Taboola vs Mgid- CPM Rates, Payments, and Earning Reports

In July 2007, Taboola was founded, thinking about content consumption patterns, and ways to predict the videos people may like before ever expressing an interest in watching them. It took 3.5 years to innovate around what became the foundation for Taboola’s mathematical predictive engine, Taboola EngageRank™, that later became part of publishers’ workflows given its various optimization capabilities. This algorithmic innovation around video then helped Taboola broaden its solution to recommend articles and slideshows, providing world-leading publishers with a single, ultimate discovery and monetization solution. Taboola is one of the fastest growing native ad network in the world with plans to bring forth native video ads in the near future.

Mgid is one of the oldest internet companies around and has evolved from a traffic exchange network to a native ad network. The company has a huge global presence and has some of the top publishers and advertisers across its network.

If order to signup with Taboola as a publisher, you need to have at least 1 million page views per month. Your registration will be reviewed and if you need the minimum traffic threshold, you will be asked to sign a NDA, and following which your ad codes will be set up. The traffic requirement was when I signed up with Taboola and that was around 2 years back.

Mgid has a more flexible minimum traffic requirement. You should be approved with less than 10,000 page views a day ie. 300,000 monthly traffic volume. You will also be assigned a dedicated account manager who can answer your queries and help you with the entire setup.

Taboola Revenue Share vs Mgid Revenue Share

Taboola is known to take a 50% revenue share of what the advertiser is bidding for the cost of a click. While this is essentially quite a hefty cut when compared with the industry standards. In fact, Google takes a 32% cut on AdSense ads and 20% cut on ADX ads. But, we definitely can’t complain as long as they provide the publishers their due share of revenue. We couldn’t find any revenue share percentage mentioned by Mgid.

Taboola Ad Quality vs Mgid Ad Quality

We found ads from Taboola to be more diverse and high on the quality index when compared with Mgid.There seems to be more regional advertiser base with operations team across the globe in the case of Taboola. For Mgid, their ads are same, either leading to weight loss/health products, make money scams or sites which are running on traffic arbitrage model and thus requires huge traffic influx.

Taboola CPM Rates vs Mgid CPM Rates

Taboola is a good alternative for sites which don’t have a high AdSense RPM but delivers a good amount of traffic. Taboola is a pay-per-click network where you get paid only for clicks. Average Cost per click may vary from 2 cents to 5 cents but is typically low for Asian traffic. Depending on the traffic quality and location, ad RPM can be $2+

If you place one Taboola widget below the content area and one on the sidebar, you can expect a CTR of 2-3%. Also, Taboola offers pop up widgets which work well on desktop traffic. You need to get in touch with your account manager for more widget types.

Mgid CPC rates vary from 1- 5 cents and are higher for tier 1 traffic. News and viral websites tend to have the highest CTR with Mgid and thus they perform quite well in these niches with average ad RPM going as high as USD 1.

Taboola Dashboard vs Mgid Dashboard

Both Taboola and Mgid have clean reporting which is not only detail oriented but also real time with a little delay. This makes both the networks quite robust in terms of their ad performance monitoring and reporting. I have personally found Mgid’s dashboard is be more appealing in terms of UX.

Taboola Earnings Report vs Mgid Earnings Report

It is always interesting to share earnings reports. In fact, this is the most crucial section of any review article and publisher’s final decision of joining an ad network largely depends on how well the network can compensate in terms of revenue, click-throughs, and cost per click.

As you can see here, the earnings report shows an average CPC of 2.5 cents and is largely due to the fact that most of my traffic is from Asian countries. Attaching below, few more graphs that can give you a better idea of the CPC rates of Taboola based on countries.

Now, let us take a look at Mgid earnings report. I haven’t used Mgid on my site for a long time and the following image is taken from flippa. On my site, I was getting a CPC which was a bit less than 2 cents. However, Taboola ads were more appealing to me and I restored to Taboola ads.

Taboola Payments vs Mgid Payments

Taboola pays its publishers in NET 30 days once you’ve accrued $100 on your account. They pay via Payoneer to Indian publishers after verifying your account and PAN. On the other hand, Mgid pays directly via Paypal and thus is much easier. Mgid also pays its publishers in NET 30 days once you’ve $100 is payable earnings. Both the networks pay its publishers on time and thus have no record of scams.

Our Verdict

It terms of ad quality, definitely, Taboola is far ahead of Mgid. When talking about the CPM or RPM rates- this is something which varies from site to site and largely depends on the niche and the traffic sources and geos. Mgid works well for news type websites and viral sites. On the other hand, Taboola is a better option for broad niche sites. As a publisher, you should try both of these native ad networks on your site and see which is performing well. If you see both are performing equally well, feel free to keep both the ad units on your site and optimize the placement for a higher return. Our final verdict will be slightly favored towards Taboola but we can’t deny the fact that Mgid is one of the best alternatives for publishers with low volume traffic. I hope this comparison on Taboola vs Mgid has been helpful to you. Keep visiting Blognife for more interesting posts on ad optimization.