🚨 Mediavine Journey's Friday Night Massacre

Shout out to subscriber Jennifer for reaching out today to let me know what’s going on with Mediavine Journey.

Are you on it?

You might wanna double check your Grow dashboard to make sure.

Cause you might be surprised that you’re no longer earning ad monies.

WTF Is Going On?

Jennifer had two websites removed from Mediavine Journey. She mentioned that the content of these is listicle format (not roundups).

Based on her saying that “it appears they did this Friday afternoon” I kinda think maybe they didn’t really notify their users. It seems as if maybe people are logging into Grow and seeing that their ads are disabled.

I’ve said this about Mediavine before, I’ve said it to them on Twitter, and I’ll say it here again - what a bunch of cunts.

They don’t even have the decency to notify people that they’ve turned off their ability to earn money.

Clearly not given them any details of their “crime” either.

So, the FAQs on Site Terminations was updated a couple of days ago as well. Sure would be nice if Google hadn’t gotten rid of the cached version of pages.

Cause this one isn’t in the Wayback Machine so who knows what they updated.

I do wonder if “traffic strategy” was always in there? And I wonder if the removed sites were getting mostly Pinterest traffic? Or Facebook?

I took a look at the recently updated “Best Practices” support page and noticed a couple of interesting things -

Posting too often can be an indication of overuse of AI.

Don’t do content that is “crowdsourced from other websites and resources” - what?

Don’t have a site “entirely focused on round-up posts or aggregated content” - are they also eliminating these sites from regular Mediavine? Some of these are in the higher level of Mediavine, too.

Nope, this well known food blog that recipe bloggers hate for its roundups is still showing Mediavine ads. (and I’m pretty sure it’s in that Mediavine Pro or Premium…whatever it’s called).

This sounds like Mediavine Journey has a new checklist of very specific criteria that they are not fully sharing.

How often do people need to space their posts so they don’t get accused of AI?

The Publisher Policies page was also updated recently and this caught my eye -

The Policies Page also mentions that excessive AI usage is forbidden….but the page it links out to seems to have been removed.

And that’s interesting cause the WayBack Machine has it.

One thing of note in that page is using AI for “untested recipes.”

And I can’t remember what page I saw it on, but I had to lol when they said even if your site passes vetting but then you start posting “low quality” content, then they will remove you.

So yeah, that’s all I know. And I hope you didn’t get caught up in this bullshit.

Coming up…

More on what I’m working on and how it’s going.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. If you’re looking for high level discussions or tips on things like local SEO and Rank & Rent, I highly recommend Jacky Chou’s Advise community. I’ve been in it for several months and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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