After numerous, and sometimes disastrous, attempts at finding a consistent ad partner for our blog, we finally found Nirvana with Monumetric – probably the best ad network for small to medium sized digital publishers.
Are you a blogger, content creator, or digital publisher with traffic in the 10K – 50K per month category? Then you need to work with Monumetric. They ‘get’ small publishers, and will make your website money.
Being a small to mid-sized blogger is a blessing and a curse all in one. On the one hand, you have all the flexibility to create and publish content on your own schedule, in your own way, and on your terms. On the other hand, your monthly costs for web hosting, email serving, accounting and various apps will be increasingly faster than your audience.
We’ve experienced it all at Kiwi Families. We’ve sold ad units direct, worked with local ad networks, sold ad units through third-party networks, and even worked with dodgy ad partners that reneged on payments! In fact, over a 4 year period we worked with 4 different ad partners and NEVER had consistent monthly earnings we could rely on. Talk about stressful!
Finally we found Monumetric, and everything changed for us. We now make around $6-700 a month, EVERY single month, and a huge weight has been lifted for us.
What’s more, Monumetric have tools that helped with our site speed, they’ve reviewed our site setup about 5 times in 2 years, and they were brilliant at helping us set up new ad units when we refreshed our website. They are absolutely a partner in our business, and we can’t recommend them enough.
What is an ad network?
So, you’re getting plenty of pageviews and you’ve got lots of potential ad space to sell. But unless you want to spend 20 hours a week cold-calling potential advertisers, how do you fill all that ad inventory? This is where ad networks come into play.
In a nutshell, an ad network works as a middle man, or intermediary, between advertisers and publishers. In practice, ad networks use already existing ad platforms, like the Google Adsense, but also Bing and Nexus and others, to bring demand to your unfulfilled ad inventory.
Some of these ad networks are very hands off, and you’ll be required to do a lot of the back and front end development to get ad units running on your site. Others, like Monumetric, are very hands on and have in-house developers who will work with you and your site to ad the best ad units for your website.
Again, some of the smaller and larger ad networks, are more set-and-forget and they’re happy as long as revenue is being created. Others, again like Monumetric, are more of a business partner and work really hard to ‘optimise’ ad unit revenue.
Monetizing and Optimising Your Ad Inventory – Ad network partners
The very best ad network partnerships work when the ad network partner is working for you. Afterall, you’re the publisher, you create all the content, work hard to bring in all the eyeballs, and continuously invest in cultivating your audience so they keep coming back. This is arguably the most important work, so don’t loose focus on what you do best, by trying to run and optimise all your ad campaigns too.
Great ad network partners will constantly monitor your website and traffic, and make recommendations for the best placement of ad units on your site. They’ll have useful dashboards that help you monitor your earnings, and they’ll provide features that ensure your site speed remains high, and you’re meeting various compliance requirements such as GDPR.
Monetizing your ad inventory, and constantly monitoring and optimsing your site is where Monumetric leave other ad network partners in the dust. Their dashboard is excellent and gives you a full daily break down by ad unit, and by platform. And their ‘success team’ as they call them are true business partners. They’ll work with you to get the best out of your website when it comes to advertising revenue.
So How Much Money Will Your Blog Earn?
So How Much Money Will Your Blog Earn?This is a great question. And there’s no straightforward answer, it really does depend. It depends on your blog niche, how long people spend on your website, and the number of pages each person visits.
It’s back to that simple blog concept. Create great content, consistently.
Monumetric use a metric here called ‘RPM’ or ‘revenue per thousand’, and you can use that to compare your earnings to similar sites, in similar niches. This is simply your revenue divided by your total traffic. Because Monumetric is a Google Adsense ad partner, they pay you on a cpm basis, not a cost per click basis, so the more traffic you bring in, the more you’ll earn.
However, this is where ‘optimising’ your ad units comes into play too. Having the optimum number of ad units for your blog – that is, enough ad units to earn the highest revenue, without decreasing the user experience for your readers – is all about optimisation.
In our example above, we could earn a better RPM just by adding one more ad unit. We could earn a much better RPM by adding in a video ad unit. But we’ve chosen not too, as we don’t want to degrade our user experience too far, by having too many ad units running. Monumetric know this, and respect our decision here, which is what makes them such a great partner.
Needless to say then, once your blog gets over 50k traffic per month, and you’re creating ‘great content, consistently’, you’ll start earning real money with a programmatic ad partner in the wings.
How Much Traffic do I Need to Join Monumetric?
Another great traffic-related question. Monumetric have strict entry requirements. This is to ensure that websites they work with have real traffic, aren’t running bots or anything black-hat, and their traffic is Google-verified.
So the first requirement is that you’ll need Google analytics installed on your site. This is easy, as almost all bloggers use Google analytics anyway, and if you’re not, then you should be!
The second requirement is at least 10k traffic. So this is actually a really low entry requirement, and means most small digital publishers should qualify. The catch here is that you’ll need to pay Monumetric a one-time set up fee of $99. This is to cover the dev costs of getting all your ad units in play and is about ONE-TENTH what you’ll pay a contract dev to do this for you!
Of course, if you have over 80k monthly traffic and you’re in that sweetspot as a medium sized blogger, then you should get accepted as soon as your traffic is verified. You’ll get their ad-ops dev to work with you and set up your ad units in the best way possible. And you’ll be earning revenue from day one!
How Do I Get Paid?
Monumetric are a little different here is they pay out on a ‘Net-60’ basis. This means you won’t earn any revenue for the first two months. Then you’ll start earning revenue every month, based on your traffic from two months earlier, if that makes sense.
We were VERY wary about this, especially as we had just been ripped off by another ad network partner, and were already missing two months of earnings.
We needn’t have worried though. All the traffic and revenue history is showing on your dashboard the whole time. And when it came time to getting paid, payment was quick and straight into our Paypal account. I think US customers can add a bank account too. But we prefer to get paid through Paypal anyway, as we have our Paypal feeds automatically downloading into our accounting software Xero.
Monumetric Support
This is probably the key area that Monumetric excel in, far more than the competition eg Mediavine, Ezoic, etc.
The Monumetric support, or success team, are available 24/7. We’ve even contacted them about tickets in the lead up to Christmas, and still received the same level of support. On the few times that we’ve thrown more curly issues into the mix, the team have bent over backwards to find an answer, and get a result.
This is the most important thing to us at the end of the day. We want to know that our ad network partner is taking care of advertising revenue, so we can get on with the most important work of all, creating great content, consistently.
So that’s it. That’s our recommendation. Hands down Monumetric have changed our business for the better. They’ve taken all the stress around unfilfilled ad inventory away. While still allowing us the space to sell direct ads at home if we choose to. A great team, they understand small business digital publishers, and they know how to optimise ads so you’ll get the best revenue for your blog.
If you haven’t explored programmatic advertising on your blog yet, or you’re wanting to work with a partner who’ll work with and for you, make the switch to Monumetric now. Your business will love you for it!
For more great ideas on making money at home, check out our side-hustle series in Family Finances.
