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Ad Networks on the Warpath: Is Your Website Next?

This is a newsletter I sent to my subscribers last week. I publish the newsletters on my website; however, I edit out some information from the public versions.

If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up for my newsletter:

We used to be afraid of Google and its penalties… and now, we should be afraid of… ad networks???

In my last email, I wrote about how on March 14-15, Mediavine decided to do some spring cleaning and banned more than 500 websites from their low-tier ad platform, Journey.
The reason? These websites were allegedly abusing AI to generate misleading images and sub-par content. Most of these websites were in the recipe niche.

The CEO Email That Sent Shockwaves Through the Community

While the purge itself was an unpleasant turn of events, what provoked a true uproar from the community was the email sent by the Mediavine CEO after the carnage.

In the email, Hochberger acknowledged that Mediavine had implemented measures to address concerns about low-quality AI-generated content on Journey. 500+ websites were terminated following a manual review by their Marketplace Quality team, which is now dedicated to maintaining content standards.

But here’s where it becomes concerning – these sites were submitted as violators to DeepSee, a partner working to classify and demonetize low-quality, AI-generated content as “Made for Advertising” (MFA).

It means the websites were most likely (we do not know for sure) reported to partner networks and exchanges (such as Raptive, Monumentrics, Ezoic, AdSense, etc.) to get them blocked at the ad buyer level 😱 
The impact could be similar to a Google domain blacklist, where the domain gets blocked from Google’s index and essentially becomes unusable.

But this was not the most worrisome part.

The Reporting Form: New Digital Publishing’s Nightmare

The worst part was this:

“Based on feedback, many publishers requested an easier way to report these sites; in response, we have launched the following form.”

Mediavine introduced a reporting form for publishers to flag concerns about the misuse of AI—and a link to this form was conveniently added to the email.

It was immediately dubbed as “Snitching Form”.

It makes it very simple to fight your competition. If you see a website doing better than you, just go to that little Google form, type in 3-5 URLs of your competitor, submit, and Mediavine will consider it to be an offender. Right? 😒

Mediavine did emphasize that every submitted website is subject to manual review and none of the decisions to purge websites from the ad network is taken automatically.

Still, this form freaked out literally everybody, even the publishers who are honestly publishing human-written content with human-taken pictures.

I think the Snitch Form reveals their weakness: Mediavine desperately wants to control the situation but lacks both the technology and resources to do so effectively. So they’ve fallen back on relying on the community and that has backfired dramatically.

Damage Control: The Publisher Webinar

A few days ago, on March 26, Mediavine hosted a publisher webinar where they addressed some of the most pressing questions.

They reassured that none of the websites submitted to the form would be purged automatically and every website will be reviewed manually.

To me, it looks like they still have no idea how to proceed or what to do about AI content, but they clearly realize that the CEO’s email was a PR disaster 😅

A Lifeline of Hope

For websites deactivated by Journey, Mediavine states they can ***edited out***.

☝☝☝ I left out some details from my original newsletter. If you’d like to receive these updates in your Inbox in unedited form, sign up:

If you ask me, I think it is a quite generous policy compared to how Google has been treating small blogs, particularly following the HCU update 😒

Some publishers plan to reapply, while others want nothing more to do with Mediavine and are considering alternative ad providers.

What’s Really Going On?

Why did Mediavine do this?

It appears that “real” food bloggers, the ones who published recipes tested by humans (either themselves or by third-party creators) are getting increasingly upset against the “faux” bloggers who use AI to generate content, and they started complaining to Mediavine about it.

Mediavine caved in ☹️

The bad thing here is that there are no clear guidelines on what is accepted and what is not. Mediavine is pressured by their top earners, but they are utterly failing at being the true watchdog. They leave this unpleasant job to the publishers who, I am sure, will abuse the reporting form.

Was I Affected?

I was not affected, even though I have a website with content 90% generated by AI, both text and media.

This website was accepted to Journey in December 2024 after Mediavine had kicked out a few websites from the top-tier ad platform for abusing AI-generated content.

Back then, after learning about it, I was afraid that I wouldn’t get accepted, but it did not happen.

This time, the purge was different. It happened in the low-tier ad platform and there were many more websites purged.

Useful Resources

Here are a couple of videos to watch about the topic.

In her video, Adrianna talks about how Pinterest is now filled with AI content that’s impossible to avoid, yet users can be banned for using AI themselves.
She points out the double standard—big guys like Pinterest, Facebook, and Google are allowed to use potentially misleading AI content, while regular users are prohibited from doing the same. Hypocrisy all around 😒

Shawna reviews Mediavine’s CEO email and the “snitch form”. She also suggests moving affected websites to a new domain ASAP.

Wrap-up

That’s what happened with Mediavine.

Next week, let’s explore what other popular ad networks (Ezoic, Raptive) think about AI content and how you can protect your website from possible future purges!

(BTW, my newsletter subscribers have already received this newsletter 😉)

Now, how about you? Are you still on Mediavine or Journey? Were you affected by The Purge?

Hit Reply, and let’s chat!

Otherwise, have a wonderful weekend ❤️