What is Mediavine Food?

If you’ve been looking at food or recipe websites recently, whether it’s to understand how they make money or just because you’re looking for the best chocolate cake recipe, you may have noticed a banner across the bottom of many of them that says “exclusive member of Mediavine food”.

Which, if you’re anything like most internet sleuths probably caused you to ask the question, what is Mediavine food?

Mediavine Food is part of the Mediavine family of advertising networks. 

Mediavine uses this designation for any food or recipe-related sites as a way to categorize sites into individual categories, to help make sure that when advertisers buy ads through the variety of platforms that Mediavine uses to populate the advertising space on those sites, that the ads show up on the correct kind of site.

As a result, you end up with happier advertisers (their ads show up where they want them) and the websites make more money than they would by using other advertising networks because the ads can be more easily targeted to the correct person.

If you’re a website creator in the food space, now you’re probably wondering…..just how much you can earn by being included in the Mediavine Food Network.

How Much Can You Earn With Mediavine Food?

Like with most advertising networks, the exact amount you can earn with Mediavine food is dependent on the amount of traffic your site brings in.

Generally speaking, Mediavine sites earn substantially more than other ad networks, in part because of the way they are specifically categorized.

While the specific amount you can earn will vary wildly based on the type of site that you have, many food sites payout higher revenue per thousand users (RPM) than other types of sites.

It’s safe to assume that inside of the Mediavine food network you should see an average RPM of somewhere between 15 and $25.

That means for every 1000 people that is your site Mediavine will pay you $15-$25.

It’s not uncommon to see even higher RPM numbers if your content targets a higher net worth audience.

Sites that focus on diets that could be considered more expensive, such as gluten-free, keto, vegan, or other diets that fall outside of the “mainstream” will often see higher payouts because the followers of these diets are often people with a little bit more disposable income, making them a more desirable target for advertisers.

What Are The Requirements for Mediavine Food?

One of the reasons Mediavine and even more specifically Mediavine food can pay these high RPMs is because they do place restrictions on the types of websites that can run their ads.

The most basic requirement to be able to join the Mediavine food network (as of the writing of this article) is that you have 50,000 sessions in the previous 30 days.

Essentially, Mediavine wants to see that you have at least 50,000 different people visiting the website each month.

While some other advertising networks will use page views, the number of pages that have been seen on your website in a given period of time, Mediavine feels that sessions more accurately represent how well your site is doing.

Although this may seem like a high number, most established sites that put up high-quality content will have the opportunity to bring in at least this amount.

Beyond this session requirement, Mediavine will review your site and make sure the quality you’re putting out makes sense for their advertisers.

We dive more into all of the requirements and the approval process to get your site accepted by Mediavine (or Mediavine food) here.

What’s The Difference Between Mediavine Food and Mediavine?

The easiest way to think about the difference between Mediavine and Mediavine food is that it is simply a subcategory of the overall Mediavine library of sites.

As we mentioned above, Mediavine categorizes many of its sites into what are called COMSCORE categories.

These different categories allow advertisers to use a variety of different platforms to purchase their advertising in those categories without having to buy directly from Mediavine or communicate directly with the website owners.

These individual categories can be selected by an advertiser, without having to know the exact website their ads will run on, and by running ads into these different categories, they will know that their ads will show up for the audience that they desire.

Mediavine has a variety of different categories that your site may fall into, depending on the type of content you publish including:

• Mediavine Food
• Mediavine Home
• Mediavine Travel
• Mediavine Finance
• Mediavine Parenting

While these different categories do include many different types of websites, if the specific type of content you publish doesn’t fall into one of them, fear not you can still run Mediavine ads under the generic Mediavine banner.

As we discussed, there are some benefits to falling into one of these categories, which may include higher RPM earnings.

Is Mediavine Food Better Than Google Adsense?

Comparing advertising networks is generally a tricky proposition.

Some websites may earn more with one advertising network than another, while other categories may earn more with the other network.

However, as a general rule Mediavine sites will earn substantially more than websites using Google’s AdSense network.

As we discussed above there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to understanding the earnings you will have from any specific network, but you can typically expect to earn between 3 and 5 dollars per 1000 visits if you’re running AdSense on your website.

Compare that to something like the $15-$25 average RPM that we see across many Mediavine websites and making the switch is a no-brainer.

What If I Don’t Meet The Mediavine Requirements?

Knowing that much higher RPM earnings are available can be very frustrating if you haven’t yet hit that 50,000 session benchmark that Mediavine requires before they accept sites to their network.

Fear not.

If you haven’t currently reached that mark and are looking to improve your earnings over something like the 3 to 5 dollars you may be earning with AdSense, you may want to take a look at some of the other alternatives, such as Ezoic, that tend to have higher payouts than Google’s AdSense network and will admit sites with lower traffic.

Ezoic previously had a requirement that sites had 10,000 monthly page views before they accepted sites to their network, this has recently gone away and sites of any size can be admitted into the Ezoic advertising network.

Keep in mind that while these earnings are generally not as high as something like what you would find with Mediavine, it’s often worth making the switch away from Google’s Adsense network and many people find that they can easily double their earnings (or more) by making the move to another network, like Ezoic.

Final Thought

Here at Brand Creators, we love when our sites have grown to a size where we can start thinking about using Mediavine as an option.

If you have a food or recipe website and are on the fence about whether or not you should give Mediavine a try, we can wholeheartedly suggest that you do.

If you’re on the fence or you’d like to learn a little bit more about the difference between Ezoic and Mediavine and which might be the right choice for your specific site, you can check out our full comparison here.