ep 067 Hanging out with Mediavine CEO Eric Hochberger

Theory of Content

Welcome back to Theory of Content! This week is a bit different and Joshua Unseth is joined by Eric Hochberger, the CEO of Mediavine. Eric is here to take the SEO conversation away from COVID and towards the future by discussing Mediavine’s upcoming projects.

Eric starts off the episode by explaining the new importance of web stories on Google. These may not seem that important to IOS users, but that is because they are only seen on Google and Android mobile devices. These web stories allow bloggers to pop up in Google Discover, which is curated to users’ preferences, instead of leaving bloggers to solely rely on rankings in Google search. Next, Eric offers some tips on how to optimize SEO for Google web stories. He suggests that bloggers make a regular companion post for each story, but to also create a landing page with all the stories, so web crawlers can easily crawl the stories. Eric finishes off the topic of stories, by giving an overview of their cons. For instance, stories don’t monetize as well.

Joshua prompts a switch in the conversation to focus on the future of Mediavine. Eric begins by talking about Trellis. Trellis is a tool designed to optimize WordPress sites, and Joshua describes it as the most important thing going on for bloggers right now. Eric jumps to the next project that Mediavine has going on which is their change in adtech. Their new server to server program will source information to the newly built Mediavine exchange server. This switch will increase the speed of ads on Mediavine sites which will in turn increase viewability of ads.

The last topic the duo cover is the death of the 3rd party cookie. This current hot topic in the ad world has to do with the push to a privacy centered world. Web users now can consent to getting specialized ads and in turn having their information shared around. The issue with this is that as personalized ads decrease so does the monetization of ads.

Joshua closes off the episode by assuring bloggers that Mediavine has their back. It can be scary when Google changes the means of monetization without bloggers’ consent, but Mediavine is there to optimize ads and monetization through whatever Google throws at the algorithm.

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