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Revcontent VS MGID - What do you prefer? (15)

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Hey all,

What would you choose between Revcontent and MGID in terms of traffic quality?

I've heard last year a lot of people saying the quality of RC went downhill, but it looks like it might have come back again reading some recent posts?

Currently I am running international COD offers on MGID and have had some profitable campaigns but nothing huge or long term at least.

I have never tried RC because I have done ok on MGID, but I am thinking of MAYBE testing out some offers on RC. From what I have read on here it seems RC is dominating MGID in terms of quality.

For those who have tried both quite recently, what do you prefer and why?

Thanks

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I only tried MGID for a few weeks then switched to Revc and liked it much better and have never looked back in that regard (although I still have an account balance on MGID and will likely try something out on it again at some point).

With that said, if I understand correctly, MGID has WAY more international traffic than Revcontent, which is very US-centric.

My *impressions* are that the people killing it on Revc are the ones running vsl's/nutra/lead-gen in the U.S. who know every widget like the back of their hand and run a variety of verticals concurrently on the 50-500 best sites on the network, and it seems that the people killing it on MGID are typically guys who specialize in a certain vertical (dating, nutra, etc) and/or geo, and really really master the MGID platform and figure out how to make it work, while focusing on that vertical or geo long-term.

It also *seems* to me that there are much more people on Revc who have moderate success than on MGID, but that those people who do figure MGID out tend to then have less competition to deal with than do the top Revcontent people, and likely have more consistent profits.

Could certainly be totally wrong about all that though... as I said I haven't used MGID in a long time...

Probably doesn't hurt to test Revc out just to see how it compares though either way

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Those two are not even in the same universe. Revcontent absolutely destroys MGID in every way, shape and form. I couldn't hardly get anything approved on MGID. I wound up just asking for my money back which they provided.

I do 4 figures a day ad spend on REV it s a REAL platform that provides real results.

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My choice is Revcontent, i have hard time to get campaigns approved in MGID,LOL

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In MGID's favor, a huge proportion of it's widgets seem to come from streaming sites, and you usually don't know what widget goes to what site, which in many ways makes it more akin to pop or push traffic almost rather than native.

Those were things I really disliked the first time I tried it, however in the spirit of transparency, I just started my first campaign in about 12 months with them today, and it is going to end the day in the green, which I'll admit absolutely shocked me, as I was expecting tons of bot widgets the first couple days.

We'll see if it was just a lucky fluke or what, but yeah, MGID does seem to have much cheaper clicks than the other networks, again, more akin to Push or Pop or something...

They do seem to be working with more and more high quality US sites though, Newsweek being the most prominent as of late.

The other reason I am hesitant to write them off is that Media Force/Comparisons.org/WeeklyPenny runs on them pretty heavily, and as far as I'm concerned those folks seem to have mastered native better than anyone at this juncture in time.

So yeah, as mentioned above, I gave up on them initially in favor of Revcontent (which I absolutely fell in love with by comparison), Outbrain, and Taboola, but we'll see what this new attempt at MGID brings forth. I'll keep you gents updated

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I've tried MGID on and off over the last few years and never had any real success. A lot of conversions but for whatever reasons low ROI or couldn't scale. Approvals took forever...eventually just opted for more convenient networks.

RevContent have had some big success with in the past but not recently...still much prefer RC though over mgid

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Thanks for everyones reply!


It seems RC might be the winner, but also depents what GEO you're running. I tend to run in non T1 geos and do ok out of it. But it really would be curious to test out some US offers on RC.


I never had any problems getting stuff approved on MGID unless it was real bad like celebs/real doctors in LP or disturbing ads.


Haha Jack, it's probably not a fluke that you're in the green so early A lot of people think they have bad quality traffic but I disagree.


As tawhay said approvals do take forever though, even worse recently.. It can take up to a week sometimes.
Tawhay and Jack: What geos are you running in mainly with Revcontent? And what vertical do you think does the best?


Thanks

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So a couple of you guys asked me what came of the above... wanted to add an update.

As I said, this was my second attempt at MGID, first in about 12 months.

I had noticed they had gotten some good new sites like Newsweek, and I saw some big outfits like Media Force and whoever is behind Life360.tips running on it, so wanted to give it a try.

Campaign was proven weight-loss one with proven funnel, proven ads, etc, same offer being run by most of the top weight loss people on the networks that allow it. I ran it profitably for a couple days on a separate network but now am going back and forth with that network on approvals as they slightly changed their P&P's and now require specific substantiations for weight-loss campaigns.

This new MGID campaign was US Desktop.

Here were the results:

Day One: Bid .15$, Revenue 160$ (two conversions) over 85$ spend
Day Two: Bid .15$, 0$ over 200$
Day Three: Bid .20$, 0$ over 200$
Day Four: Bid .25$, 80$ (one conversion) over 200$
>At this point my rep applied a blacklist to the campaign to block bad widgets>
Day Five: Bid. 30$, 0$ over 200$
Day Six: Bid .35$, 0$ over 100$

The first day was very promising, but it just did horrible since then, and I just paused it. I did just ask my rep to apply a whitelist to a duplicate campaign though.

I am hopeful the whitelist might work, but disappointed in the results of the blacklist campaign. I could have kept going certainly, but stopped now based on several factors I outline below.

Here's my thoughts on the situation:

Good stuff I liked:

-MGID seems to have VERY nice, helpful reps
-Platform is very easy to use
-The campaigns flow very nice, like driving automatic rather than stick-shift
-They allow weight-loss, nutra, etc
-They obviously have some good sites, like Newsweek

What I didn't like:
-In my campaign (again, results were three conversions for 240$ over 1000$ spend and 3500 clicks) I only had two widgets that spent over 10$. The clicks were spread out between hundreds upon hundreds of widgets that would get just a few clicks a day. I had TheOptimizer set up to block widgets at 0 lp clicks after 8 total clicks to block the bad widgets (lp ctr should be 40-60% on the funnel), but even with it that kind of super aggressive blocking, it was still hard to block many widgets that way because every day it would be hundreds and hundreds of widgets each getting 1-3 clicks... I even bid up one of my converting widgets to .75$ a click and still couldn't get it to spend.
-You have no idea where the clicks are coming from. Revc, Outbrain, and Taboola all tell you exactly what sites are sending the clicks, but MGID doesn't do this... the only thing you can do is look at your campaigns in Adplexity and see the ten widgets it provides the names of.
-When I did go into Adplexity to look at my campaigns, most of the sites listed were streaming sites with weird url's, and a couple more normal sounding ones. I entered one of the normal ones in my toolbar to check it out and it immediately caught me in an infinite back-button redirect loop that was maddening.

Conclusion:

I am hopeful that the whitelist might work if my rep agrees to upload it. If it does I will definitely report back about it.

It seems clear that there are people doing very well on MGID, as there are long-term campaigns being run on it by affiliates who clearly know what they are doing and run on a variety of networks.

I personally don't think I could get it to work though a regular blacklist campaign, at least not without spending many thousands of dollars blocking bad widgets. However since there's no way to know what sites are clicking on your ads, it seems to disincentivize doing that, since those same sites could just get new widget id's tomorrow without you being any the wiser...

Obviously MGID is a very successful company and I am a tiny, tiny fish in their ocean, but as someone with good feelings towards them who wants to run on them but hasn't been able to find success doing so, I think the two or three things that could really help would be: 1) letting us know what sites correspond to the widget id's, 2) allowing you to target specific sites like Revcontent does with their 'brand' approach or Outbrain and Taboola do with their publisher-specific whitelists, or 3) putting their widgets into separate categories so that you get more spend per widget per day and can block them faster.

So yeah, just wanted to share those thoughts in case anyone reads this in the future when researching different native networks!

Again, hopefully my rep will upload the whitelist and if that helps I will definitely let ya'll know!

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If you are running cps offers on mgid I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend setting up multi-step conversions.

The way that I did it was to place a fast redirect page between my lp and my offer. On this redirect page I placed MGID's tracking code.

After you place the code you can track on your dashboard all the people who clicked through to the offer. aka "desires". Since there's a lot more data then simply tracking sales, this speeds up optimizing ads and placements by a LOT.

To answer your question:

When I first started on MGID [4 years ago], I was blown away with the support I got. Their creative team made all of my ads, and my account manager optimized my campaigns. All I did was provide my links from my tracker and I had profitable campaigns. I thought it was too good to be true haha. They even gave me credit when my balance was $0 and offered to create a new lander for me. I REALLY was blown away...

But times change, the competition went up a lot, they are more restrictive with ads...yada yada. I havn't run on there much this year so I can't compare the 2 now.
Sometimes I had success on one platform, other times on the other. Both have changed a lot over the years and added new features.

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Hey Jack!

Thanks so much for the insight and little case study

Everything you said rang true for me, especially with the 10,000 widgets all spending a few cents a day.

I did run just 1 US campaign, a diabetes one that everyone was running at the time. I took the most popular ads/lp's etc with a couple of my own mix, but the results were zero conversions with $200 spend.

I have the most success with COD offers, and when I spy I see that 99% of offers on MGID are COD or dating with the odd crypto offer thrown in.

I would still love to try RC, but a RC rep on here said we need to create a new account so it will have the new features? I tried contacting him/her but they didn't respond. Do I need to create a new RC account? I have my cc all set up in my current account.

Cheers!

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Off the top of my head that's MGID's internal media buying team

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Hey Craig- it surprised me when you said that but I think you're right...

I just clicked one of their ads and it redirected to 'MGID'-something before redirecting to the landing page url, and I've noticed they're also often including an MGID widget on the lp's on stuff they run on Revcontent, so I believe you are absolutely right.

Very interesting... never heard of a network having an internal team run ads all over competing networks like that, but I'm sure they have no shortage of data they can use with which to build successful campaigns! They are all over practically every widget on Revcontent right now... definitely goes to show how competitive things are that is for sure!

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This is why I stopped sending conversion data back to MGID, because a handful of times I had decent volume campaigns, some even whitelist campaigns, but the good widgets happen to stop sending traffic and disappear all the time. When I ask them what happened they always say 'oh it's just publisher issues blah'.

Now without adding conversion data, I've had a campaign running 2+ months with no problems.

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We need a PSA to not send conversion data to ad networks.

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In terms of market share, MGID is clearly lagging behind, losing to RevContent in all segments. No doubts you have to choose RC

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