🤡 The AI Oopsie

oh Mediavine, you clowns

Shawna Newman
June 08, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Three weeks or so after Mediavine did their first big purge of sites for AI usage, I sent out this email.

I’d been keeping an eye on the new sites getting approved for Journey by Mediavine and I was shocked by what I was seeing.

I showed you a screenshot of the site and told you how all the AI detectors were coming back 100% human.

Madness.

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Did They Wise Up?

Today I noticed that the site in question is no longer running ads from Mediavine Journey. It’s still in the json file but apparently no longer approved.

And the privacy policy mentions Monumetric, but there’s zero ads coming up on the site.

That leaves the question - did Mediavine’s AI detection get better? Or did someone alert them (or turn them in)? Or maybe they saw me talking about it?

I don’t think it’s the first option.

Because recently someone told me that they have a site full of raw AI output that got approved after the big purge and is still monetized.

While that does give me the lols, I’m not surprised to hear it.

That makes two people I know that have full-AI content sites still on Mediavine …one on Journey and one on regular Mediavine. And they didn’t use the same AI content creation tool/platform.

On a related note, the Canadian immigration news site that was listed for sale last fall on Motion Invest - where the owner said content creation was all via chatGPT and I (and others) talked about this on Twitter/X so they pulled the listing - is no longer on Mediavine Premiere (or whatever that highest level it called). It was still there a couple of months ago but now it’s on Raptive 🙃 Same owner still listed in that json file, too.

I don’t really have any actionable advice for you here. Just some interesting data points.

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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 over a year now (I think?) and there’s tons of value in it, including a SOP for local SEO.

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