My Honest Ezoic Review in 2024

TLDR: I encourage bloggers with under 50,000 monthly sessions to use Ezoic. They’re good and will approve small sites.

How Much Money Did I Make With Ezoic?

I have an entire review below of Ezoic. That said, most people are probably just looking to see how much money they’ll make, so let’s start with that.

I can’t tell you exactly how much ads will pay on your website. All websites are different and ad rates vary based on how many ads you put on a page, your niche, what the economy is like, whether it’s the holiday season, etc.

That said, in my first two weeks of having ads on this site I was earning about $11 per 1,000 pageviews.

Ezoic says it takes 12+ weeks for its AI to perfectly optimize your site for ads. So I’m hopeful that I’ll actually earn more with time (and again during the holiday season). For now, all I can say is I set up Ezoic on my site and had an $11 RPM two weeks later.

I’ll update this post with a new graphic after 12 weeks (and again after the holiday season) to see if these numbers improve. For now, this is what it looks like after very little setup on my part.

Is $11 a good EPMV? I generally tell people that an ad network will pay $10-$30 per 1,000 pageviews. So it’s in line with my projections (albeit at the low end). That said, I do believe I’ll see better numbers 12 weeks from now, once I perfect the ad placements, and in Q4. Over the course of a year I probably will edge closer to $20 per 1,000 pageviews.

Sign up For Google Adsense

Wait, isn’t this review about Ezoic?

It is, but you’ll need to sign up for Google Adsense separately. And I highly recommend you get your website approved by Adsense prior to signing up for Ezoic for a few reasons.

1. It’s easier to focus on one approval at a time and Adsense approvals are getting harder.
2. You’ll make more money on Ezoic if you integrate Google Adsense with it.
3. If you’re already approve for Adsense Ezoic approvals should be simple.

Setting Up Ezoic (It’s Easy, if you use their Name Servers)

I’m a little annoyed that the Name Server integration option is effectively required. The code option will load your webpage twice (making it unusable). I also had some caching / ad placement problems with the WordPress Plugin (although it’s usable). The other problem is the WordPress plugin option won’t make as much money as the Name Server integration.

If you can get over the security concerns of handing over Name Server access to your ad provider, it’s an easy setup process. You just change a few name server fields with your domain registrar and you’re off to the races.

Once I was set up I was able to place code snippets in my theme to tell Ezoic where I wanted my ads to go. The AI will sometimes place ads in intrusive places and I feel like the ability to control this is a must-have feature. You can also control the types of ads that will show up on your site (I had to remove interstitials between pages which is on by default and very intrusive).

Another cool option is controlling how many ads show up per page. You can determine this based on how long your content is and whether it’s desktop, mobile, or tablet. I limited my site to 8 ads per post, but after reflection I think I should lower this number for shorter content. It feels intrusive.

I also appreciated the ability to straight up remove ads from my high paying affiliate pages. This is a big deal for me! These blog posts make so much per affiliate click that it’s just not worth ever showing ads on them.

And that’s really it for the setup. Here are a few things I glanced over but that might apply to you.

• You have to get your content approved by both Ezoic / Adsense and then connect the two accounts (this took me 1 business day).
• My rep responded to me quickly. Sometimes not until the next business day but they always got back to me with OK info.
• There was some caching stuff I had to set up for site speed that’s a little technical. Not hard for me but I’m also a software engineer.

Anyway, let’s get into how Ezoic affected my site speed.

Site Speed & Ezoic

There are definitely some site speed negatives that come with Ezoic. Obviously anytime you place ads on your site your speed is going to take a hit.

That said, I feel like Ezoic has a couple special things it’s doing that could be done better.

1) Ezoic Adds Hundreds of Network Requests and Dozens of Domain Lookups.

It’s real bad. This is a popular page of mine and pre-ads it had about 20 network requests and fully loaded in about 1 second (vs 17.5 seconds with ads). So not great.

But, maybe every ad provider does this and this is the only way to serve ads… If I check out sites with MediaVine it’s similar levels of requests (though not quite as bad).

Despite the fully loaded time being abysmal, I’m still passing core web vitals. So having ads isn’t messing with those important metrics too badly. The software engineer in me is horrified, but maybe it’s not so bad from a blogging perspective.

2) You Must Use Ezoic Leap as your Caching Plugin

Since Ezoic is both your NameServer and caching your content, they effectively become your web hosting provider. If you’re not a computer guy you may not notice it, but it’s happening through Ezoic Leap.

This is a love/hate type service. Your typically blogger using cheap shared hosting and that doesn’t know what a caching plugin is, may actually see their site speed IMPROVE when moving to this ad network. So from that perspective I love it.

The reason I hate it is because I’m a software engineer. I worked hard to get my site onto Google Cloud Platform and make it blazing fast. For me, Ezoic can’t possibly host my site as fast as I can and so this is a huge downgrade (and I hate it).

Admittedly it’s probably a good thing for most users though.

Did My Traffic Increase or Decrease After Ads?

I recently started asking myself the following two questions.

1. Since ads slow down my site and hurt UX, won’t it decrease my traffic?
2. Since Google is a greedy corporation that makes money from ads, aren’t they incentivized to send me more traffic if I have ads?

There was only one way to test this hypothesis (put ads on my virgin site and see what happens). I first put ads on my site on March 28th, 2022. Here’s a graphic from Google Search Console with my traffic numbers before and after ads.

I need more data. Two weeks into ads the data is inconclusive. In 3-4 months I’ll update the graphic with my results.

Conclusion – Should You Use Ezoic?

My personal opinion is as follows.

1. Ezoic is definitely the best ad network available before hitting 50,000 monthly sessions.
2. All ad networks pay better than Google Adsense alone (probably).
3. If you’re getting 3,000+ monthly sessions the money from ads can add up and may be worth experimenting with.

So yeah, if you’ve read this far I highly suggest using my affiliate link to sign up for Ezoic (it helps the site grow).

It also didn’t impact my review. To prove it, is an ad network like MediaVine better? When I get above the required 50,000 monthly sessions I plan to do a full review and compare the two. For now all I can say is most bloggers I talk to that qualify seem to prefer MediaVine.