat to negative with most of the growth coming from the next 9,000.

• On the SSP side, Rubicon (Magnite) led overall net line gains with 1,882, followed by OpenX at 1,517 and AppNexus at 1,105. OpenX is particularly worth watching here. It appeared in the top five across all three publisher tiers and also led established SSPs in direct domain gains at 532. Minute Media led the scaling tier at 126, while Prismriot topped emerging at 75. Prismriot also recorded the largest rank increase in its tier, moving up 289 positions. It's worth noting that these rank changes are measured within each SSP tier, so a significant jump in ranking doesn't necessarily translate into a similar increase in domain volume.

The duplication numbers add another layer to the picture. Established SSPs recorded 32% duplicated domains, compared with 30% for both scaling & emerging. Their direct plus reseller share was also higher at 34.78%, against 29.45% for Tier 2 & 28.01% for Tier 3. This overlap matters because it points to domains where an SSP has both a direct connection & a reseller path. Established SSPs also recorded the highest average intermediary count at 0.98, compared with 0.92 for the other two tiers.

The bigger question isn't how much supply was added this month. It's where that supply came from & what it means for supply quality. App inventory expands the view of the market but adding more supply isn't always the same as adding more unique inventory.

Hi all,

I run a niche comparison site for the German market that shows delivery times for electric cars across brands. Visitors are mostly people actively researching or about to order a new EV, so purchase intent is high. The audience is small but very targeted.

I’m planning to offer car dealerships (and possibly brand-specific dealer groups) direct ad placements instead of relying on programmatic ads. Before I put a number on it, I’d like to hear from people with real experience:

What CPM range is realistic for direct-sold, automotive-intent inventory in a small niche (roughly 100k monthly pageviews)? Does a German-only audience change that?

Happy to share what I learn once I’ve tested a few prices. Thanks!

Hi, I joined Mediavine Journey porgramme a month back. I get around 700 visitors a day on my website- organic search mostly. My RPMs had started increasing from 0.2 to 1.8 but for last one week it has been on consistent decline and now its again around 0.6 . MY CPMs have also started decreasing again and its currently 0.14. My US traffic is around 40 percent and Tier 1 traffic almost 50 percent. Is it because of ramp up period? There is also bots issue though I have been blocking bots aggressively, even blocking whole countries but still many show up in analytics.

Hi all,

I've spent 13+ years in digital media and ad tech, most of it in publisher partnerships: growing enterprise and SMB publisher revenue, negotiating multi-year deals and building publisher books from scratch. I'm now looking for my next role.

I'm targeting publisher partnerships, strategic accounts and monetization roles, and I'm open to relocation or remote.

Two questions for people in the space:

1. Which kinds of companies are hiring for this profile right now?

2. Is there anything you'd change about how I'm positioning myself?

If you know of an opening, I'm happy to share my CV over DM. Thanks!

Hi Everyone,

I have been in Adops for most of my Career. 12 years of experience (age 36) in this with primarily in Agency working on CM360. I have some exposure to Dv360 and TTD but limited.
I have recently tried building some automation tools for stuff like trafficking QA and Creative asset QA using AI.

I am at that point where I want to get into building products and features for advertising platforms. How do I approach this? Since my resume screams Agency Adops I don’t get interview calls and the ones I get, I end up not getting as they go with someone who is more closer to those roles.

Looking for guidance on what should I do next as I am feeling stuck and not happy with where I am. At this point I am even open to junior roles that can help me move out of agency Adops.
Any help is greatly appreciated.

Hello. I have an invoice that was due yesterday (November 10, 2026), but I still haven’t received payment. Is anyone else who monetizes their website with The Moneytizer experiencing the same issue?

So basically the IAB just raised its 2026 U.S. ad spend growth forecast from 9.5% to 12.3%..The overall market is growing and the share of it running through AI is growing faster than expected.

AI and automated campaign types in U.S. ad spend have gone from 2% in 2023 to about 12% this year, expected to go to 27% by 2030, according to one of Madison & Wall's pieces.

But this isn’t only about advertisers picking up new tools - it's more that formats like Performance Max & Advantage+ are quickly becoming the default option on the big platforms & PMax in particular has been criticized by buyers for years as a black box. The more budget that runs through these formats, the more that VISIBILITY question matters.

For those running PMax or Advantage+, has handing more over to the platform actually improved results, or does it feel like visibility is slipping?

I'm new to backlink selling or guest post etc etc selling, never really pursued that channel of revenue until lately, I was checking one of my more moderately successful websites and saw about 10 requests for some sort of backlink or guest post etc. They all left it wide open, including the rates , and asked me to send a bunch of info over.

I'm sure some of this is sketch or has a snag, but I also imagine some of them might be legit, yea? Anyway, really looking for any advice or tips to approach these guys as I could *certainly* use some extra revenue in these hard times.

Thanks in advance!

I run a Dutch website and currently use Azerion/PUBG for mobile sticky bottom ads targeting Netherlands traffic.

I'm getting around €0.56 CPM (434k impressions), which seems rather low compared to AdSense Anchor.

What networks would you recommend for better monetization? Considering Setupad, optAd360, Yieldbird and AdPushup.

Anyone with experience monetizing Dutch traffic? Is €0.56 CPM reasonable?

I run a small HTML5 gaming website with around 100–150 organic visitors per day and roughly 21k game launches per month.

Around 65% of my traffic comes from the US, with most of the rest coming from Europe, Turkey and Asia.

The site generates around 20k ad requests per month, mostly from interstitial and rewarded video ads. Ads appear before or during gameplay, and some are triggered voluntarily by players.

The problem is that my current ad network pays around $0.01 eCPM, which seems ridiculously low, especially with a decent amount of US traffic.

I've tried finding alternatives, but most ad networks require 100k+ monthly ad impressions, 200k–300k pageviews, detailed analytics reports, or other minimum traffic requirements.

I understand my site is still small, but at these rates the revenue is practically nonexistent.

Is $0.01 eCPM actually normal for HTML5 gaming sites at this scale? Does anyone know an ad network that works with smaller publishers without such high traffic requirements?

10am one creative, 4pm a different one, same city, same placement. so one pull tells you basically nothing, which i shouldve known. we do a fresh profile with matching language and timezone, geo testing proxies on the city or zip, 4-5 pulls through the day, and screenshot whatever actually renders. 2extract for the zips, SOAX for a couple markets where we still had credit lying around. some smaller countries are thin on any pool so the script checks the exit before anyone screenshots

still not sure 5 pulls is enough tbh

With more visitors declining cookies, a growing share of conversions in the ad platforms are modeled, not observed, which means the tool is estimating conversions it never directly tracked. For a while I reported those as if they were measured, then realized I could not reconcile them against the backend. Now I split observed from modeled in every report, sanity check modeled against actual revenue, and flag when modeling makes up a large chunk. How much of your reported conversions are modeled, and do you trust them?

Hello, next to Mediavine we now have affiliate offers running on our website through Digistore24. Was expecting affiliate commission revenues to be a factor 2 or 3 higher than Mediavine ad revenues. But now almost 1 month live, and only 1 commission sales so far.

So I do understand this likely takes more time to mature since we need to optimize on our side which affiliate offers work best on our audience etcetera.

A few questions:

1 - Are there more affiliates here than are using affiliate offers next to display advertising. Are you also expecting a factor 2 to 3 more revenues from affiliates offers than from display?

2 - How many months did it take for you to build it up to a succesful level?

3 - What are some of the tips & tricks that worked best for you in building up the affiliate commissions?

Last click hands every conversion to the final touch, which flatters bottom-funnel campaigns and starves everything that warmed the buyer up. Data-driven attribution looks across the whole path and splits credit by how much each touch moved the outcome, using your account's own conversion patterns rather than a fixed rule. It needs enough conversion volume to model well, so thin accounts should not expect stable numbers. The practical effect is upper-funnel campaigns stop looking worthless.

Spent a day tracing why paid numbers and the CRM drifted apart. Three causes stacked up: a redirect was stripping the utm_content parameter, one landing page template hardcoded an old campaign tag, and the form only captured first touch so any return visit overwrote nothing. Each looked minor alone. Together they misrouted roughly a tenth of leads to direct. Fixing the redirect and logging both first and last touch closed most of the gap.

Hey everyone!

I launched my website yesterday, and I'm planning to work towards getting accepted into Journey by Mediavine.

As far as I know, Journey requires at least 1,000 premium sessions within a 30-day period.

Let's say I manage to reach that milestone next month. My website would only be around 30-35 days old at that point.

My question is:

- Should I apply as soon as I reach 1,000 sessions?

- Does Mediavine accept relatively new websites, or do they prefer domains with at least 3-4 months of history?

- Would it be better to wait until I have 2-3 months of consistent traffic before applying?

I'd really appreciate hearing from publishers who have recently been accepted into Journey, especially those who got approved with a relatively new website.

When did you apply, how old was your website, and how many sessions did you have at the time of approval?

Some gap is normal from tag timing and modeling, but a steady 20 or 30 percent gap usually means something structural. Check whether the platform counts a conversion per click while GA4 counts per session, whether consent blocks one tag and not the other, and whether view through is quietly inflating one side. Line up a single day event by event before you trust either total.

We're taking applications for 3 beta design partners for Adlytics.

Ideally a mix of agencies and brands that run media across multiple channels.
AdLytics is a multi-tenant media intelligence SaaS platform built to solve advertising fragmentation. Brands and agencies struggle to understand how different channels work together and which channels actually drive results. AdLytics consolidates data from 30+ advertising channels into a unified dashboard and uses sophisticated measurement methodologies to quantify channel contribution and cross-channel synergies.

Multi-touch marketing attribution and media-mix analytics for advertisers running across many platforms. Pulls spend and performance data from 30+ ad platforms, normalizes it into one schema, and runs attribution, incrementality, halo and media-mix models over the result.