Last week, Ezoic celebrated its first ever Customer Week (thanks for attending, by the way!). To wrap up the week, Ezoic CMO Tyler Bishop hosted a live Q&A webinar to respond to any lingering questions surrounding Customer Week, our exciting Levels announcement, grants and other updates made throughout the week.
You can watch the full recording of that webinar embedded above. For a written version of the most frequent questions and Bishop’s answers, read on!
1. Once I have all my ad blocks deleted and start with the [Ezoic WordPress] plugin, how much extra revenue would you say we can achieve versus the old method?
So the question is related to the new features for Ad Tester inside of the Ezoic WordPress plugin. It’s not necessarily a best practice to delete your old placeholders. In fact, in many cases, we will tell you, “Do not do that,” because there’s a lot of data associated with that, meaning anything that Ezoic has learned over time, it’s stored in those placeholders. That’s one of the reasons for the plugin itself. Oftentimes publishers will change themes or there will be something specific about your site where the layout will change. When using the Chrome extension, we lose that data from the placeholder that was there. If you’re using the [Ezoic WordPress] plugin, any placeholders created, even when you change themes or change something about the way that the site looks, inside of the WordPress framework, we can keep those ad placements in approximately the same locations, so that’s a big benefit of the plugin.
Now, the other benefit is if you haven’t been using Ezoic for very long, if you have lower traffic… [if you] maybe have less than 10 placeholders on your pages, I would say it’s probably worth it to start from scratch. Delete those placeholders, use the plugin, because an optimized ad placeholder setup can in some cases be double the revenue of a poor one. That said, if you’ve been using Ezoic awhile, you’re getting more than about 10 to 15,000 visitors a month and maybe someone has helped you set up your ad placeholder setup, you don’t know that it’s the best practice to delete your existing placeholders and use the plugin. If you’re in the former category where you’re potentially a good fit for deleting the placeholders and using the plugin, it’s hard to say, but a good placeholder setup traditionally will outperform a non-optimal one by anywhere from 10 to 100 percent.
2. I saw a grant application that says you can take all of the grant money at once or take it monthly. How much would we get with a growth grant at once? What is the accurate maximum amount for a growth grant? Has anyone been approved yet?
Yes, many have been approved. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have already been committed to our publishers and much more to come! The amount of the grant is going to depend on your level and the type of grant…In the application, we’re asking essentially if someone would want [the grant money] in a lump sum or if they would want it monthly. Just because the max amount is the max amount doesn’t mean that a growth grant will be that amount.
When we’re going through [applications], we might look at two publishers that both have different goals. Rather than give one publisher a grant and another publisher nothing, we might think both these publishers would benefit from some money, so let’s find a way that we can maybe give them both some. I’m in favor of giving out as many different types of grants in whatever amounts we can to publishers that are doing the types of things that are growing and showing promise.
3. When will Level-Up Learning be available in Germany? (or other countries)
Hopefully soon! You know, Level-Up Learning is something that is going to be really exciting. I imagine that it will be very successful, and depending on the success of the publishers coming out of it and the feedback that we get, we’ll probably take aspects of that program and figure out how we do it in different languages like German and French and Italian. Then also, [figuring out] how we expand it, how we do more of the types of things people found beneficial in the first class. I think it’s only a program that we plan to grow, and that includes having it in foreign languages.
*Note: The first Level-Up Learning program takes place on October 4. Sign-up in your Levels dashboard today.
4. Does Ezoic monetize YouTube videos or do we have to do that in another way? If it does monetize, then what are the requirements?
So, YouTube is a closed system. If I understand the question properly, [the answer is that] the only way that you can monetize a video that you would upload through YouTube is through Adsense. Google doesn’t really open it up for anything competitive, so there’s not a place for us.
That said, [if the question is], “Can Ezoic monetize video and can easily help you monetize video on your site or monetize video on the web?,” the answer is yes. If you go to the video tab [in your dashboard], you can upload video, you can use our placeholder technology to actually have us move the video player around on a page so that it plays in places that are more engaging to visitors. Adding video to pages, or just having video on your site that we can index, gives you a lot of advantages. It drives more of an audience to your site.
Video is traditionally pretty additive in terms of revenue and we’ll earn more money than what you earn from YouTube because there’s no one competing. So with Ezoic, there’s a lot of ad partners that compete, including Adsense and AdEx and all the other parties inside of Google.
5. Will grants come with any strings attached, like a two-year contract for example?
Nope! If you [select] lump sum, there may be something in there where if you did that as opposed to the monthly payments, you would just have to agree to stay with Ezoic or keep that site with us for whatever period of time, like six months usually. But if you want [the grant money] in increments, there’s no strings attached.
Finding more information on Customer Week
Be sure to watch the entire webinar for all the questions answered by Bishop. In case you missed any of our Customer Week announcements, there are areas available to find the answers to your questions. We made a quick guide below to help direct you further.
- Customer Week
- Levels
- Level-Up Learning
- Video Player
- Blog: A New Way to Host Video
- Ad Tester
