Minimum Traffic Requirements: A 2021 Guide

minimum traffic requirements ad networks

Just here for the free resources?

Get Your Blog Monetization resource pack now

Media kits, rate cards, spec sheets, pricing guidelines, expert tips, sales contracts, and more 🍻

Every blogger knows that some ad networks have minimum traffic requirements. I’ll never forget the Reddit outcry after Mediavine increased their traffic requirements in 2020 – hundreds of bloggers were on the verge of giving up.

In fact, all those Reddit posts contributed heavily towards my decision to create the Monetization Method course. I wanted to teach bloggers that their are better ways to monetize your blog traffic than simply slapping banner ads everywhere.

But I do admit, ad networks have their place, so for that reason I’m writing this article to explore the different minimum traffic requirements for all the leading ad networks.

Using this list, you’ll be able to find the best ad network for your blogs current level of traffic.

Summary of minimum requirements:

Ad Network2021 Minimum Traffic Requirements
AdSenseNo minimum (Source)
Amazon Publisher Services5,000 unique visits a day
PopAdsNo minimum
Adsterra
Ezoic10,000 (Source)
InfoLinksNo minimum
RevenueHitsNo minimum
BuySellAds100,000 pageviews per month
Revcontent50,000 monthly visitors
Adversal50,000 pageviews per month
Monumetric10,000 monthly pageviews
MadAds Media10,000 daily pageviews
Updated early 2021

Why do ad networks have minimum requirements for approval?

In a nutshell, minimum traffic requirements exist for two reasons. Firstly, there is a cost for ad networks to serve customers, and there is a need for ad networks to maintain quality.

Customers service & onboarding

No matter how smooth your sign up and onboarding process is, eventually even the most savvy publisher is going to need help. Whether it be something as simple as a billing question, or something needing 30 minutes of specialist help (such as the ads aren’t displaying correctly), these questions are going to happen.

When it’s the owner of a website providing 500,000 monthly impressions, you obviously are willing to help.

Similarly, when it’s the owner of a new website getting 100 impressions a month, you also want to do your best to help.

But when you have 1,000 customers who are each providing only 100 impressions per month, all these little requests add up, and it becomes a bit much to handle, especially when these customers don’t generate much revenue for the business.

So the line has to be drawn somewhere, or customer service will be simply to tough to manage.

In fact, customer service is the reason Mediavine gave when increasing their minimum requirements to 50,000 sessions per month, up from 25,000 sessions per month, in June 2020.

Mediavine CO-Founder and CEO Eric Hochberger stated “[we] have reached the point in which changes are necessary to give our publishers the level of support they need and have come to expect from Mediavine.”

Technical Infrastructure

No matter what sort of online service you provide, there is going to be an infrastructure cost. Payment processing, invoicing, billing, hosting, etc

Here are two hypothetical ad networks, both serving 10 million ad impressions per month.

Ad network #1: This ad network has a 1 million minimum traffic volume, and has ten customers. Their invoicing and payment processing is managed by one employee with Google Sheets.

Ad network #2: This ad network has a 1,000 minimum traffic volume, and has ten thousand customers. Their invoicing and payment processing is managed by 3 tech staff, and a suite of SaaS products which cost the company $3,000 per month.

Although both networks are delivering 10 million ad impressions, Ad Network two has to manage these impressions across ten thousand customer accounts!

Brand safety / Vetting

The online advertising industry is full of fraudulent sites and bots. For those new to ad fraud, it’s estimated that advertisers lose billions to it each year. It’s a huge problem!

So for an ad network to ensure the network isn’t involved in any dodgy dealings, they need to do some vetting of applicant websites.

Once again, it’s not profitable to vet hundreds of tiny websites. Ad networks would rather spend 30 minutes vetting a large site, than a site with 1,000 monthly users. Drawing the line at 25,000 or 50,000 monthly users helps ad networks focus their limited resource on websites that are going to deliver a substantial number of ad impressions.

80/20 rule

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You don't actually need a crap-tonne of traffic to make a living blogging

Request our free resources below, and learn to monetize your blog the way the experts do 🍻

14+ Modules

Our training modules cover all the main monetization methods

10 Activites

Complete our activities and you'll be lightyears ahead of the competition.

11 Resources

Worksheets, calculators, and templates are included to save you months of trial & error.

INCOME REPORT ROUNDUPS

10,000+ subscribers already enjoy the latest blogger income reports from around the web, delivered to their inbox fortnightly.