Mediavine vs Raptive: what 15,000 live sites show

These are the two networks an independent publisher in an English-speaking market is most likely to be choosing between, and the comparison is usually made on things nobody outside can verify: rates, support, payment terms. We can compare the one thing that is fully visible — who each of them actually carries.

Category by category

The division is not random

Read the leader column and a pattern appears that neither network describes in its own marketing. Mediavine leads the domestic lifestyle block — home, parenting, beauty, health, travel, business. Raptive leads gaming, sports, automotive, technology, reference and tools.

The extremes make it plain. Mediavine’s strongest category relative to Raptive is Travel at 1,231 to 369. Raptive’s is Automotive at 194 to 84 — an almost exact mirror.

The cleanest way to describe the split is by audience rather than by subject. Mediavine concentrates where the reader is at home making a domestic decision; Raptive concentrates where the reader is pursuing an interest — a game, a car, a sport, a piece of software. Those are different advertiser bases, and two networks of near-identical size have ended up selling to substantially different ones.

Food is the exception, and it is the biggest category

The one large category that refuses the pattern is food and drink, where the two are within a few percent of each other — a genuine dead heat in the largest and most contested category in independent publishing. Both networks were built on food blogging and neither has conceded it. The food category breakdown goes into that split in more detail.

Because food is so much larger than everything else, it dominates the aggregate comparison and hides the divergence everywhere else. That is precisely why the headline “Mediavine has X publishers, Raptive has Y” comparison tells you so little.

Which is harder to get into?

On the measure we can check, Raptive. Its median publisher sits at 33 against Mediavine’s 29, and its floor — the 10th-percentile publisher — is at 7 against 10.

This regularly surprises people, because Mediavine has the stricter reputation. The explanation is not that Mediavine’s approvals are lax: it is that Mediavine has scaled further down the long tail, so its typical publisher is a smaller site. The two networks look most similar at the top of their rosters and most different at the bottom. The full ranking is in which ad networks are hardest to get into.

Sites that carry both

Both networks operate on an exclusive basis for display, and yet we find sites showing evidence of both. On inspection most are publishers caught mid-migration whose former network has not yet pruned its published seller file. That is worth understanding in its own right, because it is the clearest illustration of why a one-sided listing is not proof of a relationship — we covered it in sites running both Mediavine and Raptive.

How to actually decide

The data narrows the question rather than answering it. Start with your category in the table: if one of them leads your subject by a wide margin, that network has more advertisers buying inventory like yours and more publishers like you to benchmark against. If your category is close — food, crafts, technology, pets — the category argument is genuinely neutral and you should ignore it entirely.

Then check your authority against both floors, since one has a meaningfully higher bar. And then decide on the things no dataset can see: ad density, layout control, payment timing, support, and the video and ad-format products each offers. Those differ more between the two than anything measurable from outside, and they are what publishers who have used both actually talk about.

Their full publisher lists are on the Mediavine and Raptive pages, and the head-to-head numbers are also on the comparison page. If you are coming from Ezoic, Ezoic vs Mediavine shows how many sites make that move. Each month’s gains and losses for all three are in our ad network market share report.

Site counts are live relationships confirmed from both sides where possible. Neither network publishes rates, and nothing here should be read as a claim about earnings. Every figure on this page is read from our own index when the page is built, and refreshes on a weekly cycle — so the numbers move as the data does. Method and evidence rules: coverage & method.