Sites running both Mediavine and Raptive — and what that actually means

Ask in any blogging community whether you can run Mediavine and Raptive at the same time and the answer comes back immediately: no, both are exclusive, you pick one. That is broadly correct as a description of the contracts.

It is not what the public record shows.

The sites

These are live examples, strongest first. Each page shows what evidence exists for each network and when it was first and last seen:

Four explanations, and how to tell them apart

A dual listing is a fact about paperwork, not proof that two networks are serving ads on one page. There are four realistic causes and they have different fingerprints.

• A migration in progress. The most common. A publisher moves from one network to the other; the old network’s seller file keeps the entry for weeks or months. Fingerprint: one side confirmed by the site’s own files, the other side claim-only.
• A stale listing nobody cleaned up. The same as above but permanent — the publisher left long ago and the seller file was never pruned. Fingerprint: one side shows no trace at all on a network whose members almost always carry the line.
• Separate properties under one roof. A publisher with several sites can hold different networks for different domains, and shared infrastructure or a shared ads.txt can make one domain appear to carry both.
• A genuine split arrangement. Rare but real: subdomains, a video partner alongside a display partner, or a negotiated exception. Fingerprint: both sides confirmed by the site’s own records, sustained across re-crawls.

Which explanation dominates

The confirmation rates tell you where to look. Across our whole index, 7,853 of 8,638 Mediavine relationships are confirmed by the publisher’s own files, and 564 are listings where the site now shows no trace of the network. For Raptive it is 6,663 of 6,979 confirmed, with 146 showing no trace.

Both networks run unusually clean seller files by industry standards — which is why a dual listing here is more interesting than it would be on a network where half the roster is unverifiable. Most of these 133 sites are caught mid-move; a minority are something else.

What to do with this if you are a publisher

If you are switching networks, check your old network’s sellers.json a month after you leave. A stale entry does not cost you money directly, but it does mean any tool that reads only that file will keep reporting you as their publisher — including tools your next network’s competitors use.

And if you are researching a site — for a partnership, an acquisition, or competitive work — treat a dual listing as a question rather than an answer. The evidence labels on each site’s page tell you which side is real; the method page explains exactly what each label requires.

The two networks’ full portfolios sit side by side on the Mediavine vs Raptive comparison.

How long a stale listing survives

There is no mechanism that removes a publisher from a network’s sellers.json when the relationship ends. The network regenerates the file on its own schedule, from its own records, and a departed publisher disappears when somebody’s process notices — which may be the next regeneration or may be considerably later.

This is why we treat absence carefully in the other direction too. For most networks, a site not carrying the ads.txt line proves nothing: managed networks that resell through exchanges never appear under their own name in a publisher’s file. The exception is the handful of networks where presence is near-universal among live members — and both networks in this article are in that group, which is what makes the “no longer detected” label meaningful for them specifically.

Why this matters beyond curiosity

Anyone building a picture of the ad-tech market from sellers.json alone — analysts, competitors, tools that advertise network detection — inherits every stale entry in every file. Publisher counts assembled that way are systematically overstated, and the overstatement is largest for networks that prune least.

It also affects publishers directly. If you left a network and remain in its file, you are still being counted as theirs in every market analysis, and any partner researching you will see a relationship you ended. Checking a month after you leave costs nothing.

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.