Mediavine is known for being one of the best display ad networks on the planet. There have been many success stories about sellers who have doubled, tripled and even quadrupled their earnings after switching from their old ad network over to Mediavine.
Mediavine is notoriously difficult to get accepted into. Your site needs to be over their sessions minimum (which is currently a minimum of 50,000 sessions over the past 30 days via Google Analytics). There are also other factors including your traffic mostly coming from top-tier countries like the USA and the United Kingdom. Your site also needs to be in the correct niche and have the right content that their advertisers like.
As you can see, it is definitely not the easiest thing to get into.
There are a lot of articles on the web about how to get your site accepted to Mediavine. A question that is not often asked though is how to sell your Mediavine website and what goes into that kind of thing? I am going to try and answer some of those questions in this article.
Let’s start with the biggest question. Does Mediavine even allow you to sell your website if you are signed up with them. The answer is yes. At Motion Invest, we have sold many websites that use Mediavine as one of their main forms of monetization. It is definitely something that can be done.
The answer is no based on our experience. Mediavine won’t just transfer over your existing account with them over to the buyer. The buyer also won’t get automatically accepted to their program after taking over the website from you.
Mediavine asks for the new owner to re-apply the site (and go through their due diligence again) after taking it over. They will then decide if the site will continue to be able to use their services or not. This means that there is no guarantee that the site will get accepted again by them.
As a result, this can make selling your Mediavine website trickier than normal. It also makes buying a Mediavine site trickier than normal.
If the site has over 50,000 sessions over the last 30 days and was accepted to Mediavine in the past, it seems very likely that they would accept the site again. Being over their sessions minimum is the easiest transition and should (likely) allow the buyer to continue to use their services after purchasing the site.
This is the easiest way to sell a Mediavine site. Generally speaking, buyers can value it as they would any other site as they will (likely) be able to continue to use Mediavine after taking over since it is over their requirements.
I say likely because there are no guarantees. Mediavine might change their policy or decide that something isn’t a fit for them. Having the site be over their minimum requirements puts it in the best position when buying and selling.
This is where it can get tricky. Let’s say you have a site that was previously accepted by Mediavine but now wouldn’t make their 50,000 sessions threshold for the buyer to get re-accepted. This can be for a variety of reasons, Maybe the site was hit by a Google update. Maybe you stopped working on it and it slowly decreased over time. Maybe you were accepted when their minimums were only 25,000 sessions but haven’t been able to get it up to the new requirements. Either way, we have seen lots of sellers who want to sell their Mediavine sites but the new buyer might not get accepted.
So what do you do in that situation?
This is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. It depends on the site, the traffic, the earnings etc. There are ways to get creative though if your site falls into this category (and depending on the situation). Lower pricing can be taken into account, knowing that the buyer will not be able to use Mediavine after taking over. For example, the site could be listed for say 27x instead of 36x, keeping in mind that the new buyer will not be able to use Mediavine after taking the site over. This is a big loss for the buyer, so that needs to be taken into account in the pricing.
Overall, it is still possible to sell, it will just make things harder if the site is under their minimum requirements.
This is a question that buyers and sellers will need to determine for themselves.
As mentioned prior, Mediavine does have strict requirements to get accepted. Since Mediavine is one of the top display ad networks in the world, you can have some comfort knowing that the site made it through all of their checks and it was desirable by their advertisers (at one point in time at least).
While saying that, there is no guarantee. That same site might have been accepted a few years ago by Mediavine and a lot might have changed over that same period of time. As a result, it isn’t guaranteed to get accepted again by them as noted before.
When buying a site, we always recommend doing your own due diligence on a site before making your purchase.
We have seen that Mediavine generally asks that potential sellers give them a heads up in advance when selling their site. It is advised to reach out to Mediavine directly and speak with them about it. This will help you to avoid any headaches in the selling process.
If you have a site that uses Mediavine and you want to sell, please feel free to email me at ryan@motioninvest.com. We are happy to run it through due diligence and see if we can get you an offer.
Motion Invest has helped thousands of entrepreneurs just like you to sell and buy websites.
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