Why we Removed Our Sites From Ezoic
Is it wise for publishers to monetize their sites via Ezoic? Is Ezoic good? Should you join Ezoic? Those are questions that many publishers ask themselves on a daily basis. In this article, we will share with you why we removed our sites from Ezoic.
Ezoic is, without doubt, one of the greatest google partnered ad networks that you will be able to find anywhere out there. The platform comes with a host of advantages, not least of which is the fact that publishers can sign up even when traffic to their sites is still very low. Ezoic now accepts signups by people even with less tha 1000 visitors per day.
The same cannot be said of other ad networks such as Mediavine, which are rather strict with their entry requirements. We have personally used Ezoic on a number of our sites over the past few years. However, we recently decided that for all its glamour, Ezoic was not the best fit for us. So, why did we decide to cut our relationship with Ezoic?
90% of our traffic is mobile. We need to use AMP
When we started with Ezoic, we mentioned during the onboarding process that our site ran on AMP. In fact, Ezoic will ask you to remove AMP from your site as part of this process. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages.
It’s a protocol that’s designed to speed up page load speeds on mobile devices. This is done by stripping web pages of resources heavy elements such as JavaScript. The result is a better user experience.
AMP was born out of the fact that the majority of web searches across the globe are now coming from mobile devices. In fact, nearly 60% of all search traffic in today’s world comes from mobile devices. That is something that all content creators need to keep in mind.
For us, the statistics are even more striking. You can see what we are talking about in the above screenshot. The statistics are for this particular site. As you can see, between 02 December and 29 December 2023, 80.3% of our traffic came from mobile devices.
Meanwhile, 18.6% came from desktop devices, while the remainder came from tablets. Clearly, mobile devices provide us with the largest chunk of our traffic. Here is where we had a problem with Ezoic. It’s the major reason why we removed our site from Ezoic.
All our sites were on AMP right from the onset. That ensure that the sites grew at a bigger than normal pace. However, when we joined Ezoic, we were told to remove AMP. We do have to mention that it’s possible to implement Ezoic on an AMP site, but this is strongly discouraged.
We should also mention that it’s possible to optimize your website for mobile without AMP, and this is something that the majority of sites out there do. However, we were on AMP, and when we removed it, everything fell apart.
Ezoic severely slowed down our sites
The mobile-first philosophy centres around one thing; speed. The fact of the matter is that Google rewards faster websites with better ranks. One of our major gripes with Ezoic is that it severely slowed down our sites.
This is something that the folks at Ezoic will argue about, but it’s something that we observed on all our sites. Speed slowed down to a crawl, probably because Ezoic has become a bit too complex for anybody’s good. Anyway, speed was another reason why we removed our site from Ezoic.
There were too many ads on our site
But, you may be wondering, why did our site speed slow down after joining Ezoic. The major reason for this was the fact that Ezoic places too many ads on a web page. Their main thrust is on maximizing revenue, but they do it at the cost of speed.
We need to mention here that you can control the number of ads that are placed on your web pages, but that is not something that the average Ezoic user is going to be aware of. In any case, it’s good to get the most out of your pages, but at what cost?
Remember we mentioned that most of our traffic was from mobile? Having too many ads on the site becomes a challenge because they slow down the site. So, that’s something to always have in mind. It’s another of the reasons why we decided to remove our sites from Ezoic.
Is Ezoic Good?
In the above sections, we showed you how we removed our site from Ezoic? So, the question is, is Ezoic good? The answer to that is rather complex. In the first instance, when we joined Ezoic, everything was great.
However, we encountered a challenge soon after joining for most of our sites. They either stopped growing or traffic dropped down drastically. The major reason was the Ezoic bloatware.
In terms of revenue, we got a lot of growth after joining Ezoic, so we were initially happy. In fact, Ezoic can be a great website monetization platform. It’s the reason why a lot of people around the world have joined it.
The challenge regarding traffic was not entirely their doing. Part of it had to do with the Covid 19 pandemic. As soon as it hit, traffic fell dramatically for most websites. Not only that, but also monetization also became something of an issue.
Even to this day, revenues are still very depressed when compared to those of the pre-Covid era. Recovery still looks to be a long way off, even for those sites that have retained their traffic.
Today, it’s a matter of weighing Ezoic’s better revenue with website growth. We have decided that we would rather see our site continuing to grow. When we joined Ezoic, one of our sites was getting about 3000 visitors per day. Today, that figure has fallen to less than 1000.
Of course, there are many factors contributing to this drop, but we suspect that having too many ads on our web pages was a main factor in this rather sad drop.
Summary
In this article, we highlighted the reasons why we removed our site from Ezoic. It was noted that though Ezoic is a popular website monetization platform, it has a number of challenges. One of these is the fact that it severely slows down a website.
We noted here that with Ezoic, we had to remove AMP, which became detrimental because over 80% of our traffic is from mobile devices. The slower page load speeds then meant our rankings dropped down dramatically.
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