Tyler Bishop Amateur Magician and Ezoic CMO Reveals Advertising Monetization

Did you know that more large sites (over 1,000,000 pageviews a month) use Ezoic when compared to Mediavine or Adthrive? Companies like Hearst media and Mens Journal monetize their sites with Ezoic.

What you'll find below is an in-depth interview with Tyler Bishop, where he shared these details, and we also discuss how Ezoic works and how it compares to Mediavine and Adthrive.

We discuss some common misconceptions (that you will earn more on Adthrive or Mediavine), but also confirm some things about display ads (they slow down your site). 

I've worked with Tyler for the last few years using the Ezoic platform on my sites. I love his story but haven't done a profile on him until today.

Machine Learning for Publishers

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Ezoic is an end to end platform for publishers.

• Unlock more revenue while optimizing your users experience.
• A must-have tool for content sites, authority sites, publishers, and more!
• Adapt ads, layouts, and more to capitalize on changing user conditions.

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Tyler Bishop is a renaissance man

In the podcast, you learn all about how Tyler Bishop is a true renaissance man. Growing up in rural Missouri, he graduated from high school (and college) early, built startups, is an amateur magician, officiated weddings, does commentary for the world's Jitsu championship, and other exciting gigs.

He's a real hustler. 

Today Tyler is the Chief Marketing Officer of Ezoic. It's no doubt that his past experiences landed him this role in a fast-growing company. In the five years that Tyler has been with Ezoic, the online publishing industry has changed dramatically. 

Why you need Ezoic

Watch the full interview I conducted with Tyler Bishop below.

Ezoic is an end to end platform for publishers. In today's publishing landscape producing great content isn't enough. For a great website visitor experience, you have to worry about speed, mobile readiness, CDNs, GDPR, CCPA, privacy, SSLs, and the list goes on.

Tyler explains that these items were either optional or something you didn't even have to consider before over the past decade. 

Throw in the complexity of monetization, and Ezoic makes sense. Ezoic is one of the first to begin using machine learning technology for publishing and is indeed on the cutting edge. 

Ezoic and Monetization

Most people associate Ezoic with monetization, and I've written extensively on how Ezoic grew one of my sites by  232% in my NP4 case study. 

The combination of machine learning and providing the website visitor with a better experience means getting top dollar when displaying ads. 

Access to Google Ad Exchange 

Another added benefit of becoming an Ezoic partner is getting instant access to Google's ad exchange, which is usually not something most publishers have access to unless you have around 50 million-plus visitors. 

Don't confuse Google Ad Exchange with Google Adsense. With Ezoic, you'll get access to header bidding, preferred deals, and private auctions for additional monetization using Google Ad Exchange. 

More than just monetization

While the monetization is easily a favorite, Ezoic can also help with your site speed, analytics, CDN, etc. If you are curious, I do use the Ezoic CDN and analytics features on my sites. 

One interesting piece is with the machine learning UX features. In a case study of 19 websites, Tyler mentions in the podcast. Ezoic was able to show fewer ads and earn an increase in ad revenue by 46%. 

Fact or Fiction?  Once you hit 50k or 100k visitors, you should move from Ezoic to MediaVine or AdThrive for higher payouts? 

The fact is the majority of display ads are all run off of Google's network. Whether you are CNN or Hearst (Hearst, one of the largest publishing companies globally, is a client of Ezoic), Google drives the majority of the ads. So whether you are using MediaVine or AdThrive majority of the monetization is coming from Google. 

I believe it's likely a matter of opinion and use case as I haven't been able to find any hard data showing whether or not using MediaVine or AdThrive can genuinely increase your revenues. 

Fact or Fiction?  Ezoic reduces site speed? 

All ads slow websites down. The more complex the setup or the more ads, the more latency meaning slower website speed your website visitors experience. 

And that's the benefit of using Ezoic; you can increase or decrease the complexity and quantity of ads with a simple slider. Adjust the settings with what's most important to you. 

Read the Full Transcript

If you'd rather read the interview transcript, you can read below.

Hey everyone spencer here and welcome back to the niche pursuits podcast uh today i've, got an interview with tyler bishop. He's, actually the chief marketing officer for ezoic.com and you may know ezoic as a way to monetize your site.

They help you manage uh display ads on your site, but they actually do a whole lot more. They have big data analytics, they have site, speed, accelerator and a whole host of tools that helps you really optimize your site in general.

What they're, really known for is the artificial intelligence that they implement to help you optimize the placement and sizes of your display ad. So basically, there's, machine learning and artificial intelligence going on in the background that helps move around and test and tweak uh your ad, so that you're.

You're earning the most money possible, and so i brought tyler on to talk about ezoic and where it fits in the marketplace. We actually dive into how it compares to say, mediavine and app drive, and i found it really interesting that there are actually more large sites using ezoic than there are on mediavine or add thrive.

And so we're going to dive into that. And some of uh, just the the other, the business and the reasons why somebody might use something like ezoid now, at the same time that this interview is released.

So if you're watching this on the first couple of days when it's released, uh izoic has actually just opened up the doors to something called the just start program, and usually you need to have at least ten thousand page Views to be able to apply, but with the just start program they are, they are allowing sites of any size to get on their platform and they only open the doors for a short period of time.

Uh, because they don & # 39, t want to have thousands of sites going through this and what it is. Is you have to go through a short training course, so you need to watch a few videos and take a very short quote quiz just to show that you understand what zoick is and how it works.

And if you pass that quiz, then you can apply and get approved to the to the just start program. So it's, really exciting thing for smaller sites. If you're just getting started, you can get a premium ad network with ezoic, you can go to nichepursuits.

com ezoic and you can apply to the just start program. Otherwise, i hope you enjoy the video and, of course, if you like the interview, please hit that like and subscribe button. So here's, tyler, hey tyler! Welcome to the niche pursuits, podcast uh, thanks for having me on spencer, it's.

Uh it's good to be here. I've, listened to the podcast before so it's. Uh it's, fun to be on now on the other side of things, yep absolutely, and it's great. To have you on uh, i'm gonna. Let people tell a little bit about your background and what you're doing now at izoic, um and um.

But first i do want to hear a little bit like leading up to. How did you even get involved in euzoic like what's? Your background? What does it take for somebody to go from? You know high school to ezoic.

Well, for me, um, quite there's quite a bit in there but uh. I can give you kind of the uh the cliff notes, version um, which will probably be the most entertaining one for those listening but uh. I grew up in actually rural missouri, so for those unfamiliar it's, the middle of the united states and i like to say that i was close to nothing because realistically you know the way that you talk about where i'm From is you tell people how many hours from the next biggest city you can think of, and so i grew up there.

My my mother was a school teacher um and i graduated high school when i was really young. I skipped some grades um and my my mother decided that it was probably best for my future education. If i uh started university when i was um younger than most of the other kids, and so i did and i fell in love with uh with a young woman now, while i was there and along the way, i took communications classes and uh one of the Communications classes, um.

We were learning about search engines and all kinds of other stuff, and they were. I was told that that's, not real marketing, but that's. What i was really interested in uh jack dorsey actually came to our university um.

One of the founders of twitter and um did this whole presentation about twitter, and i was like this is going to be huge. This is like the next big thing, and everybody was just kind of like. Ah don't pay any attention to that.

So i'm. Actually one of the very first i think i'm one of the first thousand. Maybe twitter users, wow, um and so uh. In that experience, i got a chance to work for the the school radio station, the school paper, and i had a friend that was a personal trainer and he had gotten a job for a corporation doing corporate wellness and i was like hey, you know what seems Like they make a lot more money than a normal personal trainer, so i'm gonna use these outlets that i have as a part of a class, a newspaper and the radio station to try to get myself a job as a corp personal Trainer and i did – and i did it through a website that i'd, promote, and then i did a story about how i used a website to basically churn up this.

This business created an online business and a gentleman who was a partner at edward jones at the time, um was looking for to start a business and he decided that he needed somebody that was savvy digitally to help him start this business, and i was ready to Get married and in love – and so i was like i'm, your man, and so i convinced the university that i was a super genius.

I was some young whiz kid that graduated high school real early. So let me take his the max amount of credit hours. I can so that i can finish school work, basically all my time on this business um so that i could you know, get married and grow this company and and that's, exactly what i did, and so i graduated school um just a few Years after starting i got married and that business ended up being a platform like any entrepreneur, will tell you or anybody that's, you know started a business or been a part of a startup will tell you is um, you know it's a platform for learning in a lot of respects, and even though uh we, we did experience quite a bit of success, uh, ultimately um, and we exited that company um.

I would say you know one good idea for every nine bad ones. You know and uh from there i got involved in several other startups. In st louis i met some very, very smart engineers um. You know i can say that i've got several mentors um that i've learned a lot from over the years and um ultimately ended up working with um a couple: different companies, um and then um worked for microsoft.

Briefly um. As a part of a an exit and did not love that um, managing huge teams of people globally is not the most fun thing in the world for me personally, mm-hmm and um, and then around that time. Um.

My wife and i were very interested in in moving to san diego and um, just through uh success in the world of startups um. I'd, gotten connected uh to dwayne lafleur, who, if you & # 39, ll, go back in time and remember maybe farmville for facebook, where people would exchange um, real currency for digital currency to buy tractors, and things like that online dwayne was the He created basically the first developer uh ad network for facebook and um.

His company was bought, um and acquired, and so along the way he'd, basically come up with the idea freezoic, and i thought it was genius and um. So after talking with duane, the company had already been started for several years: um him and several engineers and a gentleman by the name of john cole, and you know the rest.

The rest, they say is history. I moved to to california and we started it in a humble beginnings office up in carlsbad and yeah. It's, been a rocket ship of growth over the last decade and we've pioneered a lot of things in this space and there's.

A lot of things that we've done that um. You know at the time i said you know this will never catch on or um. You know i i don't know if we'll, be on the side of things in terms of the ecosystem of where it goes, and so far we've, been on the right side of all those things and Um yeah it's been a long journey, but it's been a really fun one yeah.

So to give people a time frame there um. You obviously did a lot before you got to izoic, but when, when did you join izoic? How long you been there now uh in just over five years, so um yeah? I i moved here in 2015 and started working for the company and um.

That was really right around the time that um our platform sort of evolved and we started having additional products. Uh for those that are maybe aren't overly familiar with izoic um. We're, a machine learning platform that's kind of like our that's like our.

I guess our beginnings: it's like our core is using machines to basically scale the types of optimizations that you know. Normally, we're up to people and lots of tests and data and um. It originally started by doing just layouts uh, just completely testing what you would think of as like a like, a wordpress template or a theme, or something like that and testing a lot of them and ultimately, ultimately like a lot of publishers.

Didn't like that they didn't like that their site changed, even if it lowered the bounce rate or you know, made more money. You know publishers spent a lot of time on their websites and so right, um. We ultimately right around 2015 is when we uh launched ad tester, which basically applies the same methodology, but just to the ad placements location, size density, that sort of thing, and that was really a turning point for us in a lot of different respects.

Yeah. So you're. Now the uh cmo, the chief marketing officer there correct yeah that's right um. It's, one of those things where it was just me for a while and now next thing you know you turn around you & # 39.

Ve got a lot of people behind you, um making you look good and that's. The goal right – absolutely um, i agree so we're gonna spend a lot of time talking about ezoek, but before i do, i just want to fill in the other gaps there.

I was listening to your to your story. You talked about a few different companies that you helped and worked for. Um. Do you have any of your own businesses that you're either have done and exited, or you're working on right now.

Anything you want to share there. Briefly, yeah, so so my first company live anew. That was an exit um. We were very similar to the gallup organization um, and so that obviously became a huge company over time.

We were not in necessarily a position to really grow in that respect and had some kind of areas where we were uh restricted, and so, ultimately that was a successful exit. Um there's been several other companies that i've.

Had a small piece of and we've, either sold the business or i sold my shares to other owners, but now um, probably as it relates to things outside of euzoic um. I'm, a publisher in a lot of respects, just like probably a lot of your audience.

So i own and operate several websites uh, many of which i just beat up for fun, uh for different new zealand projects and things along those lines. But everything from jiu jitsu to injuries, to um, to mezcal, to um, trying to think some of the other ones, just the internet at large, some stuff on marketing that i've just started as well, so several different enterprises there and i've built a few small web applications and things like that.

That may end up one day being something that um. You know some small micro sas or something like that, but mostly just things that i mess around with out of interest. So you got quite a bit going on as well.

You're. You're dabbling on the side, in addition to your full-time role there at ezoic. So you're. You're, a hustler people on the niche pursuits; podcast love that man it's, uh that's right. I do as well, and so you're.

You're. One of the group here for sure yeah i'm. Also a i'm, also an amateur magician. I'm nice officiated for weddings, and i also do the commentary for the world jiu jitsu championship and several other large jiu jitsu championships, and those are just kind of like weird gigs that i've gotten into because people have asked Me or you know you're just in the right place throughout time and um.

I've, gotten better at saying no to things as i've gotten older, but when i was young man, you know how it goes. Any opportunity – yes yep, that's, awesome man very cool. So let's dive into izoic a little bit.

I mean you kind of explained um. You know what he zoi kind of started out in with you know: sort of testing layouts and almost like a theme tester right, uh what it! What is he zoick today if you were to just people that have never heard of what he zoick is, give them a one or two minutes two minutes snippet of this.

This is a zoic. This is what it does yeah, so i i would probably describe it in these are marketing terms, so i apologize everybody, but i would describe it as probably like an end-to-end platform for publishers, meaning uh digital publishing, has grown far more complex than it'S been um ever i mean in the last decade you've started to have to worry about things like speed, mobile readiness, cdns, you know gdpr ccpa, privacy ssl.

These are all things that were either optional or something you didn't. Even have to consider before not to mention the fact that the ad ecosystem and the way that sites are monetized has gotten far more complex, and it creates this huge, like chasm between.

Basically somebody that's, a startup. You know starting a site um or you know, maybe just an independent publisher with one or two employees or writers, on staff um and in major enterprises, and so this creates an area where it's impossible for one person, even myself, somebody that's worked in this space for a very long time to be an expert in all those things, and so one of the things that we really believe in and that is that um, your best interests are ultimately what you want to use to drive the Decisions that you make and the problem is, is when that's, outsourced or given to a third party um your best interests, aren't, always aligned, and so one of the things that machines do really well is machines can make decisions? Almost as good as people can so, if you need to make a decision, but it doesn & # 39, t have to be quite as good as the decision you'd make, but almost as good machines are great at that and the problem with People is let's say you need to make 2 000 decisions, and you need to do that in 24 hours there's no way of doing it, but the machines can do that and so machine learning is really something that we've been working on for a decade; people use that word, they use ai all the time and they don't mean it.

We mean it, we really use it, and so we've built a lot of free tools. A lot of other applications and stuff like that inside of a single platform where publishers can actually use that to basically give themselves enterprise level implementation of all these things and monetization, i would say, is what we're known for 95, probably most 95 Of our customers probably know us, as is that primarily and it's, because we're, so effective at it and um yeah.

I mean it used to be uh. You had your choice of adsense or outsourcing to an ad op shop or hiring an ad ops person, and now you don't need to do any of those things um and so yeah that's. That's. That's y zoic in a nutshell, yeah.

So there there's a lot there um, like you said i think most people know izoic as a monetization platform um, but it does a lot more. I mean i use zezoic on my case study, site onlyard.com and other sites uh as well, and so i can see what's in there with all the analytics with the site, speed accelerator with just everything out.

You know i do run it through the cdn as well um, and so there's. There's a lot in there that people can navigate, but let's, maybe focus on the monetization just because that's. What everybody knows it for um for the most part and of course i'll.

Let you squeeze in other things, uh as they apply here as well, but um, you kind of alluded to add op shops and other third-party providers that don't give you as much control you kind of highlighted that that hey it'S, probably in your best interest, if you are controlling you know, you set up your ads, you control where they go and then let the ai optimization sort of do its thing um.

So let's name some names here we're. Talking you know, people like mediavine ad thrive. Those are you know some of the places where you go and they set up the ads for you and uh. You know. Hopefully they optimize them the best.

They can right. Um that's. That's, what they do and it's very hands-off right um. You basically give them a login to your site and they set it all up for you, so that's a plus, but um you're, saying that maybe the minus is you lose some of that control is.

Maybe you can speak to that just a little bit yeah, so i i mean i think there's. There's, multiple minuses to it and so um. One of the things i like to always back up on this is um. You know the the parties, as you mentioned mentioned like i see, i see them in competit as competitors.

In the same way, i see something like adsense or just ad exchanges in general, as a competitor is the only reason why um someone would use an ad up shop as opposed to a platform like uzoic is because they don't allow split testing Um, for i mean use your imagination there's.

A reason why people don't want you to test something um, it's. Ad networks for the longest time have have done this, and this is like one of the core things that we've built the platform for so when we say we have our kind of roots and machine learning in in monetization it'S because you know even going back five or six years we couldn't.

Imagine the ecosystem would still be in the shape that it's in so much of it's, still black box and overly complex, and you have all these different parties with their hands in the pie and you don'T know where the money goes, and so one of the core things that we built into his own from the very start was the ability to basically like proxy your traffic and split it fairly.

50. 50. 20. 80. Wherever you want to go, but even if you're just using something like adsense, which you can link to a zoic, so izoic includes access to google's, ad exchange, which is usually not something most.

Publishers have access to unless your 50 million plus visits minimum, which you're, going to get through your google ad manager, formerly known as dfp account and then access to header bidding thousands of header bidders um, which is like another layer of complexity.

That's, come along over the years to basically compete with google's very dominant ad exchange, and there are others and those are also included with the zoic. So we go out and we source all of that demand um, meaning like the ads that actually, where the ads come from, and we see that as a commodity.

This is what the uh you mentioned. Add thrive. Mediavine um there's. There's, a bunch of them um. Those are you know, depending on what corner of the internet i'm in there's, different ones, that kind of like specialize in different areas, um, and so you know, i see that is you're outsourcing to somebody That's.

All those things are the same to me: um because it's. The exact same ad demand that you get with something like uzo there's. Direct deals and pmp deals that you can get through with brands, but we set those up for our sites as well, and that's.

The thing i think that people think that switching in between all these different parties, they're gonna there's, something unique that's happening where the ads are coming from a more valuable place and that's not really how ad buying ad bidding works, um and the point of it is that ad inventory value is built over time based on a lot of different factors that i think, maybe people, probably don't understand it's, That's.

The challenge is that um, it's, not necessarily worth it to fully understand unless you want to really be into adopts, which is a dying job title because of machine learning and automation, and things like that, and so one of the things that ezok Does and gives people the ability to control is basically optimizing for each visitor, so each visitor think of it as supply and demand.

Each advertiser is going to bid on a visitor differently, meaning there may be more advertisers bidding on me and less advertisers bidding on my sister in st louis could be geographically could be the fact that she has kids and i don't, and maybe There's, a lot of advertisers that are after um somebody that has more disposable income to maybe go out to dinner.

You've, got a bunch of restaurants eager to get back to it, um, and so the demand may be higher for me. So it may not benefit that site to show me the same number of ads. Let's say even if all the same locations, whatever the density, may actually impact their bids, and by restricting that for me they may drive up their bids over time and that's, something that's very valuable and Publishers for the longest period of time have a really hard time seeing that long tail machines are really good at that and they're very disciplined at it um, and so i think it's.

One of the areas where i would probably caution a lot of publishers, and that is basically trying to take more control of your ad inventory value and then being able to test stuff. If somebody doesn't want you to test something there's, a reason why, if they want to lock you into a contract there's there's, a reason why these are old.

These are things that that used to exist that we'd, almost gotten rid of, but now they've moved down a tier. They don't work with the enterprises anymore. They've, moved down to uh small, the media's, medium-sized sites and the same things are still at play.

So i run a facebook group for niche pursuits that you're aware of um. You know a lot of people. Are there talking all sorts of things about optimizing sites, uh, publishing, blogging and izoic versus ad thrive versus media vine? It comes up a lot.

You know people are under the impression uh. At least this is what i hear in my facebook group that hey when you get started out um and you have less than fifty thousand page views. Ezoic's; great, go there monetize your site uh, but when you have over 50 000 you should graduate and go to mediavine, because that's.

Where you're, going to get the highest payouts and then um. You know once your site hits 100 000 page views a month. You should graduate to to add thrive right um. I want you to address this a little bit and is it just marketing on mediavine and ad thrive's, part that hey um.

We we are more exclusive, because we only allow sites that get 50 000 page views or we're more exclusive still, because we only allow you if you get 100 000 page views um, and so when you come, you know you should feel like You're, getting a premium experience, so maybe address that um, and i know you have some some numbers about how ezoic or how many sites are using ezoic that maybe are over this hundred thousand uh page view mark and that sort of thing so Address that concern, because that's, perhaps the biggest concern that i hear in my facebook group all the time that hey when you're small, go to izoic when you're big, go to mediavine, add thrive, yeah, so Um would love to address it.

It's, probably one of the like. I did i internally. I use this because i don't mean to like um trivialize it to anyone, but i call it like the worst bro science that exists in our space um, because one of the questions that i think people should always be asking with anything as It relates to like information that's, shared between like groups of publishers anywhere on the web, which there's, a lot of places that people go and get information.

But i would say, publishers really like getting info from each other, and i think that's. One of the things i enjoy about you know kind of your group and some of the uh different programs that you've had and some of the guests you've had on your show, is you know you have people that have Actually done these things, but can can kind of fill you in why something works or why it doesn't and that's, a question that people should be asking is why why are these things? Why is this the case so um? If i start with something like a zoic and then i move to a um ad thrive or a media vine – or you know any any other party and someone makes more money, why, like? What was the difference? That's? What i want to know yeah – and i do i know the difference and you can actually go and find these things out for yourself without having to have any kind of extra knowledge there's, a number of different extensions out there, google just launched One it's, not perfect, but you can actually see where the ads come from and so for the majority of the two parties that you mentioned.

The majority of the ads served on all the sites i've. Seen are through ad manager, google ad manager, which means it's. Google addex, which is, i would say, if you look at even an enterprise site like cnn.

com or mashable, or you know you name it. Almost all the ads that are filled programmatically on a display network are from google's. Ad exchange. Google has a great business um i've got to say that's.

Why congress wants to talk to him a little bit more about? It is because it is so dominant because, if you think about it, if i'm, an advertiser which i am um and have been for a long time, if you want to show display ads it's, really really difficult to say.

You're, going to get any kind of realistic good campaign coverage without using someone like google, so it's where the majority of budgets go, and so it's rare that you find uh advertisers in bulk that are Spending lots of money in places, not google, and usually the reason why you spend money other places is because you want to spend less right, not more yep, and so that's, where the majority of the ads are coming from.

So if ads are all a commodity, then what else is the difference? Well, one is – and this is this is an area that i've spent a lot of time on, so that that kind of progression of izolic mediavine ad thrives specifically, that stems.

I think in large part from a group online called the income school who do an awesome job of kind of selling a course to people just getting started, and that was sort of their take on how things worked.

And so i actually met with them. Because i was really interested in kind of digging into some of their data and where they were coming up with some of that, and it turns out it's. Just it was subjective, you know, and they'd, had actually a bad experience with us a long time ago and uh that was on us.

I mean we just had a. They had a sales rep that's, actually no longer with the company that wasn't great um and just didn't, do a great job of like tending to them, and so we worked with them on basically saying, Like hey look, we would love to do a case study and then share the data with you and your members, so that you know you can like say like with certainty.

These guys are true or not true, and we'll share all the data, and so you can see it back and forth. So we just finished a six month study with them looking at sites that basically had used the zoic and either moved from us to one of those outsource ad up shops and um.

Basically, we wanted to look at three months worth of data before leaving their average epmb, so that's revenue they make per visitor uh. Epmb is earnings per mill? Visitors mill means thousand in advertising because makes tons of sense right right, absolutely and um.

Yeah so uh we looked at that as the average, and then we looked in the next six months with these oak, which of course includes as soon as we started the study um the pandemic. So we were like immediately like great.

This is gonna not be great for us um. Fortunately, for us ezio's. Machines are really good at what they do and uh in june and july, largely a lot of the ad rates recovered and so um. Looking at the data that i've got now.

I actually just shared this study with them um earlier this week and basically um izoic on all the sites that we looked at um that came back from those adopt shops um. They were making 46 percent more with the zoi, showing as many or fewer ads in almost every case fewer and that's.

The big key, so two things are the reason why someone would leave something like uzoic and then make more money number one. Is you show more ads um? It seems counterintuitive people are like. Oh, these shows so many ads, but it's because the machines are testing and they're putting placements in spots where advertisers are going to increase or decrease bids over time based on historical data, that's.

How bidding works so if i come to a site and we take away an ad today, um i'm – probably going to earn lower rpm on that page, so revenue from all the cpms, the you know, whatever advertiser bids for that ad on the Page right um, but if i'm, really valuable, the advertisers will eventually start bidding more for the limited spots, because what happens is if i'm, really valuable.

The advertiser goes. You know what i used to be able to bid a three dollar cpm and be able to get the sidebar spot, but now there's, only one sidebar spot and there used to be two. So now i need to bid four oh wait.

Now. I need to bid five and that's. What actually gets me on the page that's? What what makes me the winning bid, so you can actually show fewer ads over time now. Izoic. Does this automatically so right? One of the things that really works against us here is, if we build ad inventory for someone over time which this takes usually depending on your traffic.

It might take six to eight weeks before you start making a meaningful difference in terms of just the ad rates. Yeah demand is great, like i said when you get ezok, you get thousands of header bidders and addicts, so people make more money than something like adsense or you know pretty much anything else right off the bat, but it's really.

Building that ad inventory over time, we have sites that are three years old and their revenue epmb is like it's, linear and it's, because the machines continue to do this over time. Now, if you leave the zoic, while we've built your ad inventory value up because ads are bought and sold based on historical data, you leave.

Somebody shows more ads well those ads, even though the spots are no longer restricted. The advertisers are still bidding what they were bidding before. So it looks like you're, making these way higher rpms, but you need to be looking at epmb, because session earnings could actually be going down, and not only that you should look at your rps epmv.

We are the ones that pioneered that metric, and now everyone uses it because we highlighted how rpms can be manipulated and people can be tricked. But ultimately, you'll, see everywhere else, people just stay flat or they go down and it's, because no attention is giving to basically increasing the ad inventory value over time.

So you leave you zoic, you didn't. Have it set up properly you didn't, have a lot of placeholders on the page. Um you didn't. Have your adsense linked you, didn't have an ads.txt file. These are things that some of these other parties will set up for you.

So you're already at a deficit. They come in, they show more ads, they put them in places where it's hard to find them. The advertisers bid more. We've built or added inventory value; it makes sense, but that's.

The thing is over time: you'll perform better. Your best interest will be taken care of with something like uzoic and that's. Why we've, been able to show when sites come back, they earn more and, of course, in this study we took the time to make sure that everybody was set up properly and that's, something i think we have to get A lot better at yeah yep.

No, there's, a lot to be said there um, so how many sites were part of this case study that you did so there was 19 okay. There was 19 that finished the full, the full six months, um, which is not a lot, but i mean to start with.

We wanted to only include sites that started at the same time that we could look at the same data, and it was actually tough to convince those 19 sides, because they they were there's. This, like thought that you make it.

You know and uh i hate that i really hate it. I mean i, i hate this idea that the number of page views that you have is something that advertisers care at all about, because truthfully i mean, i think, sites think that, like big sites are sites that earn 50 000 or 100 000 page views per month, That's, not a that's, a that's considered in the industry.

That's; a that's, still a very small site right um! It's, not until you're, you know well, over a million someone might say you're, a medium-sized publisher, um, and so i mean you can look at uh a tool like built with, which is free.

It's, got a chrome extension. I highly recommend it to publishers. You can see what any website is built with meaning like what cms are they using? Are they using wordpress? What plugins are they using all that kind of stuff um, but it also gives you aggregate data on what size sites and what types of sites are using different technologies, and you can look at something like uzoic.

Not only do we have more customers at at large, but publishers that are over five hundred thousand over a million in the alexa top 500 top thousand top. Ten thousand zero has far more customers, and i think it's, because the longer you've been doing some of these things, which obviously a lot of publishers that are that size have been doing it for a long time.

You realize just you know how um uh, how unfair it seems to give 20 to 25 of your revenue away to somebody that's, basically just giving you access to ad demand that you want that you can't quite get on Your own or don't want to take the time to set up, even if you can yeah.

So i want to clarify two points, one with the case study that you did you so night. These 19 sites were on a competitor and then moved to izoic for six months and or or some time period and increased.

I think you said 46 or 49 percent. They're out of revenue for 46 and there's. A couple in there that are outliers, we had you know a few uh we've got one that had 177 percent increase, the lowest was 13, and then we had one that was basically flat.

It was negative one percent, but they're showing fewer ads and they were happy with that, but uh at large it was 46.65 that's, awesome and um yeah everything uh in in between there as well and um. I think one of the things that we learned along the way there is just how um much better of a job.

We need to do from a platform standpoint of making it very, very simple, very, very easy for publishers to be as hands-on or as hands-off as they'd like to be, i think, a lot of people are like hey tyler.

You keep selling this. Like idea of control, but i don't want to do any of these things, myself, um, and so that's. Fine, i think we want to make the platform to where your best interests are taken care of with the flip of a couple switches and you're, not giving away this huge portion of your revenue uh to somebody to do all the same stuff.

Um and then you know, one of the things i find over and over again is the longer that somebody is doing this, the more and more they want to do more, like you mentioned early on, like analytics being able to dive into things a little bit deeper And stuff like that and being able to give people the controls to do a lot of different things like that as they you know as they grow and decide, they want to try something new yeah, and so then the other thing that i just wanted to clarify That you mentioned is so, if you use tools like built with to see what people are running on their sites, you say that there are a greater number of sites over call it.

The 100 000 or 500 000 page view a month using ezoic when compared to an ad thrive or mediavine yeah, and i mean you could say i mean to play: devil's advocate even against that which is it's. True, you could say well because these alexa platform and izoic um, basically like any publisher, can come and use uh ezoic um.

You know we're bound to have more uh or something along those lines and those parties. You know you have to apply, and then they accept you're, not like it's, a scale problem for them because they have people doing it.

Even if you outsource um all your work someplace and you make it really simple so that you know pretty much any you know, outsourced person could do it um. It still gets the point to where it's hard to scale for them and um.

I think that that's, part of the case um – that's, going on there with some of that. But even when you take that into account, i look at that is uh a risk from the standpoint of realistically like that's.

If we think that people are gonna do this in five years and four years and three years, i i don't think that we're, looking at the the way that things are trending and my god izoic has such a Head start when it comes to using machines and ai and things along those lines and um yeah because of our growth, we got 33 million in growth funding last year, um, which means that we didn't need we didn & # 39.

T need money. Um we've, been profitable, for, i think, the last four or five years um, that's money so that we can hire engineers so that we can uh grow our support teams and stuff like that, so that we can basically grow As fast as our platform is – and i think that that's – something that publishers can take some amount of comfort in from the standpoint of i mean, go back and look at the history of this business, the people that we're Talking about now that we're competing with those people were different three years ago and they'll, be different three years from now, because they get bought and sold.

They go in and out of favor with with different types of publishers and um yeah. We we kind of sit here in this spot where it's like everything that you need. We want to make it easily and accessible to to all publishers.

We i i don't, think there's, any need for anything to ever be exclusive um. If you can set. If you can get access to something like adsense, you should be able to get access to everything else that any of these guys would offer you so yeah.

I love the points that you're, making there um for so for people listening, i mean they can kind of just take that information, as they will right, whether that provides comfort or just more data in their decision right that hey there are tons Of huge publishers on the zoid platform there's, not some magic that add thrive and media vine are using to you know to uh earn more money.

If you will um so big brands, use zezoic, i mean hearst is one of the largest publishers in in the world well-known popular mechanics, cosmopolitan um american media group uh, you've got uh men's. Journal like these are all these are all parties where they skeptical and then used the zoic, and then they continued using it, and these are teams that have adopts people on staff um, and so this has been um.

This is not just something that's like oh well, we & # 39, ll use a zoic, and you know, but once you get big enough, you can use something better, um, the the materials and the access to uh ad networks, exchanges uh from A monetization standpoint that you get with these oak is exactly the same stuff that you're, seeing uh quote: unquote the big guys use yeah that's awesome.

So one other question that comes up that i'll. Let you address again in my facebook group or that i've just heard is that izoic hurts sight speed. You know i signed up for a zoic um and then my site speed tanked.

Once you know all the ads went up, uh or i had you know some issues that caused the the site to slow down. So what what do you say to that concern again? I know you're, well aware that one comes up quite a bit.

What do you say to that? One yeah? So i you know um one of my one of my heroes. Um is mark twain and mark twain's uh. He grew up about half an hour from where i grew up, and so when i was in school, you go got to go on like one field trip and you got to go on it like 10 times over the course of your uh.

You know your role. Missouri education, he went to his hometown. One of my favorite mark twain quotes. Was it's, easier to fool people than to convince them? They've, been fooled and um. I at a zoic. I like from day one i've, always said, like i'm, not going to be a marketing guy, we're, going to basically be educators and it's.

An uphill battle in this space and site speed is an area where i think, even people that feel like they have a good grasp on it. Myself included would say that there's, all kinds of nuances and complexities to it that just make it a huge pain in the butt and google doesn't make it any easier on anyone right, um that said, um all ads, slow Websites down whether you're talking about adsense or um, you know something more complex where you're setting up header bidding and ad exchange and everything else, um the more complex the setup, the more latency and things like that that you're going to get, and the reason is is because you're waiting for bidders calls are going out to multiple different places and things along those lines.

Google itself is slow, singleton networks like adsense or, if you just put like one single ad network, where you have like an ad tag or an auto ad script, or something like that on your page um. Those things are it's, making a single call, so it's slightly faster, but i actually just took my jiu jitsu site and i uploaded a blank html page.

So no wordpress, no nothing and i put google analytics on it. Just google analytics took it from a 100 score just being blank to like 91 on mobile, and then i added a facebook pixel and i added an image and that brought it down to like 85.

And then i threw in adsense auto ad script in the header. Along with that – and it brought it down to the 40s wow, so it gives you an idea of just how much ads will slow sites down now. That being said, easily should make a site faster, showing ads than it could ever be otherwise, and that's just out of the box.

So if you integrate with us one of the things that we do is we um. We're. Big proponents of name server or cloudflare integration, which is server level integration. It's, how pretty much every person that's! Writing a book on header bidding and basically uh any kind of like com, complex ad setup right now it's, talking about server side bidding and things like that.

There's just a lot of there's. A lot of benefits to it right, but outside of that you've got um. You & # 39. Ve got the fact that ezok offers a free cdn. If that's, enabled, along with caching being set up properly.

So there's. Multiple types of caching people think because they have a caching plug-in on a wordpress site like they've got that does the job, but you have browser caching, which means that somebody & # 39.

S visited your site before they don't have to reload all the assets. If you have a the cash policy not set to you know something like an hour or something silly um. As long as it's, not like a forum and then you've got like the cdn cache, which is you know, you have your host and then you have all the mirror versions.

Um that happen across the world on a cdn. So people can access like a more local copy and as long as that, cache policy is good, you can access those which is faster. So if you don't have those things enabled and zook has to call back to your host origin.

Every single time it's, going to take longer as well. So a lot of these things are settings and it comes back to what i was talking about earlier about like getting things set up properly and i think speed has been one of the most difficult ones.

It's, a lot like um, a vaccine. If you will – and that is that the things that it takes to build a vaccine that works for all people is very difficult because you have to test it and maybe at a thousand people, you find it to be safe and everyone gets the benefit.

But then you roll it up to 10 000 and people start getting really sick or a couple people uh break down, and god forbid they die right. That's. If you, if you implement, like all um all one size, speed implementations on every site, you're, going to start seeing that a lot of sites start um failing.

Basically it's going to break them. It's, going to break the framework whatever so ezok has built the site, speed, accelerator um, which i think we get a lot of. We get hammered on this, but most of the features are free, like the gross majority of features which are paid elsewhere are free with these.

If you enable all of those you enable the cdn um and you integrate at the name, server level and you don't have silly cache policies set because you & # 39. Ve got a plugin or something like that. That's.

Setting these for you, which is super common, i had to write. I wrote my own support article for it, because i was just unhappy with how well we were solving this problem and if you implement those things, ezok will be as fast as anything else.

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