Yes, the journey begins. The Mediavine Journey, that is. But first, a story on why it matters.
Five years ago, the global pandemic hit. I had free time, so I started a YouTube channel for one of my niche sites. Made 75 videos or so over the course of the next year or two. All with my iPhone. Now external audio. No thumbnails (I have since gone back and added them).
I embedded them on my website. Lost interest once other projects provided bigger opportunities.
5 years later, the videos have gotten almost 2.5 million views. Neighbors and friends have found them on accident when they were looking for a solution to their problem, not knowing I had even started it.
And, I’ve been getting $250-$500 per month from ads on the videos. I haven’t made a video in over 3 years… Sure, monthly views have been dropping a bit, but I’m still getting hundreds of dollars per month.
Ad revenue was never the only goal for this YouTube channel, just one of many ways to earn and grow the brand. While I don’t work on it any longer, the ad revenue has always been a nice little treat each month.
Now, how does that relate to Mediavine Journey?
Weekend Growth now qualifies for Mediavine Journey
Weekend Growth started as a newsletter. To this day (almost 2 years later), that’s still its primary function. Ad revenue was also never the goal here.
But, some of my longer tutorial emails made sense to publish on a website. So, weekendgrowth.com started getting regular content.
But it was never optimized. Just copy/paste from the email.
And yet, some content started to rank. But not much of it. And it never got that much traffic.
For January 2025, Weekend Growth got 3,500 sessions.
But last month, I interviewed someone on the podcast who said they qualified for Mediavine Journey with less than 10k pageviews in a month. I asked how, and said they didn’t know. They applied and got accepted.
3.5k is a lot less than 10k. But I figured it was worth going for it. So I installed the plugin, and was accepted much less than 30 days later.
My initial hunch on why the site bypassed the 10k mark is because of the number of pageviews per visit… not sure if you noticed that in the initial screenshot. Over 4 pageviews per session. For a blog, that’s insanely high.
But then I sat down to write this email, and I went to look up Journey’s requirements (so I didn’t steer you wrong).
And I couldn’t find any mention on the Journey application page. Nor in their blog post on it. Hmmm.
Am I just missing it? Very possible. Did they used to have it and remove it? Was it never there?
I don’t know. But, perhaps sites with less than 10k visitors now qualify? Or, there is still an expectation of 10k, and my site met it with its high pageview per visitor count?
Either way, can’t hurt to apply if you want to monetize with Mediavine Journey
But I Digress…
Anyways, tangent over. Back to ads on Weekend Growth. Will I earn much from them? No. It’s very hard to predict (and they warn against it) but if I were guessing, I’d say $100-$275/month at current traffic levels.
But a couple things on this:
- If you’re new, earning even a few hundred dollars is incredibly motivating. I remember from my first blog back in 2017.
- Even if not new, it has the real potential of being ongoing. $200 next month isn’t much, but $200 every month of the year is $2,500. And then there’s next year. That’s real money.
To bring it full circle, let’s look at my total earnings from that random niche YouTube channel. Over $12k lifetime…
So, today starts my Mediavine Journey. I won’t earn much. But all this adds up.
And if you want to apply to Journey, I would appreciate it if you used my affiliate link HERE. This email took me an hour to write… so affiliate earnings help offset the time!
