Raptive

So the question of why goes back to what I was saying about in the content realm, everyone thinks Google.

Generally they think Google Mediavine, or Google Raptive, or Google AdSense.

Those are the programmatic networks of choice.

Okay? AdSense usually, AdSense is very good.

You have a snippet of code, and it shows ads that they are using a sales team and bidding CPC systems and stuff to build.

And so there's these, AdSense is a very good network, and there's a couple of premium ones.

Raptive used to be called AdThrive, and Mediavine are both premium ad networks.

They generally earn 50 to 100% more than AdSense.

So starting with that meal plan subscription, then as soon as I was rolling, I set up a website, and we have ads on the website, so we're part of an ad network.

It's called Raptive, and they put advertisements on our website.

So we started making income from that.

And then I signed the book deal.

We bought a company called AdThrive.

It renamed Raptive, which just passed Apple in page views with 227 million uniques.

And Raptive took off as a company 10 years ago when I stepped down, and I don't appreciate the obvious implication in the correlation of those two facts, that it did so well when I left.

But my cofounders-

Well, they're two independent facts.

No, I wouldn't say like display ads are dead per se.

It's just there are only large publishers left, right? So my buddy who's a social media influencer, she just went to a Raptive meetup and it's only like large influencers at this point, right? They're able to drive their own traffic from social and they can still do 50 to 100K per month in display ads.

You know what I mean? But I think the days of the SEO display ad content sites are pretty, pretty long gone at this point.

Affiliate still very much alive.

But, you know, we get these, um, updates.

I built in a little, like, um, for Raptive, and Mediavine might have this as well, there's API access, and so we built this little Slack bot that does, like, a comparison of, like, here's how much you earned this month versus last year.

So it does that on the first of every year.

We're recording on the first.

So did those 30,000 subscribers find you on Substack, and then also find you from your other email list? Or are you posting social media content about it as well, where people are discovering it?

Um, initially it was a lot of my existing subscribers, who...

I remember I had just transferred over to Raptive, and I was just gonna start Substack also, and I was talking to the newsletter experts at Raptive and just saying, you know, "What do you do?" You know, "Is it, is it cool to send your subscribers and let them know this is what you're doing, and you wanna transfer them over?" And she was like, "Yeah." I- she's like, "I think that's a great idea.

And then you give them an easy way to opt out."

So for new blog posts, you don't need to do too many.

I think Raptive was recommending 11 new blog posts per month.

So think of that.

Obviously, you can do less as you're building up in your journey.

I have some dips here and then I have some months where I get more.

But yeah, you know, we are reasonable folks over here.

Going back to the Mediavine, when OK, what was asking about it over here, if you are new, we are trying to get on one of the two major ad networks, Raptive.

I'm on Raptive and Francesca is on Mediavine.

We can monetize the informational based content with display ads.

Maybe as a buyer, you're like, oh, I have a path to get this into Ezoic or Mediavine or Raptive or something that is going to have better payouts than straight AdSense.

And for the commercial intent content, okay, that's monetized with affiliate partnerships.

So maybe you have a path where you can say, oh, I know how to increase conversions on that side.

Basically, AdSense is well known to be one of the worst display advertising networks.

In terms of how much they pay out.

So just switching it to another one like Mediavine or Raptive, if they'll accept you on their platform, you're going to increase the revenue just simply doing that.

Yeah.