Media.net Review: CPC Network that Average sites should just Avoid

Media.net is an advertising network being run by yahoo in collaboration with Microsoft Bing. While Adsense really tops the charts when it comes to online advertising, but Media.net has slowly emerged as one of the good alternatives to Google Adsense. We’ve played around with the service and publishing this media.net review. We’ve also tried to answer some of the questions that users usually have.

Getting Started

Although the service is not among the top ones, the approval process is pretty hard. Firstly you need to have a pretty popular blog with a good amount of daily traffic and subsequently higher page views. We were approved pretty quickly, but we’ve heard from many that they were rejected even though they had pretty good blogs.
A good amount of US/UK/Canada traffic is must if you want to get approved for media.net.

You are appointed a dedicated account manager who approves your websites and also provides you support whenever you need that. He will closely work with you and make sure that you receive the best CPC and RPM.

CPC or CPM? They are both

While many feel that media.net is a CPM or RPM network, its more of a CPC network rather than a CPM one. There’s of course some good RPM fill, but majority of the ads are CPC and will pay nothing unless they receive some clicks. This can be judged from the amount of revenue

Our ad mix is actually mostly cpc, with some cpm mixed in where our inventory permits. Our ad units are very reliant on our optimization efforts, which perform much better with cpc advertisements. – Media.net support

Fill Rate

As earlier stated, media.net requires a good amount of US/CA traffic and most of the fill is only available to visitors from these regions. So if your site is not receiving enough of US traffic, you will see reduced earnings. However they do provide the option to enter an alternative Ad code so that they can divert the ad request to that code if they don’t have any inventory available for the particular visitor.

Real Results

So finally it comes to the real results that it provides. Let’s see how it performed in our trial. Besides the good aspects, here are some of the bads that we noticed and we think that these need to be included in this media.net review.

1. Hard to get approved. I’d call the approval process as even harder than Adsense.
2. Fill rate is not good enough for non-us visitors.
3. Ads are mostly a category ad instead of a direct ad dedicated to particular product/service.

   

4. No real-time revenue estimation. Takes over a day to see figures.

While the RPM was pretty nice for us during the beginning, it slowly dropped down to $0 and while writing this review, it was still $0 for like 5 days in a row. The reason for this is simple – They are showing CPC ads, which are not receiving any clicks due to them being irrelevant to the content or the interests of the visitors. Here’s a screenshot of the same.

Are you using media.net or planning to apply for the same? Let us know if you agree with our Media.net review, If not, we’ll be happy to include more detailed info and improve upon the issues that you find out.