What No One Is Telling You About Ezoic | Skipblast

What No One Is Telling You About Ezoic

If you’re like me, then you’ve signed up for the mailing list of several SEO bloggers and you listen to podcasts on SEO, etc. Also like me, you’ll probably noticed the trend of everyone and their brother trying to get you to sign up for Ezoic.

You truly cannot escape it.

I’ve been watching this recent trend with some humor as Ezoic first came onto my radar well over a year ago….when no gurus were trying to convince you to sign up for it. I assume Ezoic did some sort of influencer campaign for all these gurus to be so sweet on them.

And I’ve been using Ezoic on one of my sites before all the gurus jumped on the bandwagon. So, I want to give you my honest opinion on it and share my experience.

This post contains some affiliate links to products that I use. If you click through and make a purchase, I’ll earn a commission, at no additional cost to you. Read my full disclosure here.

What Is Ezoic & Why You Might Want To Sign Up

If you’re not familiar with it yet, Ezoic is just an ad platform that lets you arrange and split test ads from online advertisers on your site.

I think they’re probably gaining some popularity because their requirements are not as strict as Mediavine and AdThrive.

Ezoic requirements:
  • Google AdSense approved site
  • 10,000 monthly sessions to the site in Google Analytics

Learn more about Ezoic here.

When they first contacted me back in 2015 via one of my niche sites, it was because they noticed that I was running AdSense ads on my site.

The ad rep told me that they could significantly boost my ad income. I was a bit skeptical at the time, especially since when I did a search for reviews there weren’t many people singing their praises (like there is now).

So, I totally blew them off.

Fast forward to 2017 and they contacted me again, via a different site of mine, and I exchanged some emails and ultimately declined to use their service. The rep gave me serious attitude, and I almost didn’t respond when a different rep contacted me in 2018 (via yet a different site of mine).

But I did respond because the traffic on this particular site of mine was at 300K+ visits per month and I’d been declined by Mediavine. Also, because my AdSense income for this amount of traffic was just tragic.

AdSenseJuly
my last full month of AdSense ads

I’d been working super hard on growing the traffic to get into Mediavine or AdThrive, so when I got rejected by the first one I just assumed the second result would be a waste of time as well.

Enter Ezoic.

When you sign up for Ezoic, it takes a bit of time for their system to optimize the ads on your site. So, the income fluctuates a bit from day to day before it finally settles into a decent EPMV (that’s their version of RPM).

For me, I was able to see a noticeable improvement in ad income pretty much immediately for my site.

And this was despite the fact that I slipped a spot for my top keyword, so my traffic dipped a teensy bit.

My first month at Ezoic wasn’t even for the full month. My ads went live about 10 days into the month, and the results blew AdSense out of the water.

ezoicaugust
20 days of traffic and Ezoic earnings

The percentage income increase that I’ve seen since using Ezoic on my site has been pretty consistent.

Even when my site got hit by one of the algo updates…and then another….and finally the most recent one….to where my traffic is now only around 40K per month…my ad income is STILL higher than when I was getting 300K+ monthly with AdSense ads.

Potential Pitfalls & Things I Don’t Like About Ezoic

Obviously when you put any ads on your site, it slows them down. And Ezoic is no different.

They say that your site speed will be better if you use their DNS integration instead of their WordPress plugin.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want my site linked to any service at the DNS level.

tumblr inline mn4j87lQF71qz4rgp

So, yeah, the shit is slow. My most popular post on my Ezoic site is image heavy, so without any speed optimization that sucker was taking over 25 seconds to load with Ezoic ads enabled.

What’s weird is that it didn’t start with a jump to 25 seconds…it was more of a slow creep to that time over a few months. No idea why because nothing else changed.

On a side note here, my site experienced a significant drop in traffic/rankings after a few months using Ezoic – complete with warnings in Google Search Console about slow site speed. The site had been holding steady for more than a year, so I kinda wonder if Ezoic was the cause of that…since there were no updates at the time. Maybe, maybe not – who’s to know for sure!

Needless to say, I’ve since invested in WP Rocket + Stackpath CDN to control my site speed issues.

But wait! Ezoic is all set to ride in on a white horse like your fucking knight in shining armor!

A knight there to slay those page speed issues…or something sorta like that, maybe?

The Speed Money Grab

They have a new speed optimization plugin you can find in your Ezoic apps dashboard as of December 2019. No, silly, it’s not the same as the one you’ve been using for months now.

It’s different!

It’s got new features!

I mean, it looks the same, except now there’s note that you have to pay for new features.

But it’s different!

paid speed accelerator ezoic

Let that sink in — You have to pay to use it now.

What the actual fuck? This is some some pay to play bullshit* (*don’t worry, there’s more about this pay to play stuff later).

rs 500x215 160518183217 gilmoregirls2

I know the Ezoic social media team are everywhere online, so before I get a comment here, yes, I know that you can still use the old features at no charge and it’s only the “new features” that have a subscription fee.

Though, I have to wonder if that’s really true for new users signing up with Ezoic. Cause the pricing page makes it look like you have to pay for the site speed accelerator. (and what even are the new features?)

Ezoic pricing page Jan 2020
Ezoic pricing page Jan 2020

I only see the site speed accelerator listed by itself…not as a core feature or ad-supported feature. So, not sure if new people are required to pay for the features that used to be free (and still are for me) or not.

You’ll notice in that image that it says that the cost of the site speed accelerator is based on traffic. I’ll show you the prices that I see in my dashboard.

Ezoic speed accelerator prices
Ezoic speed accelerator prices

You’ll notice that my rates show that a 30% “Premium” discount is applied. We’ll get to what this “Premium” stuff is all about in a moment.

Anyways, as you can see the prices aren’t all that cheap. In fact, if you wanted to pay for a setup like I currently use for page speed optimization, you’re looking at:

  • $49/year for a one-site license for WP Rocket
  • $10/month for Stackpath CDN
I also tested Nitropack in December and compared it to my WP Rocket + Stackpath combo. I ended up getting a refund on Nitropack. While it did improve my page speed times, it did so by making the initial above the fold stuff look all funky for the initial few load seconds….and the ads loaded way after everything else compared to my current setup.

I don’t ever really see myself paying for the speed accelerator new features from Ezoic. My current setup is working just fine.

Ads Look A Bit Spammy Sometimes

Sometimes you land on a webpage and the ads that are on it are truly enough to make you leave the site. At least I experience that sometimes.

Maybe you don’t.

Or maybe you’d go on a tech site (mine) and see the ad below and bolt.

gross ad earwax

Yup, I just took that screenshot on my site – from an incognito window, so no, I’ve haven’t been looking up earwax.

That same page has a few other ads showing that look a bit junky. Here’s a collage of the spammiest ones I saw today (still from an incognito window).

dumb ezoic ads

That being said, not all of the ads look spammy. Otherwise, I wouldn’t still be using Ezoic on my site.

In fact, when I look at the same page on my site when I’m not in an incognito window, all of the ads are relevant to me and for things like Semrush, Hulu, Thalys trains and a Pinterest course.

Since most of my traffic to the site comes from organic search first-time visitors, I have no idea how many of them are seeing the spammy ads versus things that are relevant to them.

Anyways, I have a site that meets the qualifications for Ezoic but hasn’t yet reached the requirements for Mediavine. I really care about the quality of this particular site, so I’m not using Ezoic on it purely because of the sometimes spammy ads.

The Premium Ads Money Grab

This is probably my biggest gripe about Ezoic. A couple of months ago, I got an email from my account manager at Ezoic letting me know that I’m invited to join a special invite-only program.

Ezoic Premium Program Invitation
click to enlarge photo

Let’s take a moment to applaud them for those psychology tactics that they’re employing here.

Scarcity marketing, making you feel like part of an exclusive group – really rolling out the red carpet for psychological manipulation here.

Back on topic …

A few days later, I got another email reminding me how limited this program is and how limited the window is for me to eagerly sign up.

ezoicpremium

At least they give you a 14-day free trial, though, right?

So, here’s the thing with Ezoic Premium. You have to pay for access to the higher paying ads. That’s fucked, right?

How much do you have to pay? That seems to depend on your traffic. You do get told up front how much it will cost you – because there are three levels to Ezoic premium and you have to pick a level.

I wish I’d thought to take a screenshot of it, but alas here we are and all I can I find mentioning the different levels is the conversation below from Reddit:

redditezoicpreimum

Here’s what I can tell you about my experience with Ezoic premium. I’ve been part of it for just over two months now, including the two-week trial period.

My monthly cost is $58 for the plan that I selected. I have to pay that via credit card on the same date each month before the ads run for the next 30 days. They don’t let you pay for it from the earnings you have accrued, which is lame.

So, basically you pay in advance for the privilege of getting higher paying ads on your site.

M1VzKWS

Oh, and if you opt for the yearly payment plan, then you get a 20% discount. But, if you want to break the commitment before your year is up, there may be a penalty fee and stuff…or so the story goes.

For the first month that I paid for premium, I actually did okay. I paid $58 to profit an additional $17.01.

ezoic premium month 1

When that second payment hit my credit card, I still wasn’t happy with the fact that I was paying for access to the higher paying ads.

And does that mean that when you’re not paying that Ezoic is just pocketing more money? I just don’t know, but this just doesn’t feel right, y’know.

And yeah, I get that they are providing a service that isn’t free…but all this money grab nonsense is tiring.

My second full month on Ezoic premium doesn’t end for another week. Based on what I’m seeing right now when I calculate my daily RPM, my premium earnings will just be around $61.

Giving me a profit of $2.00.

But wait…if I wasn’t in the premium program those ad spots would still be filled with regular ads…. so I’m either breaking even or, more realistically, experiencing a profit loss this month.

Obviously, we’re now in Q1 when ad revenue is at its lowest of the year, so some drop is expected.

But here’s where I’m concerned….

What if my site traffic drops to the point where the monthly premium fee costs me more than the premium ads bring in?

My site already has seem some rollercoaster ups and downs with the core algo update that has been rolling out this week.

Supposedly my fee will adjust itself. But I assume that means I won’t get a credit for the month and that it will just change going forward….assuming it works as designed, but reviews I’ve seen leads me to not expect that.

giphy

As I mentioned earlier, it’s hard to find out what other people really think about this sort of thing.

Though the post wasn’t live when I was doing my initial research for myself, the FatStacks blog now has a review of the premium ads. He seems mostly positive on it, but you should read it if you’re considering going premium.

There are some interesting user comments on the other Ezoic review on FatStacks that I think are worth highlighting here.

ezoicreview1
click here to read the rest of this review at FatStacks
ezoic premium review
click here to read full comment at FatStacks

As I mentioned, I’m only a week away from completing my second month in Ezoic premium, so the verdict on it is still out from me.

But I can tell you that I don’t like having to pay to play, so to speak, to have access to the premium advertisers.

My Takeaway

It took me a really, really long time to decide to sign up with Ezoic for one of my sites. As I mentioned earlier, they first contacted me back in 2015 and I didn’t sign up with them until 2019.

Part of the reason that it took me so long to test them out is because as an affiliate marketer, I could tell that all of the reviews that I was reading about the service were bullshit. And no wonder, their affiliate program gives you a percentage of LIFETIME earnings of the people who sign up under you.

So, hey, if you wanna sign up with Ezoic –> here’s my affiliate link.

So, a few thoughts on that real quick –

  • this is why all the gurus are promoting Ezoic so hard
  • I’d prefer higher ad revenue without paying for it instead of an affiliate program

Anyways, it seems that I’m not the only person who’s noticed how difficult it is to find even a slightly critical review of Ezoic. The screenshot below is from Reddit

ezoic review reddit

In all fairness, I should note that Anne at yeys.com uses Ezoic on her sites and has no complaints. I even asked her why she wasn’t using Mediavine for her higher traffic sites.

All things considered, there is really only one thing that matters in the end when it comes to Ezoic.

giphy

Did Ezoic increase my ad revenue? Yes, yes it did.

And here’s the thing, even with my site loosing a fuckton of traffic since signing up with them, I’m still making more with Ezoic right now than I was when my site was seeing 200K+ visits per month with AdSense.

In the Ezoic vs AdSense war, Ezoic is clearly the winner.

At this point, there’s no reason for me to leave Ezoic until their ads earn me less than AdSense did….unless I can qualify for Mediavine (but I already told you they rejected me once).

So, even though the money grabs make my blood boil, it’s all about that money so I’m still using them…unless this review/rant burns that bridge.

If you’re considering adding Ezoic to your site, then I hope my honest review here of my experience with them helps you decide if they’re right for you. And if you have used Ezoic, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

And since I’m really just an affiliate marketer with no shame, here’s my affiliate link.

giphy

41 thoughts on “What No One Is Telling You About Ezoic”

  1. Cheers Shawna

    I have Ezoic for a couple of months on 3 of my sites. I share your opinions entirely.

    This move with the site speed I felt like a jerk move. I prefer to pay a monthly subscription to use all their features. Actually it is exactly that, a monthly subscription with a wrong naming and structure. They should work more on those plans.

    On Reddit is full of complains from people using Ezoic saying that it slowed their side speed. I know that all the other ads is slowing the website but still.

    I started a new website in January and I don’t plan to install Ezoic on it. I will wait for Mediavine or maybe AdThrive.

    PS: I will also post this on https://www.reddit.com/r/NicheWebsites

    Reply
    • Hey George,

      Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts. I didn’t know about that subreddit and it didn’t surface when I was doing my research for this post. Some interesting stuff on shared on Ezoic in one of the older posts there!

      And thanks for the Reddit share!

      Shawna

      Reply
  2. Nicely done!
    Imo not everyone cares about sitespeed.
    Lets say you have a site that gives 100$ a month from adsense and you can get approved for mediavine,adthrive and other better networks but ezoic approves you.
    Hey you now making 500$ month pretty much passively.
    Its plus side.
    Who gives a shit about sitespeed unless you are note extremely slow. Trust me alot less people care about user experience than making money.

    Anyway i love teh call out to other influencers about ezoic. I feel niche pursuits guy had made the niche site just so he could advertise all those services and his ney venture.

    thing is they;re the only option who take sites with 10k views. Other take atleast 25k to 50k minimum.

    Reply
    • Exactly! Ezoic having the lowest traffic requirements is something that I saw a lot of people talking about on Reddit and other forums – more than one person mentioned that Ezoic seems to accept everyone and that they’ve never heard of a site being denied by Ezoic. Meanwhile, tons of people get denied by Mediavine and AdThrive.

      And yeah, my site is making more with Ezoic than without it. I do love that fact cause extra money for no extra work is awesome, but I’m still trying to work on my site so that it qualifies for one of the better networks!

      Reply
      • This is usually what people do
        When they hit 10k views
        they put ezoic on sites
        when they hit 25k views
        they replace it with media vine
        when they hit 100 k views
        they go for adthrive.

        Reply
  3. Thanks for the mention here, Shawna.
    This is a really good post! I haven’t made up my mind yet re the money grabs, to be honest.

    I don’t buy the speed accelerator myself because I optimize speed in-house (it’s much cheaper than their solution). I talked to my rep about this and their stance is that it’s simply a paid service that they offer web publishers, regardless of whether they are even using Ezoic for ads. Some people struggle with speed issues, so Ezoic developed a speed accelerator which basically does what web publishers should be doing in-house anyway.
    I use a good host and a great server admin, and my sites are super fast without Ezoic on them, so no need for the accelerator.

    They let me test it and it did zilch to improve my speed, which is actually a good sign for me. It means that they’re not somehow slowing down sites with their ads on purpose to sell you the accelerator. I have seen people complain along the lines of “you’re slowing down my site and then charging me to fix your slow ads issues”, but in my experience, that’s not the case. The ads are as fast as they can get them to be (which isn’t very fast) – the accelerator deals with other site stuff. It could be a solution for people who don’t know how to optimize their site, I guess. IMHO, it’s too expensive for that.

    As for premium, they offered that to me years ago and I said no, but recently my rep convinced me to give it a go. The bottom line is that I make more money that way but yeah, I totally agree that it doesn’t look good. Then again, it’s their business and their business model, and I can respect that. They’re probably well aware of the fact that people complain about it and it doesn’t look good, but hey, maybe that’s still a better solution for them.

    So, it’s not that I have no complaints about Ezoic. I do. But I also have complaints about every affiliate program that I’m with 😉 I have yet to find perfection. Right now, Ezoic is the best solution I could find. And it does help that I have a good contact there who can help me out when things don’t work out with my direct reps. IMHO, communication is key and I know that Ezoic doesn’t work well for many publishers on that front – but it does for me.

    (And no Adthrive for me, apparently. No idea why. I did try – they rejected my beautiful 100% whitehat, informational website without even saying why and refused any further discussion on the matter. So, in my book, they suck compared to Ezoic where I have someone I can actually talk to).

    Reply
    • Ah, see my rep isn’t great about responding to my emails. So, maybe I’d be less salty about it if the rep was better!

      I’m still on the fence about keeping premium. I’ve giving it another month, but right now I’m leaning towards cancelling it. The “extra” it’s making just isn’t extra enough for me.

      Reply
      • Shawna, with the amount of traffic you were having monthly, the adsense revenue you were making in a month is what you should be doing in a day or two. It’s either that your ad placement was not optimized or your traffic is coming from the wrong country.
        Mediavine and AdThrive would refuse your website either for poor, slow design or because of your source of traffic. They look for mainly USA, Canada and UK traffic.

        Reply
    • “the accelerator deals with other site stuff. It could be a solution for people who don’t know how to optimize their site, I guess. IMHO, it’s too expensive for that.”

      Not true. I’ve tested Site Accelerator ONLY AD Delay enabled and the other options disabled because those are already handled by WP-Rocket. Guess what. Mobile Google Pagespeed Insight 85+.

      So they should deliver ezoic optimized code for ADs in the first place.

      Reply
  4. Hi Shawna! Clicked over here from Reddit. Great rundown on Ezoic! Definitely one of the most honest reviews I’ve seen on it. Question: How does Ezoic compare with Monumetric?

    Thanks again!

    Reply
    • Hi David,

      Thanks for the kind words! Unfortunately I cannot compare Ezoic to Monumetric because I’ve never used them. I feel like the FatStacks blog is the only place I’ve ever seen them reviewed.

      Reply
  5. Hey Shawn,

    Sarah here from Ezoic’s marketing team, (as you predicted!) but I’m not here to intrude on your review, instead it sounds like we have done a poor job in handling communication with you which is by no means the integrity we instill in our team here. I’d like to apologize for that reason and ask if you would be open to allowing us to mend that communicative relationship and assure that you are fully satisfied with Ezoic products- if you’re not, there are many efforts we will take to guarantee you’re getting more than what you need out of our platform.

    I think Ann hit the nail on the head with a lot of the things she said, The Site Speed Accelerator was created sites on the internet beyond those that monetize with ads. Also, if sites use other ad partners they can still access the Site Speed Accelerator because we understand that any site with ads, despite which platform you use, along with any third-party script on a page or plugin feature you want to use has the ability to slow down your site. Regardless- thank you for continuing to use Ezoic although it seems we haven’t served your needs you to the best of our abilities quite yet, I’ll be working to make sure that changes.

    Reply
    • haha, I knew I’d see one of you 🙂 You know, honestly, at the end of the day my need is making more ad income than AdSense offers and that need is met. But I still think that some of Ezoic’s practices, like requiring payment for higher paying ads, is less than awesome. And I get that increasing revenue though things like premium ads and the speed accelerator is part of the Ezoic business model, but it doesn’t really do much in the way of creating evangelists for a brand. That being said, I haven’t used the other premium ad networks, so it’s possible my opinion will change once I have something else to compare it to to.

      Reply
    • Hi Sarah,

      Is it possible to change my Ezoic account manager?

      I’m experiencing poor communication with the current manager and its affecting my revenue.

      I need someone helpful, who is willing to assist me

      Reply
  6. Thank you for this in-depth post. I was considering Ezoic, but I didn’t have a good feeling about them. I mean, why would I have to change my DNS? Why would I need to pay THEM to show higher paying ads? Why would I need to pay for better site speed? I mean, red flags just keep popping up. Plus, the ads are really spammy. Most people recommend Ezoic **just** because they have a high paying affiliate program (just like HostGator, which sucks beyond words).

    Reply
  7. I use generatepress and I reduced the number of plugins to 5 (GP Premium, WP Rocket, Ads.txt, All in one WP security and Slim SEO)

    I already cleaned the database, pictures are optimized and everything but my GTMetrix is more 13 seconds with Ezoic.

    My site without ads is between 1 to 2 seconds.

    Making more money with Ezoic but totally sad about my site speed.

    Thanks for your honest review

    Reply
  8. Nice article.
    But you got the premium calculation wrong.
    Premium earning you are seeing is only the difference in earnings if you have not gone with premium and displayed regular ads.
    Here is how they are implementing it. If regular ad bid is 1$ and Premium is 50$ eCPM. Then total eCPM is reported as Regular 1$ and Premium 40$ so the regular ad CPM gets deducted from the premium amount earnings.
    So you don’t have to wonder how much you would have earned if you didn’t go premium.
    Also also notice that paying upfront is a major no no. Hope ezoic improves that.

    Reply
  9. Hi, congrats for the great article!
    I’ve been blogging for a few years now as a weekend activity, and making a few bucks a month out of a mere 15K monthly visits. I moved from AdSense to Ezoic and I was happy for that decision because, as you stated clearly, it increased ad revenue.
    Everything was going fine until I gave in to the temptation to use their free WP hosting service, and save a few hosting bucks a month. Not a smart move. That free hosting service lacks many important features even the cheapest WP hosting services offer. No cPanel, no e-mail, no staging site, no database tools, and the list goes on. Also, the migration was kind of a nightmare.
    Therefore, I’m pretty ok with everything Ezoic offers, except for that free hosting service.

    Reply
    • Thanks for reporting that. I was tempted to move one of my websites there but it sounds pretty bad upon your experience.
      How fast is you website since you moved it there?

      I also got invited to their premium program but I really don’t like the fact there is no compensation on the fee in case you traffic drops. It can end up badly in case of a bad Google update. And for people who pay their taxes on their sales and can’t deduct expenses, this system make your extra profits destroyed by extra taxes.

      Reply
  10. I am using since August with Ezoic SSA
    August: $114
    September: $210
    October: $275
    November: $341
    So let me make the points first.

    1- I am not using any optimizing plugin (Autoptimize, Wprocket, Smush it etc.)
    2- I disabled Varnish from cloudways server
    3- I am using Ezoic SSA (which claims you will get a good score with us)
    4- I tried everything with the support team (Images, Videos) to explain things to improve my site which went down from 2 seconds to 20-30seconds.
    5- I followed all the steps mentioned by EZOIC Blogs.
    6- The support team is taking a long time to response (3-4 days). Worst support ever.
    7- The support team is asking for my internet speed (the funniest thing happened today) and saying because of that your site speed is slow.
    8- They are not considering Google Pagespeed Insights.
    9- If I post the SS of the support team, Ezoic will feel let’s fire them and hire some good people. (Please don’t claim we are having a world class support team)
    10- I am still with EZOIC, Why? Because of two things,

    — First I believe they will solve the problem (but don’t know when maybe in the next 6 months).

    — Second they killed my site (before December updates). I went from 2k visitors to 1k now and after December update it’s increasing. (At least google understand lol) and because of this, no one (platform like Mediavine etc.) is accepting my request.

    So all these things is what I am getting with Eoic. Ezoic Support Team created one SSA version and nothing worked my site speed is super slow.

    Well, this is a polite way to express my frustration with Ezoic. Well, patience is the key to get things done, then 10 days is my patience which I cannot exceed to months.

    PS: 13 DAYS IS MY PATEINCE

    If you want to earn good then do choose ezoic, and if you want to kill your website then go with ezoic.

    Also, we know next google update will be about the site speed.

    See the full thread with images and proof here: https://m.facebook.com/groups/EzoicPublishers/permalink/2776364425970877/

    Reply
    • Hey Gaurav,

      Looks like you’re earning some good monies at least, but I hear ya on the slow site speed. I recently discovered that changing from the Ezoic plugin for my integration to using their Cloudflare DNS resulted in faster load times on my site. (I’m also on Cloudways) So, I don’t know if that might work for you.

      If you want, I can reach out to my contact there and see if I can you some help.

      Reply
  11. I currently use Ezoic ads and have the 5 Star Premium. While I get frustrated with a few things they do, it’s clearly the best option for sites that are under 100k visits per month. The premium model is definitely a head-scratcher (so annoying)…

    In my case, I pay $440, for 5 Star premium, to make about $690 gross ($250 profit). I have an upgrade to the Diamond level available but am unsure about moving up at this point. According to their stats, I should pay $1100 to make $1680+ ($580 profit). It makes sense because my profit should go up each month as long as traffic stays the same or goes up, which isn’t guaranteed. It’s frustrating to have to pay the large chunk of change upfront though… It would be nice if they just did this for everyone’s accounts.

    The other “bonus” of moving to the Diamond level would be 100% off the Site Speed Accelerator, which I currently don’t use. If it works as well, or better, than WP Rocket (which I use) it would save me the $200 or whatever the price is for unlimited sites a year over there. I think I’ll wait to upgrade until my traffic is well above the minimum threshold for the Diamond…

    I did also try the Site Speed Accelerator when it first came out as a trial. It definitely made my sites show as super fast on the Google Pagespeed Insights, but in real life, I’m not convinced that my site was much faster… Site speed is a bit confusing to me as a site can show as blazing fast on one checker, while not good on another. I’ve used Pagespeed Insights, Pingdom, GT Metrix and they all show way different results.

    Also, I applied for Mediavine on multiple sites at different times when I more than met their traffic thresholds and was declined each time. (3 or 4 times I think) They take about a month to get back to you after applying and they offer zero detail about why your sites were declined. For this reason, I’ll never apply for them again. When I’m at the levels for AdThrive, I think I’ll apply there.

    Soon, I’ll be documenting my niche site journey and I hope to make some tutorials and reviews of the different parts of Ezoic that I like and dislike. I absolutely agree with Shawna that there is a lack of real information, and also a lack of onboarding information about the ins and outs of using Ezoic to its full potential. I’ve had to learn as I go…

    Reply
    • Hey Ryan,

      I agree that they are your best option at the lower traffic levels. And I’ve recently been testing the Site Speed accelerator again and it seems that the fast loading time comes from using the Ezoic Cloudflare DNS integration with Site Speed accelerator. I was surprised to see that it was faster than WP Rocket + Imagify. (My hosting is Cloudways).

      I think it’s so odd that Mediavine never really tells you why they don’t want your site. I’ve seen some people mention that not having at least 75% of traffic in US, UK, or Canada is one of the reasons they decline. As well as if most of your traffic hits one post.

      Best of luck with AdThrive!

      Reply
  12. Hi Shawna,

    I’m using Ezoic and my website is slower. I’m on Cloudways just like you are but you claim your website is faster with Ezoic.

    Ezoic support is not helpful and I’m hoping you can help me instead.

    These are my current settings:

    1. I have disabled and uninstalled all cache plugins.
    2. I integrated with Ezoic leap via nameservers.
    3. Varnish from Cloudways is still turned on (Should I turn it off?)
    4. My theme is Generatepress + premium

    Reply
    • I’ve got the exact same setup. Though I have been considering trying one of the DO Premium servers cause I’ve heard you get a speed boost. I suggest going through pagespeed insights and gtmetrix to see what’s slowing down the and seeing what you can eliminate. One of my sites was delayed by the tablepress plugin, so I had to remove that plugin and get use html tables instead.

      Reply
  13. Hey Shawna, thanks for this clear opinion about Ezoic and what we don’t know about them.

    Well, I just joined them and am still looking forwards to reaching Mediavine threshold, so I can switch over to them as soon as possible.

    Reply
  14. I’ve read this and all of your other Ezoic guides and YES. I used your affiliate link.

    But I’m wondering. I use GP and you do too. And I know you use LEAP, and I know you don’t use featured images at the top of posts.

    Are there any minor or major speedhacks to use? I am getting so frustrated. You know that leaderboard LEAP has? People with the same setup as me, Ocean droplet with GP are getting 100 scores on mobile (at least on the leaderboard) and I just don’t know how to replicate their scores.

    I’m getting 45-55 on mobile and although I am kinda fine with it. I would love something like 70+.

    Ezoic says “Twenty TwentyOne is the fastest theme for Ezoic”… Bullshit. I tried it and it was no faster than GP whatsoever, even though their technology thingy claims GP is slow.

    I even replaced Youtube embeds with preview images, and boy it was a mistake. I think having full embeds is a ranking factor. Damn, I tried everything.

    Please, if you got any secrets, I wanna know. I’ve tried everything for a week and kind of got the point of reversing my optimizations because nothing does much anyways. Setup is 100/100 with LEAP without ads, and then with ads it’s 45/90.

    Also, with the payment plan do you choose 10% of profits or the ad at the bottom. Is the default option for this kinda scammy?

    Reply
    • Hey Oscar, I wish I had some secret that I could share on this but I don’t. I eventually gave up trying to get things in the green since these ads are the slowest on the planet. The good news is that if you end up on Mediavine or AdThrive, their ads load MUCH faster.

      And I’m not paying anything to use Ezoic on my sites and I think the only time you should be paying is if you accept their Premium program. So, you may wanna look into that a bit more.

      Reply
      • Good to know that Slow is normal so I don’t have to blame myself.
        Like you say, slowest ads on Earth, what a ride!

        I wont extend this conversation. But I think payment is payment nonetheless. From my understanding, if you do nothing. They keep all the revenue from the sticky footer ad (could be 50% of revenue?) whereas, the other option is paying 10% of your total revenue.

        Also, thanks for your wisdom. Your words got a lot of weight in my eyes.

        Reply
  15. I integrated my site with cloudflare. Only speed was the issue & rest all I think was fine in my case. Leap settings provided by their customer support increased my site speed a litle but not to a very great extent.

    Earnings are increasing slowly & EPMV is getting better slowly. Only the issue I think with me is their customer support who cares more for the sites who are above the level 2 or 3 & not for the beginners. I am at level 1.

    I think the service might get better in the upcoming days.

    I was also struggling for speed in the beginning, but on continuously complaining I was explained by their customer support that FCP( First Contentful Paint) is the main factor which must be given importance. I checked my FCP & it was 1.5 seconds. I went through many articles & found that google also pays importance to the FCP as this decreases the bounce rate to a great extent & boost your rankings. Google also recommends to place all the javascripts in the footer to impove FCP. Ezoic especially pays attention to the FCP.

    Hope this might help someone.

    Anyways thanks for the great article Shawna Newman.

    Reply
  16. I switched to Ezoic about four years ago, and this company ended up effing me over. The first three and a half years were great, but while I was enjoying $16 EPMV, they crammed my site with so many ads, it couldn’t perform well.

    When I started with Ezoic, I had around 200K page views per month. After three years of continual declines due to poor page speed performance, I get about 25k page views per month. That’s the level of traffic my site received about 8 years ago. Everything I built fell apart with Ezoic.

    The worst thing about Ezoic is that they teamed up with a more successful publisher to push me to sell my site to him. I received a few emails from him. Gee, how did he get my email address? It’s not on my site. Only Ezoic has it. After I didn’t answer his emails asking me to sell my site to him, I saw Ezoic basically sabotage my site with extremely poor hosting.

    It was partly my fault. I moved my site to Ezoic. HUGE MISTAKE!!! They were a great host for 2 years. Then, shortly after a top Ezoic publisher tried to buy my site, their hosting started to suck big time.

    The first thing that happened was a “bug” in their plugin. They deleted my .htaccess file, which resulted in many problems, including PHP code at the top of every page and all sorts of low-level access and caching problems. They claim it was a plugin bug, but when I searched for the PHP code at the top of my page, only one other site in the world had it. Probably another site they wanted to sell to another Ezoic member.

    My site never recovered. I ended up setting Max Ads Per Page down to 1-4 ads. I took all Ezoic ads off of my top 15 pages, replacing them with static Amazon Affiliate ads I made myself. I was getting 100/100 on Google’s page speed tests, but in real world tests, my site was slow AF. That’s because Ezoic sabotaged it so I would just sell it to another publisher, who appears to have left the platform recently.

    You’ve been warned. If you use Ezoic, don’t host with them. They pretend to be on your side, but if some top publisher wants to buy your site, they’ll sabotage it so you’ll be more inclined to sell. If this happens to you, move your site off Ezoic and stop hosting their ads. They’re like a python trying to strangle you.

    I usually make a few grand over Christmas. This year? $50. I hate Ezoic with a passion. They’re total sleazebags. Don’t fall for it. For how much I made with them over the years, I lost it all over Christmas. If I realized what was happening earlier in October and moved then, I would have thrived.

    The sick thing is, every time I got my site performing well, they made changes to their services to slow me down even more. Hosting any WordPress site with high performance is not expensive these days. I moved to a new host, and I’m spending about $20 a month, getting super-fast speeds like never before.

    The publishing game today is all about speed, if you’re a small publisher. When my site was fast, I outranked all of the major publications. After Ezoic sabotaged my site, my articles that ranked 1-2 are now 5-6. That’s a HUGE decline in traffic.

    Speed is so essential. Make sure to check your site’s speed all the time — not just the pure score, but also what real users are experiencing. Ezoic seemed to be throttling a lot of my users on purpose, so I’d resign to selling my site off to their good buddy.

    Unless you’re getting over a million page views per month, Ezoic will treat you like dirt. Don’t F with them.

    Reply
  17. I read through the comments. All of these people are vexxed about page speed on Ezoic. Look at where the people on the leaderboard are hosting! None of them host with Ezoic. Most of them seem to be limiting Ezoic ads or bypassing them on their top pages.

    If you want fast page speeds, you’ll never get them with Ezoic. They load so much javascript into your pages, and, for whatever reason, you can’t cache it or delay it.

    I just set up a new hosting solution, and I get 100/100 on every page, with AdSense ads. All of Google’s javascript can be delayed and managed to achieve perfect page speed scores. Most importantly, the REAL WORLD tests show that my site is remarkably fast — thousands of times faster than on Ezoic. I see my rankings going up every day!

    LEAP is a joke. You turn on all of those settings, and none of them take hold. It’s like the steering wheel on some carnival merry-go-round. You can turn the steering wheel all you want, you’re just going to go in circles.

    I know for a fact that, regardless of what you do, Ezoic will give the best performance to its highest earners. Unless you get over a million page views per month, don’t bother with these guys. LEAP is just a way to make it seem like they care about performance. The only way to get a fast speed on Ezoic is to bypass the service altogether.

    Oh, and the last few days on Ezoic, when I got about 1K pageviews per day, I was earning about 21 cents per day. Absurd. I used to make up to $300 a day! To go from that to 21 cents a day is just pathetic. I don’t know why I waited so long to leave these jerks.

    Ezoic used to be pretty good. In October 2022, they really seemed to lose their mojo. Part of it is the market. I think they had some leadership changes. They went from being a company that I admired and respected to one that I loathe. At one point, I even reckoned that if I ever got a tattoo, it would be an Ezoic design. Oh my! I’m so glad I never did that.

    Reply
  18. One more thing. The last three months on Ezoic, the ads were horrible. I went in private mode/incognito mode. Every page had the “Promo Codes” ad. Every effing page!!! No one clicks on that. So that’s why I made 21 cents a day.

    There’s a big recession in the publishing space right now. With AdSense, I’m getting about $8-10 per M page views (not users or sessions). That’s really good. With Ezoic? 21 cents.

    I look forward to rebuilding my business with AdSense. When it gets back up there, I may look at some elite ad networks. But I will never, ever go back to Ezoic. I don’t care if they guarantee $30 EPMV. Ezoic will slow down your site and you’ll eventually lose everything. It takes a few years, but it will happen! You’ve been warned.

    Reply
  19. Ezoic helped another publisher sabotage my site so he could buy it for next to nothing. This turd was in good with Ezoic and featured in some of their marketing material. I received an email from him that he was interested in purchasing my website, which I ignored.

    A few weeks later, some .php code showed up on my website, on every page. I reached out to customer support for help, and they instructed me not to comment out the code, because their engineers need to track down the problem. After not hearing back, I tracked down the issue to an erroneous modification of .htaccess. When I told customer support, their engineers seemed to arrive at that conclusion at the same time! What a coincidence. They said it was a problem with the plugin, but why did it only affect my site and one other. Ezoic has 10,000+ suckers, uh, I mean, websites, last time I checked.

    The consequence of some crappy .php code at the top of every page led to a massive loss of traffic and revenues. I went from $30-50 per day to less than a dollar. I went from 1000-2000 visitors per day to 600. It basically appeared as a low quality site. Also, they totally dragged performance down as far as they could. I went from perfect CWS for years to the worst possible performance, yet I didn’t change a thing.

    They sabotaged my site so some jerk could buy it. I believe he bribed some “engineers” and the account manager to facilitate the purchase at a steep discount.

    This happened 9 months ago, and my site is still recovering. I still get only 500-600 visitors per day. Before the “error” I had thousands and had decent revenues.

    Ezoic was very good to me for years, but I do believe they’re a sleazy company. I’m not sure how high up this scheme goes. The blogger in question does all sorts of sleazy things. His sites lie about who writes the pages (their writers all have Ph.D.’s) and he claims the work is featured in every prominent website, but a quick search verifies this is false.

    Now it’s time for my revenge. I’m going after every top ranking article and will soon take the #1 spot. I reported him as spam in many ways, pointing out the lies about author’s credentials and the work being cited in every top publication. I’m going to destroy this f**ker.

    Reply
    • whoa, that is a wild story to hear! I now I kinda wonder who this person is Hope you start to see some recovery and crush that dude in the SERPs!

      Reply

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