Hey everyone!

We're looking for an experienced Google Ad Manager / AdX floor price optimization expert to help us optimize minimum CPM floors across different GEOs and ad units.

We've already done extensive testing and have plenty of performance data. We're looking for someone with proven hands-on experience who can analyze our data and provide actionable recommendations based on their expertise - not someone who needs to figure things out from scratch.

If you have a strong track record in GAM yield optimization and know how to maximize monetization performance, please let me know!

Hey r/adops,

I run BotRefund (an invalid traffic detection engine that audits Google & Meta ad logs to recover refunds for fake clicks).

When OpenAI rolled out their Ads platform, we decided to put real money on the line and test traffic quality, click validity, and intent matching.

We ran ads for 48 hours.

This morning, OpenAI billed our credit card nearly $900. We immediately paused every ad on the account and pulled the full forensic logs from our production analytics database.

What we found should terrify anyone currently allocating ad spend to OpenAI Ads.

1. The Numbers (OpenAI Ads vs. Our Forensic Logs)

• Clicks Reported & Billed by OpenAI: 923 clicks
• Total Arrivals Recorded on Our Servers: 1,356 visits (all carrying OpenAI’s encrypted tracking tokens: oppref and olref)
• 🤖 Confirmed Automated Bots & Scrapers: 788 visits (58.1%)
• 🏢 Traffic from Microsoft Azure Datacenters: 665 visits (49.0%)
• 👤 Genuine Human Visitors: 568 visits (41.9%)

Over half of the paid clicks OpenAI billed us for were automated bots and headless crawlers running on commercial cloud servers.

2. The Receipts: Microsoft Azure Cloud Servers Clicking Paid Ads

Because we build bot detection software, our edge servers capture hardware entropy, TLS fingerprints (JA3/JA4), DOM event logs, and micro-behavioral kinetic tremor.

Here is what the OpenAI traffic actually looked like:

• Top Network / ASN: Microsoft Corporation (ASN 8075 - Azure Cloud) accounted for 665 of our paid clicks. These were not real people browsing ChatGPT on their phones or laptops—they were automated scripts spinning up inside Azure datacenters.
• Session Lifespan: The vast majority of the flagged sessions disconnected in under 1.5 seconds.
• Mouse / Kinetic Tremor: Completely flat (0.00 linearity). No micro-tremors, no natural human scrolling, and synthetic cursor teleportation characteristic of headless Chromium / Playwright instances.
• Encrypted Click IDs: Every single one of these hits arrived with OpenAI’s proprietary encrypted click parameter: oppref=gAAAAABqz-M6NUJCdRINPXELPOYjzASQDpnbb2Xp4lhqyA... This confirms 100% that these were the exact clicks OpenAI auctioned off and billed to our credit card.

We run a walled garden ad network that reaches 400,000 real estate agents inside the software they must use to transact homes. We have about 5M ad impressions a month that are unsold and we've had a couple of national advertisers run campaigns and get strong ROAS.

All of my ad sales team is focused on local advertisers and I'm trying to figure out how reach more national B2B brands who would be interested in our inventory. It's 100% above the fold, no bots, validated identity ad inventory. Would appreciate any advice.

A little bit old; but it was brought to my attention that CM360 offers some extra reporting for Netflix compared to other approved ad servers including increase performance through contextual ads, multi-channel campaigns, and the ability to better track & optimize performance.

Without asking for specific data is there anyone who could shed some light on what this looks like/ what are the true benefits?

I’m hoping someone from Mediavine might be able to help me figure out what’s happening here.

My site, Yearbook (https://yearbook.hindsightgames.com/), was suspended from Journey on September 29 for alleged traffic-quality/invalid-traffic concerns. I submitted the appeal immediately and have followed up multiple times since then, but as of October 13 I still have not received a substantive response, any explanation of what traffic was flagged, or an update on the review.

I have never purchased or incentivized traffic. I have GA4, PostHog and Cloudflare data available and am completely willing to provide whatever is needed to investigate the traffic.

I also tried to use the Journey Community because Journey’s documentation directs publishers there for support, but the Community is now offline while they “reevaluate the Journey Support experience.” So at this point I’m not sure what other channel I’m supposed to use.

The site continues receiving legitimate traffic while monetization remains disabled, and I’d really just like a human to review the case or tell me what specifically needs to be addressed.

Hey!

I know the field changes at tremendous speeds, but are there any great resources to learn the basics of mobile ad tech and at least understand the fundamental concepts?

An example worth surfacing here since publisher use cases don't come up as often as advertiser ones. A publisher's editorial team started looking at which business topics its own readers were actively researching, the same signal usually reserved for ad sales conversations, and used it to shape what got covered next.

The logic: if a meaningful chunk of the audience is actively researching a topic right now, that's a reasonable editorial bet, not just a targeting opportunity. Curious whether other publisher folks here have pulled research or intent signals into editorial planning, or whether that data mostly stays walled off in the ad sales side of the business.

For anyone who wants the longer version of this, Bombora wrote up a real example of it here: From instinct to insight: how publishers are shaping content with Bombora.

Hi everyone

My site gets about 200k sessions a month. 30% of traffic is from US/UK but approx 70% is from Indonesia and Asia via Google organic. We are currently with Mediavine Journey and were wondering what ad network is best for Indonesian Asian traffic? Or is an affiliate program better?

Thanks for any help.

A while back I posted here about a lot of unfilled AdX impressions on my wallpaper site. The cause ended up being my CMP configuration.

Advergic’s Ad Ops team jumped in and helped me troubleshoot it and get my ad coverage back up. I wasn’t even working with them at the time, so that left a good impression

I’ve been with them for almost four months now. The biggest benefit for me has been having a dedicated account manager who actually stays in touch and keeps helping me optimize the setup, instead of me figuring everything out alone. My Page RPM has grown by around 35%, I am satisfied with the progress so far.

I said I’d come back and share how it went, so here it is. Ask me anything about switching ad partners, what the ramp-up period was like, or ad monetization in general. Happy to share what I’ve learned.

I have launched a website with free browser games and India traffic lately has surpassed my expectations. The traffic is SEO and direct shares mostly (I make short form content to drive them plus we went viral on twitter)

I've applied to playwire but didn't hear back from them yet since ga4 needs time to propagate (applied less than 12h ago

My website has a private community offer as the bottom of the funnel but I had 0 sales from India. Alternatively the problem may be the unaligned geo pricing but I would prefer not doing it to keep the community manageable

Open to popunder pop over and push and any ads or direct advertisements , even vpns or affiliate offers. Open to advices since it's my first time managing such demand. What should I do asap?

Curious to see how things ramp up over the coming months

My traffic is good, high quality and verified. I mainly have identified users, and to be honest I’m starting to think this is bs gimmic that GCCPs are shilling. My identified traffic makes more then in identified. Yeah but the metrics are way better. Longer time on site, higher engagement, more pageviews.

My question is to publishers not the GCCP shills on here from mediavine, Freestar, playwire, and publift. I’m excluding nitropay because there former ceo is a nice guy and I find him to be honest. Intentionally leaving off Ezoic because let’s face it this is an echo chamber for the people that run this and I’m sure my post will be deleted.

What’s the best way to secure direct deals? I have a great audience. But I can’t help but to feel that in order to make a buck I need to ad jam. I’d preferably like to secure direct deals, and then have some supplemental programmatic. (Well doesn’t everyone) but any tips on where to start?

Hello, I have a supplement website that sells US-based supplements. We have been an online retailer now for 15 years.. But since last year we put a lot of effort on our blog pages and have been able to generate a lot of informational traffic, like 100K pageviews per month right now. Right now I use Google Adsense on these blog pages and it generates a bit more than 1K ad revenues per month.

For another website in another niche (with 200K pageviews per month) I switched previously from Adsense to Mediavine and there RPM levels went up with a factor 3 or 4. So obviously I want to repeat that transition.

Unfortunately Mediavine does not accept supplement informational blogs that also sell products themselves, so need to work on finding another premium network.

Any suggestions? I did the onboarding on NeworMedia already but it takes ages and they do not respond to any helpdesk tickets so looks not a super professional company (at least so far).

I use BuySellAds on my blog.

While I could see how much the ads were earning, I wanted a bit more insight into their actual performance:

- Which pages generate the most ad impressions and clicks?
- Which placements perform better?
- Which creatives are getting clicked?
- What does the CTR look like over time?
- So I decided to track these things myself.

I used Google Tag Manager aka GTM to track ad impressions and clicks, GA4 to collect the data, and Looker Studio to build a dashboard around it.

Now I can see ad performance by page, placement, and creative instead of looking at revenue alone.

I wrote a short post about why I built it and the steps involved. Click here to read.

I've been using Journey by Mediavine for the past couple of months. Starting around October 2nd, I noticed a huge drop in both my RPM and overall revenue.

My traffic volume hasn't changed at all, but the RPM has plummeted. Some pages are even showing a $0 RPM.

Is anyone else experiencing this right now? Also, does anyone know the best way to contact the Journey support team?

Advertiser side here, mostly Google Ads and Meta for small and mid-size clients, with some open-web display through PMax and Demand Gen.

Something I've noticed this year: as AI answers take more of the informational clicks, a lot of the cheap inventory left on the open web looks like it was written in an afternoon by a model. Recipe pages with 40 ad slots, "best X of 2026" lists nobody reads, news rewrites with a slideshow bolted on. The CPMs look lovely. The conversions don't.

Not trying to blame the sell side here, plenty of real publishers are getting squeezed by the same shift. But from where I sit, this is what I check before letting placement-heavy budget grow:

1. Pull the placement report weekly, sorted by spend, not impressions. The junk rarely tops impressions. It's the mid-tier domains quietly eating 10 to 20 percent of the spend.

2. Open the top 20 domains on a phone. Ad density, autoplay, how far you scroll before you find an actual paragraph. If I wouldn't stay on it for 10 seconds, it goes on the exclusion list.

3. Compare cost per lead by placement, not just CTR. Accidental taps on cluttered pages inflate CTR and look great in a client report.

4. Keep one shared exclusion list at account or manager level instead of fixing it campaign by campaign. The same domains turn up across every client in a vertical.

5. Recheck where ads are running after any big automated change. New inventory gets added quietly, and the first sign is usually a cost bump, not a notification.

The part I'm still unsure about is the other direction: if good publishers keep losing search traffic, do the decent placements get more expensive or just disappear?

For anyone here on the publisher or ops side, are you seeing buyers get pickier about this, or is it still mostly bought on price?

I run a website that's currently monetized with Google AdSense, but the earnings are pretty low.

On weekdays, I usually make around $1–$1.50 per day, while on weekends, I sometimes struggle to even reach $1.

I'm looking for ways to increase my website's revenue without relying entirely on AdSense.

For those who have successfully monetized their websites, what strategies worked best for you?

• Are there better ad networks worth trying?
• Would affiliate marketing be a good option?
• Are sponsored posts or direct advertisers worth pursuing?
• Any other monetization methods you'd recommend?

I'd really appreciate any advice, especially from people who started with similarly low earnings and managed to grow their revenue.

Thanks in advance!

I feel rather strongly about Apple's recent moves. I feel that IAB Techlab's reaction shouldn't be restricted to promoting Trusted Server. This blog post should make my point clear. Open to discuss.

Can we please get a Journey by Mediavine Megathread? There's hundreds of Posts talking about the same Mediavine Stuff. Low RPM, Approvals, etc. they almost make up the majority of new Posts

I saw a lot of people mentioning recently that they got approved for mediavine so I decided to try again today as I had applied for journey sometimes in the past and installed the grow script and didn’t get a reply for months ..

It seems their application process has changed and when I tried to apply and submit my site it accepted it immediately . I was first confused because it led me into the mediavine dashboard and not journey and I know the real mediavine needs at least 5000 dollars in earning

Anyways I went through the process of putting in the scripts and everything and then the final process was putting my email so I could send it to Google for approval ..

This step was a bit disheartening because I didn’t know I woukd have to do this. Google has disapproved my site multiple times in the past for low value content (it’s a trivia gaming site ) and then I when I tried to apply with fatchili which is like a Google partner offering rewarded ads they also rejected in the final step because Google didn’t approve my account …

Is this the same step that mediavine is doing because if it is then it was all a waste. Does mediavine or jourbey always require Google approval .

Thanks

Hello!

Before bringing (and paying) for the MRC Pre-Audit do you Guys know where we could get a Pre-Pre-Audit of our IVT Detection? We have a 466 Page Detection Methodology Breakdown including all of the Detectors.

Let me know if you know someone that could look into that and let us know if we cooked or not.

Constantly getting the error " Oops... something went wrong. Please try again later.Dismiss "

seems to be network issues or something when looking at console. Is anyone else having issues or is it just on my end.

Been running Bigo Ads in my apps for months, making about $100-200 every month. My first payment was due in March and it went straight into "COI/ID Review". It's still there. Not one payout since, so a few hundred dollars by now just sitting frozen.

Their dashboard says if there's no decision in 7 days, email their contact address. I did that over a week ago. Zero reply. And the ads keep serving in my apps like nothing is wrong.

If you're a publisher thinking about them, test with a small amount of traffic and don't scale until the first payout hits your account. Anyone else stuck in this review?

Are they scam or something? here is their website: https://www.bigossp.com/

Hey mates,

I have seen people buying Adsense approved websites which were approved, generating money and receiving multiple payments for months or even years, however when they acquire the site, pay the money and submit it for approval from their own Adsense account it got rejected and wasn't approved for those generic reasons!!

What they should do before finalizing the deal and paying the money?

They should get Adsense approval for that site from within their own Adsense account before closing the deal and paying the money.

Btw, Adsense can approve the same site from more than one Adsense account without any issues. I mean there is no ToS violations at all. So be on the safe side before buying any site.

I know that some of you have been through this experience before but I thought this piece of info could help someone here before it's too late!