The order you are told to join ad networks in is now backwards
400 words · about 2 min
To join Mediavine Official you now need $5,000 of ad money a year, not 50,000 visits a month. Raptive dropped its bar to 25,000 pageviews. Ezoic — the one every guide calls the easy one — raised its bar to 250,000 people a month.
- How it was measured
- We read each network's own live requirements page on 2026-08-28 and quoted it word for word, rather than repeating somebody's summary. Re-checked on 2026-08-30: the two Mediavine pages we read now return a 404 and no archived copy exists, so that figure can no longer be produced from the source. The note at the bottom says so — it is reported as unverifiable rather than quietly kept or quietly dropped.
- Last checked
Listen to this Playing read from this page, nothing added
Watch it plot 33s · narrated · the same figures as above
An ad network is the company that fills the ad slots on your pages and pays you for them. They pay very differently, and the standard advice is that you climb between them in a fixed order: start on AdSense, move to Ezoic because it takes anybody, reach Mediavine at 50,000 sessions a month and Raptive at 100,000 pageviews.
Every number in that sentence is now wrong.
Two of those words are worth pinning down first, because networks quote different ones and the difference is large. A pageview is one page being loaded. A session is one visit, which usually covers several pageviews. So 50,000 sessions is a bigger site than 50,000 pageviews, and a bar quoted in sessions is harder to clear than the same number quoted in pageviews.
| Network | What everyone repeats | What their page says now |
|---|---|---|
| Mediavine Official | 50,000 sessions/mo | $5,000+ annual ad revenue |
| Mediavine Journey | — | 1,000 sessions |
| Raptive | 100,000 pageviews/mo | 25,000 pageviews/mo |
| Ezoic | no minimum | 250,000 monthly active users |
| Monumetric Propel | — | 10,000 pageviews + $99 one-off fee |
The order has flipped. Ezoic, described everywhere as the one that lets anyone in, is now the hardest of the three to reach. Raptive and Mediavine Journey are both reachable long before it.
The consequence nobody states
Mediavine Official's bar is money, not traffic. Read that again: you cannot qualify without already earning $5,000 a year from ads somewhere, and for a new site that somewhere is AdSense — whose own published requirements are thinner than everyone assumes.
So AdSense is not the thing you outgrow. It is how you qualify for the next one. That reorders the whole plan — the thing everyone treats as a stepping stone is the door.
Why the wrong numbers survive
Mediavine's own marketing page still states the 50,000-session requirement. It is dated October 2019, it carries a small note from an editor, and it ranks above the current help-centre article that says 1,000.
This is not writers being lazy. The out-of-date page is the one Google shows you, on the company's own website. Checking the original source means checking which original source, and preferring the help centre over the marketing site is not an obvious move until you have been caught by it.
Tracked as MV-OFFICIAL, RAPTIVE-MIN, EZOIC-MIN, NETWORK-LADDER-GONE. If a number here looks wrong, tell us and we will check it against the source.