We created Trellis for the publisher who is an expert in producing content, but perhaps not technically inclined or interested in committing a lot of time to maintaining the nuts and bolts of a website. We designed Trellis for maximum performance right out of the box with the specific goal of meeting Google’s tough Core Web Vitals standards. All without requiring any technical know-how from content creators.

However, we also know that sometimes a site owner wants a specific look or a special feature and needs help from a developer to create code customizations to achieve that end.

We’re pleased to introduce freelance developer Ralph Cope, who has worked with the Trellis framework on several projects and joins us today to discuss his “under the hood” experiences with Trellis.

Tell us a little about yourself: How long have you been blogging and working with other sites and bloggers?

I have been working with bloggers for about 5 years now. I started as a writer for a fairly large travel blog before transitioning to a more technical role. I learned the ins and out of SEO pretty early on and in the last few years have become quite involved in the more technical side of things, e.g. development, performance optimization, structured data, semantic SEO, etc. 

I am now a freelancer who mostly provides consultations and full website builds to clients — both with the most up-to-date SEO practices in mind, of course.

Where did you first hear about Trellis?

Jackson Groves, owner of Journey Era and a friend of a friend, approached me about switching his site over to a new theme. Being primarily a content creator, Jackson didn’t feel comfortable handling any sort of development-related work and asked for my help. 

Being a Mediavine partner, Jackson had heard about Trellis from his point-of-contact and decided to give it a shot. He shared the documentation with me, and we went to work.

Switching themes and frameworks can be a big decision. What convinced you to try Trellis?

Having received lots of positive feedback, Jackson was pretty adamant about using Trellis. The biggest selling point was the potential boost in website performance and speed it promised. Initial projections pointed to Trellis decreasing load times by around 30% and boosting ad revenue by about the same.

2021 was also a rough year for Journey Era. Between several waves of COVID and a few borderline-cruel Google broad core updates, the site had lost a considerable amount of traffic. If there was ever a time to try something new, such as switching themes, this was it. 

What WordPress themes/frameworks (or CMS) have you worked with before Trellis?

Personally, I have worked with several different themes prior to Trellis, including but not limited to:

• Child themes
• Theme builders e.g. Elementor, Kadence, and Thrive
• Enterprise-level bespoke themes

What technical issues were you hoping to resolve with Trellis?

Mostly site performance and load times. Trellis was marketed as the first theme ever built with Google Core Web Vitals in mind, so it seemed like the logical choice.

That being said, Journey Era was already quite fast before I began working on it. Average page load times were around 785 milliseconds (0.785 seconds) according to initial benchmarks I took, which is a pretty impressive number already. Trellis and I would have our work cut out for us if we were serious about trimming load times.

How easy was it for you to set up Trellis on a website? Did the process go smoothly?

Trellis appears to be a very simple framework but has a lot of complexities under the hood. The way it is coded (the PHP and whatnot) is quite different from any other theme I have used before. Needless to say, there was a bit of learning curve in the beginning. 

At first, Trellis felt quite rigid to work with. There are relatively limited built-in options when it comes to theme customization (compared to other theme builders), which is a decision I imagine the developers of Trellis made intentionally in order to keep it as lightweight as possible. 

This meant I would have to style the site directly using my own HTML and CSS. 

After getting to know it better, I really started to appreciate the Trellis framework more though. Yes, I had to customize almost everything myself — including some special JS and PHP — but once I got my rhythm, I really enjoyed the work. By the end, I actually ended up learning a few new tricks for website development.

Did you do any custom work on the site (e.g., a custom homepage or post layout)? If so, how easy/difficult was it to work within the Trellis environment?

There were a few functions that needed to be built into the new site build using Trellis that unfortunately couldn’t be done using pure CSS or HTML. As such, we had to resort to making a child theme, which is something that I usually like to avoid just from experience. 

Setting up a child theme for Trellis is also a bit of unique case, again mostly due to the way the framework is built. Luckily, Mediavine’s development team was quite helpful when it came to troubleshooting and actually went out of their way to help explain things.

What improvements have you noticed with Trellis? (Site speed, CLS scores, traffic, earnings, etc.)

We built the new site using Trellis first on a staging environment and ran a number of benchmarks to track performance. Once the new site was 100% ready to go, we pushed it to production, let it sit for a week and then ran a final set of benchmarks. All benchmarks were taken using GTMetrix.

Overall, all key performance metrics showed positive movement. First contentful paint, largest contentful paint, time to interactive, and total blocking time* were all improved (meaning less load time) by about 30-40%. Speed index, which roughly translates to total load time, saw marginal improvements but nonetheless improved. 

The real fruits of our labor showed a little while after final benchmarks. Within a month of implementing Trellis and doing a thorough SEO audit of the site, traffic rose by 140% i.e. more than doubled. Ad revenue was also up quite a bit.

* These four metrics (FCP, LCP, TTI, and TBT) are displayed first and foremost when anyone runs a Google Lighthouse test on a given page. Generally speaking, they are good indicators when judging overall page load times.

Would you recommend Trellis to other developers and bloggers? Why or why not?

Yes, I would recommend Trellis to any blogger or developer who was looking for a lightweight theme/framework for their site. Despite the learning curve, Trellis proved to be a good performer and return on investment. 

I will say though that I can only recommend Trellis at the moment to content creators. Whilst it does a good job of handling and rendering blog content optimally, I don’t know if or how it could be used for more complex websites, like e-commerce.

What advice would you have for someone preparing to move to Trellis?

If you plan on developing a custom site in Trellis, you need to be competent at least in HTML and CSS. JS and PHP are also a plus. 

You could get away with creating a website using just the customization options provided by Trellis but you will be limited in what you can do. If you really want to get the most out of this framework and have total creative control of the frontend, you need to be able to style and build everything yourself to a certain extent.

If you haven’t already discovered it yet, I highly recommend using Chrome DevTools for dev work. This was a godsend for me when I first got into development and really opened my eyes to a lot of technical know-how. I still use it on a daily basis and certainly when I was working with Trellis.

What is your favorite feature of Trellis?

I like how the developers of Trellis did their best to incorporate as many speed optimizations as possible into Trellis itself, thus removing the need to install additional plugins. CSS/JS minimization, image lazy loading, and code injections are all handled by Trellis, which means I don’t need to use plugins like Autoptimize, Code Snippets, or Asset CleanUp. 

That being said, I still do use WPRocket as a caching plugin, as its one of the best of its kind IMO. I just make sure to turn off its handling of CSS, HTML and JS optimizations so that it doesn’t conflict with Trellis’ own features. 

Any other comments about your experience?

For content creators who are looking to streamline their site and maybe learn a thing or two about web development, Trellis is a great option. It doesn’t have as many features as other theme builders out there, but that’s probably a good thing. It’s a lot faster that way and will require you to think critically about what you really want include on your blog or site.

Thanks, Ralph, for chatting with us today. We’re so pleased that Trellis is helping you help your clients achieve their business goals!

We’re really proud of the results that Trellis has produced, and our team is committed to improving and enhancing this framework to continue to serve content creators and their business goals. Learn more about Trellis, and if you’d like to read more testimonials, check out our other Case Studies.

The post Ralph Cope Interview: Trellis Case Study appeared first on Mediavine.

On the heels of winning the DEI Driver and Highest Health Check honors the past two years, this marks our third straight year of GCPP recognition.

Allow us to offer a huge thank you to Google for this award — and to all of our publishers who helped put Trellis on the map in the past 12 months.

We’re excited to celebrate — with you. In honor of its award-winning status, we’re offering you the biggest Trellis discount ever: 20% OFF new annual, monthly or multi-site licenses.

Oh yes, you read that correctly.

This is also your one and only chance to get that discount on renewals of your Trellis license forever.

(Keep in mind that is only on continuous subscriptions; you can’t stop and start again and keep the discount, and this promotion doesn’t apply to already active licenses.)

Happy Cyber Monday and GCPP Award Day!

Today is Cyber Monday — or, as those of us with Internet connections call it, Monday — and we’ve got a terrific offer that we promise isn’t impacted by supply chain issues:

WordPress users can enjoy Trellis for 20% off as long as you subscribe, today through Wednesday, December 1st. Simply head to the Mediavine Marketplace and use coupon code TRELLISMONDAY to check out.

We’re thrilled to offer this deal since, without you, Trellis wouldn’t have come this far.

[Waits for people to purchase, then return to this article they bookmarked.]

Okay, now that you’ve all bought and installed Trellis and are passing Core Web Vitals, let’s talk about why we won the GCPP honor and why you’ll be happy with your purchase.

Trellis Won Because it Works

This section could be summed up in two words: It works.

Google handed Mediavine the Innovation Award because Trellis, and the rest of Mediavine’s broader efforts to help publishers pass Core Web Vitals, are extremely effective at meeting that goal.

As we write this, almost 80% of Mediavine publishers who have been running Trellis for at least 30 days are passing Page Experience and the required Core Web Vitals.

Yes, you read that statistic correctly.

Consider this for context: Overall, about 30% of Mediavine’s publishers are passing — and that’s above average for the Internet as a whole.

Thanks to solutions like Optimize Ads for Page Speed and Optimize Ads for CLS, which are available to Trellis and non-Trellis sites, we give all of our publishers our best shot.

But it’s Trellis that truly makes the difference when it comes to Core Web Vitals — and makes Mediavine stand out from the competition. It’s as easy as it is powerful.

With no technical background, you can install Trellis.

With a brief plugin audit, you can begin passing.

That’s it. No speed optimization plugins needed. Just Trellis and a good caching plugin (or, ideally, caching on a CDN …. more on that in a future blog post).

Why Page Experience and Core Web Vitals Matter

As many of you are aware, Page Experience is a ranking factor in Google Search. It also marks the end of AMP requirements for many of Google’s news and article carousels.

The second factor above is probably the biggest reason for news sites like Mediavine’s own celebrity gossip flagship, The Hollywood Gossip, to embrace Page Experience.

But what about publishers that still aren’t in Google News?

[Side Note: You should be. There’s no downside and anyone can do it! See: THG is a Google News publisher; it’s not called The Hollywood Fact. Sign up today at the Publisher Center.]

When Google first announced its Page Experience algorithm update in June, it started with a slow roll out. Now it’s here and its impact is clear for all to see.

Page Experience is one of many factors Google takes into consideration, but it could be the difference-maker for publishers in many situations.

Page Experience and Competitive Search Traffic

Earlier this month, we spoke to John Mueller on Facebook Live. The John Mueller.

According to John, Page Experience matters, and as Google’s SEO guru, that speaks for itself.

While it’s one of hundreds of different algorithms or signals Google considers, as we said above, it’s a factor when determining the results for competitive search terms.

What did John use as an example of a competitive space? Food blogs.

Mediavine isn’t only for food bloggers, but we do have a few thousand — and we feel that all lifestyle publishers should heed John’s advice on this one.

Our mission is helping content creators build sustainable businesses. Passing Page Experience puts you in better position to do just that, by capitalizing on more organic search traffic on more competitive terms.

That’s why we’ve invested so heavily in Trellis and other solutions.

Do I Need Trellis?

If you’re already passing Core Web Vitals, and have dedicated tech resources to help you pass the upcoming new Core Web Vitals and whatever else Google plans to add in the coming years, then probably not.

But for the rest of us?

For content creators with limited resources (or who want to focus on what they love, not Core Web Vitals), Trellis effectively plugs you in to Mediavine’s engineers, product managers, designers and support team.

All of whom are here to help publishers pass current and future Core Web Vitals. It’s what we call the Easy Button that keeps your website future-proofed.

Trellis Isn’t For Everyone, But It Is For Anyone

To be clear, you don’t have to be a Mediavine publisher to run Trellis. In fact, hundreds of publishers run it today who are not represented by Mediavine Ad Management.

And yes, they, too, are eligible for this insane 20% discount on (Cyber) Monday.

Purchase today and install when you’re ready.

Watch out 2022. Trellis is coming for you.

The post Trellis is Award-Winning. Make it Yours This Holiday Season. appeared first on Mediavine.

I couldn’t tell you who “they” are … or if they really do say that, honestly. But it sounds good, and in this case, it’s actually true. 

Trellis is here. At long last.

After two years of development and nearly a thousand sites helping us through the testing phase, Trellis is finally in open beta.

No more teasers. It’s here if you want it. Here’s the lowdown on Trellis and why you should install it if you haven’t already.

What is Trellis?

For those of you living under a teal-colored rock, Trellis is a WordPress theme optimized to help you pass Core Web Vitals without any technical knowledge.

In typical Mediavine fashion, Trellis follows all Google best practices and is built using the latest web technologies — oh, and did we mention it’s optimized for ads?

Long story short: Trellis is optimized to help you pass Google’s Page Experience metrics, increase your website traffic and make you more money.

Does it Work?

With 77% of Mediavine sites running Trellis already passing Page Experience on mobile — and that number increasing every day — that’s a resounding yes on the Google front.

As for traffic and revenue? 

Trellis websites are seeing 30% more monthly sessions, on average, compared to non-Trellis websites, along with 35% revenue growth. 

That’s worth repeating: 30% more traffic and 35% more revenue, on average.

What is an Open Beta?

With the release of Trellis version 0.14.3 to the public, we’re no longer requiring an invitation in order to be able to install Trellis. 

Hence, the open.

As for why it still has the beta label, this just means that the product is still receiving rapid development. It’s more than ready to go live on your site.

Trellis is already live on over 1,000 Mediavine sites, some of which have been running it for years with few, if any issues.

In fact, the blog you’re reading this on has been running Trellis for over a year. 

Yup. This is Trellis. (We know, it’s a lot … try to lift your jaws up off the ground.)

The beta is simply there because we’re in the process of making even more innovative changes. Have no fear.

Consider this: Gmail was an open beta for five years! This is a real thing companies do, not just a Trellis phenomenon.

Now that we’ve convinced you, here’s how you get it.

Head to the Mediavine Marketplace and Purchase Trellis Today

Starting right now, anyone can follow this link to the Mediavine Marketplace and purchase Trellis.

Wait, did we lose you? Come back!

How Much Does Trellis Cost?

Trellis will be available for $149 per year or $14.95 a month. It’s available to both Mediavine publishers and publishers not using us for ad management.

Why the Recurring Fee? 

With Trellis, you get more than just the theme framework source code.

You’ll have access to the Trellis API, which includes Trellis Images — a way to generate WebP images using artificial intelligence.

By generating the smallest WebP files with the least quality loss, you’ll make both Google and your users happy.

The Trellis API also includes another first-of-its-kind feature: Critical CSS and the removal of unused CSS at the page level.

This unheard-of speed optimization will not only help with PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals, but it will make your website noticeably faster.

Unlike other offerings, we generate this on each page, ensuring that if you design a page with Gutenberg and use different blocks, for example, every page renders exactly as it should, all while preserving the all-important speed boost.

Most importantly, your Trellis subscription includes ongoing support and development. 

This represents perhaps the greatest value of all; I’m sure you’ve learned by now that the Internet is constantly evolving — and fast.

Mediavine isn’t just interested in improving Page Experience today but years down the line, whatever Google and the rest of the web throws at us.

That’s why we built Trellis and why it’s worth the wait.

What About Child Themes?

If you’re familiar with theme frameworks, then you know that in all likelihood, you don’t want merely the framework itself but also what’s called a “child theme.”

That’s the part that will make your site look the way you want it to.

With your purchase, we’re including three free Trellis child themes for you to choose from: Bamboo, Birch and Wisteria.

In this open beta phase, we’ll be working with popular theme developers to bring additional theme options to our publishers.

But if you don’t want to wait, you can build your own custom themes as well. Have you seen Mediavine.com?

Is it Hard to Install?

Not at all. We’ve put together a ton of resources to help you out and of course, you’ll have Mediavine’s award-winning support if you need it.

NOTE: Please follow our advice and set up a staging site where you test and tweak things before you push it live. 

Your host should be able to help set this up. It’s better to troubleshoot any issues that arise before flipping the switch, if at all possible.

Even More is Coming Soon!

If you’ve stuck with us this long, you deserve the fun stuff. We’re honestly just getting started with Trellis and have so much more in the works!

Trellis Blocks

Even if most users arrive at individual posts or landing pages, publishers always take great pride in their homepages. We get it.

While we’ve encouraged publishers to use a static page with Gutenberg to build their own homepage, it’s often tough to make them look good.

Enter: Trellis Blocks.

Mediavine will be releasing a plugin, included with your Trellis subscription, featuring several Gutenberg blocks, as well as patterns to help construct beautiful homepages and other key pages like your recipe index.

That’s Not All!

Not even close! We’re working on a plugin to help you build really cool category pages with Trellis Blocks as well.

We have plenty more tricks up our sleeve as we go to migrate our own sites, including The Hollywood Gossip, to WordPress and Trellis.

Mediavine’s full resources and support are behind you.

Thanks for reading and happy installing!

The post Trellis Open Beta: It’s Finally Here! appeared first on Mediavine.

As we mentioned recently, the much-anticipated (or at least discussed) Google Page Experience algorithm update officially took effect on Wednesday, June 16.

Mediavine’s Core Web Vitals Update has all the details on the change, which is currently being rolled out and “will be complete by the end of August 2021,” according to Google.

The most significant changes from this update won’t be obvious until later this summer, in all likelihood, meaning you still have time to make necessary adjustments.

With the new Page Experience algorithm in effect, Core Web Vitals are here to stay, and we’re here today with an update on a related topic of interest to many of you: Trellis, which is now available to the public!

How is Mediavine’s WordPress theme framework, which we’ve optimized for pagespeed, faring thus far?

Trellis and Core Web Vitals

Released in at the end of August, the latest version of Trellis (0.14.3) is designed to fix any Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) issues, and a majority of Mediavine publishers running Trellis are now passing Core Web Vitals.

Yes, you read that correctly. 

As of August 2021, 77% of sites running Trellis are passing. Overall, over a thousand Mediavine publishers have hit these metrics, a crazy-high figure compared to the internet as a whole.

Considering that just 4% of more than 2 million websites studied are currently passing CWV internet-wide, we’re confident in saying that Mediavine is on the right track.

Trellis is unquestionably a major driver of our early success. More Trellis fun facts:

• 99% of Mediavine publishers running Trellis are passing FID (First Input Delay). If you’re running Trellis, FID is basically the equivalent of filling out your name correctly on a Scantron.
• 77% of Trellis sites are passing Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and CLS.

Given these trends and data, Trellis is looking like the most successful path to passing Core Web Vitals, but again, remember that it won’t fix things instantly.

If you’ve just installed Trellis version 0.14.3, it will take up to 28 days for Google to fully update data in spots such as your origin summary, Google Search Console, and the CRuX API.

Give it a little time, and don’t stress.

If you’re passing CLS in the Lab section of PageSpeed Insights after updating Trellis, you’re very likely to pass in about 30 days’ time.

For the 129th Time, When Can I Get Trellis?

You can get Trellis … NOW! We just released the Open Beta to the public, and you can buy Trellis for your WordPress site and install it today.

We know Trellis has been a long time coming. With the rollout of Page Experience and these awesome Trellis stats, we want it in your hands as soon as possible.

Until you’re ready to install Trellis, there are steps you can take on your own to be in the green for Core Web Vitals.

With easily enabled Dashboard options such as Mediavine’s Optimize Ads for PageSpeed and Optimize Ads for CLS features — and a little technical knowhow — you’ll be well on your way.

Mediavine’s own sites are passing CWV, so we know it can be done! For more on how we did that, check out this article on how The Hollywood Gossip is passing Core Web Vitals.

The post Trellis Update: Majority of Sites Pass Core Web Vitals appeared first on Mediavine.

But what gets us even more excited — always — is seeing the ways our Mediavine publishers find success for themselves and their websites with any of our products, like Create or Grow.

So today, we’re thrilled to welcome Sarah Auerswald of MomsLA to the Mediavine Blog to share another Trellis case study with us.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and your everyday life.

I moved to Los Angeles to work in the movie industry, fell in love with the place and the man who became my husband and have been here for 30 years. We live not too far from Venice Beach, although we don’t get there as often as we should for being this close.

Our two sons are both seniors right now — one in college and one in high school.

When I became a Mom I wanted to work a more flexible job, and thank goodness someone invented the Internet and blogging because after working on a few other business ideas before that, I found the right fit for me and my family.

When I’m not working, I love to learn about how other people run businesses, so I spend a fair amount of time doing that. I have been known to over-volunteer and was PTA President at my kids’ schools for way too many years. I founded and help run a local Chamber of Commerce because I think it’s great to support local businesses.

My hobbies include sewing, watching food shows on Netflix, trying to get my 17-year-old to talk to me and, prior to 2020, I spent a lot of time talking to humans in person. I hope to do that again someday.

How long have you been blogging? How did you get started blogging?

I started blogging regularly in 2008 with my baby site MarVistaMom.com which is all about my neighborhood where I’ve lived for 24 years. (And is still going, FYI.) I was inspired to start by a friend who had started one while she was traveling. She opened my eyes to the possibilities and I was hooked.

Once I got my feet wet doing that site, I was asked to join a group site — the LA Moms Blog — which was part of a network of sites all across the country managed by Silicon Valley Moms Group, and it was off to the races. Mom Bloggers were HOT and we got a lot of perks.

They ceased operations of the group suddenly in 2010, and my partner and I decided on the spur of the moment to form a new Mom Blogger group for Los Angeles on our own. MomsLA was born. But just like before, we had to figure out what people really wanted, sometimes the hard way. We have published over 2000 blog posts over the years, but it turned out that most of them were essays about motherhood that, by 2015, were no longer resonating with readers. Parents in LA wanted lists of summer camps, things to do with kids this weekend, where to get kids’ haircuts, or where the best playgrounds are, and other super-practical information — at least, that’s what they wanted from MomsLA — so we’ve adapted our content to fit.

How long have you had Trellis?

Since June 2020.

What theme/website setup did you have before Trellis?

A custom child theme built by our coder.

Was it difficult to switch to Trellis?

I felt it went very smoothly. And every question I had was answered right away by the Support team. That was great!

What would you tell anyone who is moving to Trellis to help them have a smooth transition?

Get your ducks in a row ahead of time. Do a plugin audit. If you don’t need any, get rid of them. And maybe hold off on publishing content for the couple of days prior to the switch.

Be sure you have site backups, and maybe go so far as to have backups of the last 10 posts in a Google doc or on your computer just in case.

Try not to have anything scheduled for publishing at a later date. Leave them all as drafts.

And keep trellis@mediavine.com ready in your address book!

What improvement have you seen in your pagespeed with Trellis?

Our pagespeed scores doubled immediately, going from 43 to 96. That was amazing! I will say a recent check has us not quite at that high point, so I need to dig in and find the reason.

Do you think Trellis has helped with your SEO? If so, how?

The pagespeed alone has had to have made a huge difference, but the font size and page layout is also important and they are so beautiful and easy to read now.

What excited you most about being part of the Trellis beta?

I really wanted to get in on the ground floor of the new theme for pagespeed improvements and ad optimization — and honestly, I’d forgotten I’d even applied (it had been so long)! So when I got the email saying we were in, I was thrilled!

Another big reason I wanted in was the site needed a facelift (we do live in Los Angeles, after all), and the Trellis theme gave us that. It’s so pretty!

Clean lines, legible fonts and I love the homepage with the circular elements for featured images. Even though I know not as many people actually go to the homepage, I still love it!

Would you recommend Trellis to other bloggers? Why or why not?

Yes! It has been an overall positive experience for us — pagespeed improvements, ad optimization and for us, a pretty, new site.

What is your favorite feature of Trellis? What do you like about the Bamboo theme?

Pagespeed! (And it’s pretty!)

The post Sarah Auerswald Interview: Trellis Case Study appeared first on Mediavine.

Despite the challenging circumstances, Mediavine persevered in what ended up being a productive and exciting 2020.

Having reflected upon the past 12 months in Mediavine’s 2020 year in review, we now turn our attention to the year ahead.

Believe it or not, 2021 is shaping up to be even more noteworthy — in a positive way of course — and for a number of different reasons.

Without further delay, let’s dig in and break down some of the things publishers can expect in our roadmap for the year ahead.

Mediavine Ad Management

To mitigate some of the declines in advertiser spend due to Covid-19, Mediavine invested heavily in its ad technology last year.

While these efforts paid off for publishers in the near term, their most significant impacts will truly be evident in 2021.

Part of that is macroeconomic: As vaccinations begin and global markets recover, advertising spend should continue to increase.

Beyond that, and more importantly for content creators, a number of projects we began in 2020 will soon be firing on all cylinders.

Mediavine Exchange: Server to Server

Let’s start with the biggest one.

As we told you recently, we spent 2019 and 2020 building our in-house custom OpenRTB Server-to-Server solution, the Mediavine Exchange.

The above link will direct you to a 1,500-word essay on the topic, if you care for a deep, technical dive, but the key takeaway is this:

The competition is reliant on third-party, off-the-shelf S2S fixes. In building our own solution, Mediavine is once again ahead of the curve.

In the first half of 2021, we expect the Mediavine Exchange to fully replace client-side header bidding for our publishers. If those words mean nothing to you, think about it this way instead:

By going fully server-to-server via the Mediavine Exchange, publishers will be years ahead of the industry when it comes to the fastest-loading ads, the highest viewability and the most revenue per ad spot in the industry.

Beyond that, S2S is paving the way for additional new and exciting aspects of our advertising offerings in the coming months.

Outstream

Another 2020 venture that’s been in the works for awhile, but which we only started talking publicly about recently, is the in-house Mediavine Outstream Player. This should realize its full potential in 2021 and here’s why:

Outstream ads (you can think of them almost as animated display ads) are high-paying video ad units that run in the same slots as traditional display ads without the cost and effort of publisher-produced video.

Thanks to the Mediavine Exchange, we have more exchanges integrated —and greater outstream inventory available — than any other solution, and our ad performance should demonstrate this over time.

Expect outstream to make waves in 2021, especially as our brilliant ad tech team continues integrating it in ways that I can’t even begin to tease yet (although I suppose that itself is one heck of a tease).

Bottom line: We’re now entering the second Decade of Video, and it’s going to be even more innovative than the last.

Native

Native ads, which extend beyond traditional display banner sizes as well as integrate the look and feel of individual websites, are not a new concept. They’ve been the talk of the digital advertising world for years.

However, the Mediavine Exchange (are you sensing a pattern yet?) is about to take this offering to another level.

Due to the complexity of designing, building and integrating these ad units across demand platforms, native ads have traditionally been the realm of just a handful of exchanges — Triplelift, Sharethrough and Google AdX.

Well, that’s about to see a big change with the Mediavine Exchange, with integration from all major partners.

We’re already testing with some big industry players, again, years ahead of the trend. While everyone else will be dreaming of a productive future in native, Mediavine publishers will be living that dream in 2021.

New Publisher Offering and Application Process

To focus on our core publishers, we made a significant change to our ad management service and products in 2020 by raising the Mediavine traffic requirement to 50,000 sessions a month (update concerning GA4).

This enabled us not only to improve the quality of our offerings going forward but also to drive the highest CPMs in the industry.

As with any shift of this nature, it was not without drawbacks. It created a void for publishers on the cusp of our previous, lower-traffic threshold, along with those launching new websites.

One of our top priorities of 2021 is to fill this void.

October 2021 Update

We remain committed to providing a monetization option for publishers who’ve not yet reached the 50,000 sessions a month threshold.

The creation of a new product — one geared towards meeting content creators earlier on in their journey, while balancing the needs of existing publishers — is on our roadmap for 2022.

We believe that everyone, from new clients to those who have been with our company for years, will be happy with the results.

Core Web Vitals: Pagespeed and CLS

Google is upping the ante and changing the pagespeed game once again, throwing down the gauntlet with a new Page Experience algorithm and a new set of metrics — Core Web Vitals — effective May 2021.

While hitting Core Web Vitals will mean a collaborative effort from all of your publishing tools, ads are often one of the biggest culprits in slowing down websites and causing Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

On the ad front, Mediavine is already alpha testing some significant shifts in the way we render ads to help publishers solve for both CLS and LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), the two most challenging Web Vitals to hit.

Currently, only 12% of websites are hitting Web Vitals as-is. Imagine how few of them will be able to pull this off while optimizing ads.

Like everything else, Mediavine has been preparing for this for a year, and our publishers will reap the benefits by standing out from the competition and dominating those Google Search results.

Third-Party Cookie Solutions

If you thought Google was moving the goal posts with that new Page Experience algorithm we just talked about, they’re about to relocate the entire field when it comes to cookies, data and privacy.

We’ve talked about this at length, and it’s no longer just a distant early warning. Sometime near the end of 2021, or early 2022, is Google’s timetable for Chrome ending support for third-party cookies.

No one knows exactly how the cookie is going to crumble (sorry), but analysts believe an ad revenue drop of up to 60% is not unrealistic.

Given the impressive market share of Android browsers and Chrome on desktop devices, Mediavine takes this very seriously.

After all, third-party cookies vanishing means the entire programmatic advertising ecosystem — and the personalized, targeted ads it relies on — must reinvent itself or go extinct.

Not to be overdramatic, but it is that big of a deal.

Fortunately, there are several paths forward and Mediavine is exploring each of them, in some cases incredibly ambitiously.

The two main paths through the post-cookie wilderness are the Privacy Sandbox and First-Party Data, which we’ll touch on below.

The Privacy Sandbox is the Google-led initiative by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). It’s meant to establish new, privacy-centric standards through which users control their data instead of advertisers.

While it won’t match third-party cookies in terms of ad performance, we see this as important part of a broader solution.

As Google’s most award-winning partner, we will be on the front lines in terms of implementation as the spec becomes more defined.

With First-Party Data, gathered when users consent to personalized ads by authenticating (read: logging into your site), publishers could actually see higher CPMs than we expect with third-party cookies.

Yes, making more money while respecting user privacy is an attainable goal; but how? The linchpin of that strategy is creating a value exchange with readers, providing incentive for them to log in.

On that note, allow me to reintroduce…

Grow

Mediavine launched Grow in 2020, but this will be the year it emerges as the foremost first-party solution for publishers.

Grow is a series of tools to help publishers forge a better relationship with existing and new audiences.

By providing increased value to readers through these tools, Grow enables publishers to encourage users to log in, thereby consenting to personalized content and ads alike.

The idea is that enhanced user experiences will leave readers excited to come back over and over again and encourage other readers to do the same, using the exclusive social functions of Grow.

To deliver this kind of value, we’re thinking big in terms of the features Grow already includes and its long-term potential.

We’re enhancing social features, creating ways for publishers to encourage readers to opt-in to newsletters AND personalize ads and much more that we’re excited to reveal in the coming months and years.

It won’t happen overnight, but Grow will soon become an instrumental engagement framework, providing the tools you need to emerge stronger when third-party cookies are but a memory.

Trellis

Trellis, our much-discussed WordPress theme framework years in the making, is finally ready to break through in 2021.

Trellis has been slowly expanding its beta phase, and you can expect it to be fully open to the public in the next few months.

Beyond simply being available and looking cool, Trellis is fully aligned with Mediavine’s goals of helping publishers hit Core Web Vitals, grow their traffic and, most importantly, maximize their revenue.

Trellis is built to work in concert with everything we’ve described so far, from exclusive native templates to slick Grow integrations.

As we roll out Trellis plugins, such as Trellis Images, you’ll see that this is much more than a theme framework.

It’s a one-stop shop for speed and user experience.

That isn’t to say there won’t be a pretty design. We have big things coming re: our existing child themes, as well as new ones in the making.

Even more exciting than the official Mediavine child themes will be the ones that the community itself begins to build this year.

With independent publishers poised to hit Core Web Vitals easily, while earning more money than even the largest legacy publishers, 2021 will truly be the Year of Trellis.

Grow Social

After acquiring Social Pug and rebranding the popular sharing plugin into Grow Social, we spent much of last year improving the product’s pagespeed, code base and existing features to our exacting standards.

In 2021, publishers can expect even more development from Grow Social, including tighter integrations with Grow.

As the fastest and one of the most popular social sharing plugins, Grow Social has great things in store (especially if you also use Grow) that we’re excited to announce over the course of the year.

Create

Last but not least, our OG WordPress plugin: Create.

While we’re still waiting on our friends at Google to develop more Schema types that fit in well with the Create brand, we’re returning our focus to its core offerings: Recipes, How-Tos and Lists.

Look for our long-promised improved nutrition calculation and imperial-to-metric conversion functionalities to arrive in 2021.

Create will always be the fastest, most user-friendly option for bloggers building structured content around reader-friendly experiences.

Education and Events

I wish I could confirm the return of “real world” events in 2021.

We’re eternally confident in our ability to revamp the programmatic advertising ecosystem and lead an entire industry to a safer, more prosperous future but certain things are beyond anyone’s control.

What I can promise is that when it comes to our extensive educational resources, Mediavine will not miss a beat in 2021.

From Teal Talks to blog posts, community groups and social channels, Mediavine is committed to helping content creators of all sizes build sustainable businesses.

Rising to the Occasion in 2021 and Beyond

To all four of you who made it to the end of this novel: I’m impressed!

To everyone else, I still love you — and I’m excited for the year ahead.

I know I’m supposed to say that, but if the past year taught me anything, it’s that even the greatest challenges provide opportunity.

This industry evolves so rapidly that providing a concise roadmap for a full calendar year ahead is a daunting exercise — and looking back, some of this might feel incomplete, even anachronistic.

But that’s also a big part of what inspires us year after year. Adapting to sweeping change can be scary but nothing is more rewarding.

Whatever obstacles the industry throws at us, we will face them head on, proactively and with a more secure, open and thriving web in mind.

Finally, I just want to thank you. The support of the publishing community — not just by trusting us with your business, but legitimately helping us build these products — is our biggest asset.

We will not let you down.

The post 2021 Mediavine Roadmap appeared first on Mediavine.

We first launched the core Trellis theme last March, and as of the end of October the Trellis beta program has been going strong. Over 1,600 sites, in pretty much every niche, now run the Trellis framework. (Update: the Trellis theme is now live and available to all WordPress users!)

We love celebrating our publishers for their hard work and constant pursuit of ways they can implement new things to help increase their sites’ traffic and revenue, all while sharing their expertise and knowledge to help others learn and grow.

Similar to our Publisher Interview series, Content During Covid series and our Traffic Case Study, our Trellis Case Studies also share success stories of how our MVPs started their blogs, plus how Mediavine has helped shape their businesses and lives for the better.

This series focuses on the transition to Trellis, site improvements, traffic increases, favorite features and their recommendations to other bloggers about whether or not they should make the switch.

Join us for our interview with Meredith of VidProMom, a site all about helping people create fun to watch videos so they can capture life’s relivable moments and share them. Meredith strives to help others start and grow their online businesses.

We’re excited to have Meredith back on the blog, so please say hello and learn how Trellis has helped her site look better, run faster and ultimately increased her income.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and your everyday life.

I live in rural Upstate New York with my two daughters and my husband.

When I’m not creating YouTube videos, blogging and running my membership program, I love to binge Netflix!

How long have you been blogging and how did you get started?

I’ve been a content creator for about six years now. I started blogging while working full time and that led to creating a YouTube channel.

Within a few months, I began making a little bit of money. I lost my job a year and a half later, which is when I decided to take my business full time.

How long have you had Trellis?

I have had Trellis for approximately three months. I have the main Trellis theme at the moment, as the Child themes haven’t been made available to me yet.

Was it difficult to switch to Trellis?

Not at all, and actually, it was way easier than I anticipated it would be!

I thought I’d need to dedicate a day to installing Trellis and making any necessary changes to the design, but it was super quick and painless.

You installed Trellis yourself. Tell us about the process. How hands on were you?

The process was totally smooth. I’m already a “hands-on” WordPress user so everything was clear and simple. (I’m a geek about these kinds of things, so I embrace new technology!)

What would you tell anyone who is moving to Trellis to help them have a smooth transition?

If your current theme has custom short codes only available within that theme, be prepared to make some changes to pages and posts that utilize those short codes.

You can easily figure out if you’re using those codes by doing a search of your pages and posts from your WordPress dashboard.

It took me about an hour to adjust mine, but since I’m using Mediavine’s Create plugin, all I had to do was create (see what I did there?) a few new Create lists to embed in my posts (which is a much better long-term solution anyway).

What improvement have you seen in your pagespeed with Trellis?

I am excited to share that after implementing Trellis, my homepage GPSI went from 50 to 84.

What excited you most about being part of the Trellis beta?

It feels like we’ve been hearing about it for ages, and I like to fiddle with new themes.

It’s been exciting to spend time working with a new theme that’s created by developers who I know are trustworthy and knowledgeable.

Would you recommend Trellis to other bloggers? Why or why not?

Yes, absolutely!

Trellis is easy to install. You can make tweaks to it and have confidence in knowing the changes you’re making are going to IMPROVE your site’s performance.

Faster pagespeed, more traffic and increased ad revenue!

The post Meredith Marsh Interview: Trellis Case Study appeared first on Mediavine.

In its early stages, Mediavine often billed Trellis as a WordPress theme framework, but our vision for this product is so much bigger than that.

Think of Trellis as a speed and user experience framework.

Through a series of plugins meant to replace tools and services publishers would traditionally use in the name of providing a state-of-the-art website, Trellis does much more than a traditional WordPress theme.

With Trellis and all that it provides, websites will be optimized for the new Google Core Web Vitals, plus reader experience and advertising.

Today, we’re discussing one of the first Trellis plugins — free with your purchase of Trellis — that will help fulfill this important mission.

Introducing Trellis Images

Trellis Images is an image optimization plugin.

It produces next generation WebP images designed to be automatically served by Trellis.

What is WebP?

Google Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, and the latest versions of Safari all support a new image format known as WebP.

WebP is the successor to old-school image file formats such as GIF, JPEG and PNG, some of which are over 30 years old.

In human terms, they’re older than some of the bloggers using them. In computer terms, they’re more like dinosaurs.

What makes WebP so innovative? These images are significantly smaller but at the same quality, while supporting all the features you previously needed a combination of GIF, JPEG and PNG to accomplish.

WebP supports transparent backgrounds (what we used PNG for), animation (the dreaded bandwidth-heavy slash awesome GIFs) and serious compression (JPEG) simultaneously.

Yes, it’s the one format to rule them all, and WebP looks fantastic as well. That’s what Trellis Images generates for you.

How Trellis Makes WebP Images

Once a publisher installs Trellis Images, the plugin automatically forms a queue which will go through your images to generate WebP versions of every image requested on your website.

Trellis Images will call home to our Trellis API, which is included — similar to how we generate Critical CSS — in your monthly or yearly Trellis fee.

Our API uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze your image and pick the perfect amount of compression to use, maintaining the best balance of file size and image quality. This will produce images at a fraction of their original size but look just as good to users.

We then send this image back to your WordPress server which stores it in the file system alongside the original image you uploaded.

Trellis is not touching the original image, only creating new WebP images — and only for images that are actually used on your site.

Does This Mean I Need to Compress the Original Image?

No, and please don’t.

Trellis Images will require additional storage space, but it’s incredibly important not to optimize / shrink your original images.

Why? Think of image compression like old school VCR or cassette tapes. (Really dating myself, I know.) Every copy you make, or each time you compress the material, results in significantly worse quality.

You always want to keep the original image around if you want to make new versions. Think of the re-mastered versions of your favorite songs, movies, etc. They were all created using the originals.

Keep your own “masters” around, in other words. Don’t nix your original images; we encourage you to upgrade your hosting instead.

How Trellis Serves WebP Images

If you’re running a Trellis theme, it will automatically look for WebP versions and serve those to users.

As we mentioned previously, nearly every web browser supports WebP these days, so nearly every visitor to your website will therefore be served this compressed, lightweight version of your image.

On the off-chance that a browser does not support WebP, have no fear. We will serve the original image, whether it’s JPEG, GIF or PNG.

And, while we told you not to compress the originals, WordPress will still shrink them down and serve the appropriate size to readers.

They may be a little larger since they’re uncompressed, but please realize this is only a tiny percentage of readers at this point.

Focus on the vast majority of your audience and upload large, high quality images. Then let Trellis Images do its thing.

How to Install and Configure Trellis Images

As with most of Trellis, Trellis Images is designed to be incredibly easy to install. Our goal is to bring optimal pagespeed and Core Web Vitals to the masses, which means making things work out of the box.

When you purchase Trellis in the Mediavine Marketplace, you’ll receive a download link for Trellis Images. You simply upload it to your plugins directory and activate it. (Check out the full installation guide here!)

That’s it. No configuration needed.

As long as you have a valid Trellis License Key and are running a Trellis theme, you will be soon serving WebP images and passing Google PageSpeed Insights requirements with flying colors.

More importantly, you and your readers will reap the benefits of a huge, real-world speed improvement.

Caveat 1: Trellis Images Takes Time

In order to ensure we don’t overwhelm your server, Trellis Images uses a queuing system to slowly generate your images over time.

We only generate images when they’re requested, making those versions as needed and reducing the storage costs of running Trellis Images.

Real world example: The first time a user requests an image, they may get the original file you uploaded. We’ll then start making a WebP version, which hopefully will be ready by the time the next user comes along.

For older posts, it may take a few days after install for all of them to be generated. But once you’ve been running Trellis Images for awhile, it should be nearly instantaneous.

You can circumvent this by visiting brand new posts in an incognito window after they’re published. This way, you’ll know for a fact that before most actual readers are on that post, the compressed WebP version of your images will be ready to go.

Caveat 2: Trellis Images Doesn’t Serve Your images

Trellis Images is generating the WebP versions for Trellis to serve up. In other words, you need to be running both Trellis and the Trellis Images plugin.

More importantly, Trellis Images isn’t a hosting service, nor is it a CDN. Your web server still does the work of serving your website and its assets (like images) to readers.

That’s why it’s important to make sure your hosting company is well optimized, setting the correct caching headers for images and ideally serving the site (excluding images) from a sitewide CDN.

Trellis Images is the first of many additional plugins we’ll be providing for free with the purchase of Trellis.

As always, we appreciate your patience and support. All of this is geared towards helping you build the most optimized, feature-rich sites on the web, so we promise it will be worth the wait.

The post Trellis Images appeared first on Mediavine.

The core Trellis theme launched back in March, and at the end of October we announced that the Trellis beta was officially open. Over 1,600 sites, in pretty much every niche, are now running the Trellis framework. (Update: the Trellis theme is now live and available for all WordPress users!)

All of our users across the board have seen improvements in pagespeed and overall performance after switching to Trellis.

Similar to our Publisher Interview series, Content During Covid series and our Growing With Mediavine Traffic Case Study, our Trellis Case Studies also share success stories of how our MVPs started their blogs, plus how Mediavine has helped shape their businesses and lives for the better.

The difference with this series is that it focuses on the transition to Trellis: Site improvements, traffic increases, favorite features and recommendations to other bloggers about whether the switch was worth it.

Join us for our interview with Shashi of Savory Spin, a site all about recipes that are easy-to-make, healthy-ish and tasty. She’s a huge proponent of “a little spice is always nice” and passionately incorporates that motto into her eats and treats.

We’re excited to have Shashi on the blog, so please say hello and learn how Trellis has helped her have a lightweight site with less plugins, more sessions and an increase in income.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, your family and your everyday life.

Currently, I am in the midst of moving from Athens, GA to Covington, GA (also known as the Hollywood of the South) with my daughter and our two older fur babies. This is our 3rd move in 4 years and I think the dogs are done with my flighty ways.

I am also in the middle of trying to switch up my full-time gig — which, currently, is working as a graphic designer for a small company in Athens. I have been mulling around the thought of taking the plunge and going back to blogging full-time, or getting a more meaningful job in Atlanta.

Lots to think about, which I get to forget when I’m indulging in the things I love —like cooking, puttering around the yard, trading chilies with my neighbors, messing with my dogs, hanging with my daughter and working out.

How long have you been blogging and how did you get started?

I have been blogging since June of 2013 — which means I’ve had this side hustle for about 7 years. I am incredibly passionate about tasty food as medicine and the blog is my outlet for that.

I actually started my blog because of my daughter. She wanted me to do a book of recipes, but a book seemed so tedious, so I figured I’d start a little online food journal that she could refer to in years to come. Well, God intervened and lead me to Mediavine for my fantastic side hustle with full-time pay!

I joined Food Fanatic in September of 2014, then hopped onto Mediavine in August of 2015.

Hands down, Mediavine has been one of the best things that happened to my blog. The ad revenue is fantastic, but being a publisher with a company that cares so much about its employees and for its publishers, well, that has been such an honor!

Even in the time of ‘rona, when ad spend was plummeting, my earnings didn’t. This was due to a lot of the positive actions Mediavine took and continues to take.

One of those changes for me personally, was being accepted into the beta program for Trellis.

How long have you had Trellis?

I have had the Trellis framework since the beginning of July. I am on the Bamboo theme.

Was it difficult to switch to Trellis?

From my standpoint, switching was easy and sweet. Just like eating a chocolate cupcake! (Please excuse the food pun #badfoodbloggerjokes.)

What would you tell anyone who is moving to Trellis to help them have a smooth transition?

Work closely with your host. Agathon is my host and they were fantastic in handling a few issues, while also fielding all my off-the-wall questions.

Before Trellis, when I had my site on the Foodie Pro with Feast theme, I was fixed on the need for a fantastic landing page. I thought my landing page was banging, but then I learned that people aren’t coming to my site for the landing page — they’re coming for the GF pancakes, salmon and other foods.

So, my best advice is to be open to suggestions by experts because they really do help.

What improvement have you seen in your pagespeed with Trellis?

I have seen growth in my GPSI scores from the 70s all the way up to the 90s.

My pages also load a good amount faster.

How has your revenue grown since moving to Trellis?

Since Trellis, my sessions and viewability have increased, which has led to a nice, consistent rise in revenue.

Each month has been higher than the last since I got accepted into the Trellis beta program.

Do you think Trellis has helped with your SEO? If so, how?

Yes, I think it has. More sessions and increased speed seem to support that, which is a definite benefit of Trellis, from what I learned during some of the Teal Talk and Theory of Content episodes.

What excited you most about being part of the Trellis beta?

I struggled with pagespeed as well as overall design, since the Genesis framework was hard for me to decipher. I was using plugins and pieces of code (not very effectively) to get results that appealed to me, but ultimately slowed things down.

I hoped to get in on the Trellis beta program because of all the reports I read, and was on the verge of giving up to have Feast do a redesign instead.

That’s when I got the Trellis beta acceptance! To say I was excited would be an understatement. I could not wait to get out from under the Genesis framework onto Trellis.

From joining Mediavine to adding Create, Grow and then Grow.me, Mediavine has consistently put out products that have helped my little blog grow — and Trellis is no different!

Would you recommend Trellis to other bloggers? Why or why not?

Yes, I would recommend Trellis to other bloggers — 200%!

If you are after a lightweight theme that delivers more sessions and viewability, then Trellis is hard to beat!

What is your favorite feature of Trellis?

I love that Trellis is so lightweight and gives my site a much needed speed boost.

Right after the install, my daughter asked me what I did differently, as she noticed that my site was loading faster.

The post Shashi Charles Interview: Trellis Case Study appeared first on Mediavine.

* Editorial note: Since the airing of this episode, “Grow.me” has been rebranded to “Grow.” *

From video playlists to Grow.me and, yes, Trellis, Mediavine Co-Founders Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger are sitting down with Mediavine’s Director of Marketing Jenny Guy to dish about all our coming attractions and share their best optimization tips.

Don’t miss this episode, sponsored by the lovely folks at Agathon! (Originally aired 7/16/20)

Watch the video here or check out the transcript below.

Mediavine Summer Updates with Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger

JENNY GUY: Hey, everybody. It is Thursday, July 16th. And you are watching the Mediavine Summer of Live, which as of today, is at the midpoint of our season. I’m Jenny Guy. I’m your host and Mediavine’s Director of Marketing. Welcome and thanks for watching, y’all.

How’s everybody doing out there? I’m kidding. I watch the news. I know how we’re doing. But for the next hour, we are going to forget about the dumpster fire in the world around us. We’re going to attempt to do that. And we’re going to talk about our businesses.

And I would like to kick things off with the audience. Please comment with one thing that is making you happy or getting you through this tough season of life. It can be a recipe. It can be a news story. It can be a GIF– I love GIFs– or a meme, a meditation routine, or practice that’s working for you right now. Whatever you’ve got that might help us all get into this better mind space, share and share alike. That would be amazing.

Things that are getting me through today, one, RBG is out of the hospital. I’m pretty excited about that. And also working with businesses that have similar values to Mediavine as well as the strong base of commitment to their customers– that makes me happy.

And the company that our episode today is brought to you by checks all of those boxes. Agathon— what up– provides WordPress hosting with a focus on speed and stability plus the expert support you need as a professional blogger so you can focus on growing your sites.

Working closely with our Mediavine engineers, Agathon has optimized their new high speed hosting platform for the Trellis framework. We’re going to talk about Trellis today. The power of Trellis combined with the speed of Agathon’s next gen hosting offers the performance you’ve been waiting for.

Join the wait list today and be the first in line when Agathon’s Trellis-optimized hosting becomes available publicly. That is so exciting. We are putting the link into the comments right now. So you can sign up for that and be ready to go. We are going to talk about Trellis later. We have been friends with Agathon for a long time. So for more information on them, check that in the comments.

Another thing that’s making me super happy today is a little help from my friends and colleagues. And that means the two people I have a guest today. I have Mediavine co-founders, Amber Bracegirdle and Eric Hochberger. They’re here. We’re going to do a State of the Summer Vine. We’re going to talk about everything that’s been happening and that will be happening around these parts, and taking your questions for them.

For anyone who doesn’t know who these two are, Eric is not only a co-founder, he’s also the CEO of Mediavine, which is definitely a shout-out to the HairClub president– also a client, which Eric is not a member of that, if you cannot tell by his quarantine hair. He is a computer programmer who leads all of our technical initiatives and is the architect of our ad tech. He’s also known for his Go for Teal and SEO like a CEO blog posting video series. And he’s crazy about Shih Tzus. Hi, Eric.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not too much cats, but hello.

JENNY GUY: No, we don’t love cats. Amber is also a Co-Founder and our Chief Brand Officer. She’s a longtime blogger at her site, Bluebonnet Baker. And she initially came on board Mediavine to run Food Fanatic, which is one of our owned and operated sites. Bottom line, they smart.

If you’ve got questions for Amber or Eric, drop them in the comments, please. And welcome to you guys. I don’t think I’ve ever had all of us, all three on, at one time together.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No, I think we’re going to do it– where were we? Chicago, maybe?

JENNY GUY: A year ago, probably.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah. And you were out sick.

JENNY GUY: I was sick, yeah.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So Eric and I ended up doing it on our own. And it was–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Not quite the same.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: –sad.

JENNY GUY: Well, I’m sure it was great. I watched it. It was great. I also forgot today what year I had a surgery. I’m like, was that last year? Was that two years? I don’t even know what– I don’t know what time it is or what time is at all.

But let’s do this. There is a lot happening at Mediavine these past months. And we’ve got so much exciting stuff to discuss. But first, let’s just get this out of the way.

Last week was a busy week for all of us, partially because a paid version of one of our WordPress plugins had a less than awesome thing happen, which was a bug in Grow Social Pro. Eric, will you please tell us what happened, and how we fixed it, and also how we’re making sure that never happens again?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so first off, huge apology to all of our publishers and non-Mediavine publishers that are running the paid version of Grow Social Pro.

We had two bad versions of the plugin that basically conflicted with certain settings if you had on in Yoast and you had those other settings on in Grow Social Pro. The combination of the two of those over certain versions of these two versions of these plugins would basically undo the other one’s ability to output meta tags onto the page.

And certain plugins, such as WPRM and Tasty Output, recipe card metadata through the Yoast plugin, what ended up happening is that stuff was accidentally being removed if you had basically our plugin instead of Yoast outputting that.

So what did that mean? As a result, a lot of, unfortunately, recipe bloggers lost their rankings inside of their carousels. So they no longer had rich snippets. Or they no longer had recipe results. This was temporary. It was a quick fix that we were able to release within a day, actually that same day. We sent out an email to all of the people affected.

And hopefully everybody was able to update in time. I know a lot of people were seriously impacted by this. And we’re sorry. But going forward, we have a lot of checks in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
We’re spinning up all new testing environments to make sure that every version. And we already have a very intense QA, or quality assurance process, but it’s going to be more intense as a result of this.

We’re going to make sure that we are running every version of Yoast that we can, at least recent versions– WPRM, various themes, various frameworks, various settings, most importantly. And we’re going to make sure that we’re not impacting other plugins going forward, at least the most popular ones that our publishers will be running.

So the best we can do is say we’re sorry. We will make sure this will not happen again. And I can assure you from both quality assurance and from the engineering side, we’re taking this very seriously. And this will definitely not happen again.

JENNY GUY: Our QA department has been working behind the scenes for a long time. But now they’re actually an official QA department. Eric, who’s in our QA department?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It’s a great question.
[LAUGHTER]
So it’s led by Doug, who is actually a former Support Engineer over here who has a QA background. He’s taken over our QA department. And on his team, he has– I should know their names because that’s what you do when you have an 80-person company, right? You know every person’s name.

JENNY GUY: No, you shouldn’t. That was my fault. Guys, I ambushed him.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Ambushed.

JENNY GUY: That’s what happens now. It was an ambush. Also, he’s kind of sick if you’re wondering why he sounds a little Bea Arthur-ish. He’s also in a basement in another state.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Surrounded by cats– as much as I love cats, I’m allergic to cats and they do this to me.

JENNY GUY: That’s why he sounds like that.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I can actually attest to that. Because the first time that Eric ever came to my house in New Jersey, my giant Maine Coons made him very ill.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Those are not cats. Those were, like, tigers, I’m pretty sure.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I mean, yeah, they’re like my–

JENNY GUY: She’s always like, just stay at my house in San Antonio. And I’m like, I don’t want to die. So I won’t.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No.

JENNY GUY: Thanks for the offer. So we do– and then Amber, I’m going to have you address a little bit about how we publicly respond to this.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right.

JENNY GUY: And if somebody missed anything, that they could make sure they don’t get missed the next time. Eric, take a sip of water.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So we immediately sent out an email once we knew that there was an impact. It’s a little bit difficult. Because some of our Grow sort of customer lists are not in our main customer service tool yet. That’s one of the things that we’re working on.

But we also sent out a blog post the next day. We held on that because I thought we were still waiting on some technical stuff. So I do want to send out an I’m sorry that we didn’t have a matching blog post to go along with the email. That was completely on me. I understood us to be waiting on some technical information and didn’t push anybody.

And so the next day, as soon as we realized that was not the case, we got one out that detailed everything that was going on. And that will not happen in future– as soon as we send out an email, we will have a matching blog post on the website.

JENNY GUY: And I think, just to let everybody know, if there’s ever something happening behind the scenes– we’re known for transparency to a fault here. That’s not a– I mean, and I say to a fault as the director of marketing. There are times I’m like, you don’t need to– and everybody’s like, we’re going to say that.

So we talk about everything always. That’s never– that’s never a thing that we’re going to keep from you. If there’s a problem, we’re going to say, we done effed up and this is how we’re fixing it in the future. So and then Amber, if they’re not on the list, talk a little bit– either one of you, whoever wants to, if Eric has a voice or whoever can talk about it– why would people not be on the list? There was a migration of the plugin, there’s a little bit of a history here with the Grow plugin to begin with, right?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right. Eric, do you want to talk about the technical aspects of that?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so we have the Mediavine Marketplace, which is actually we took over from Social Pug. So it’s the same place you would have purchased it before. But you have to make sure you have the right email address in there because that’s the email address we’re going to have on file for all paid users of Social Pro.

A lot of people get it through their host or through what’s called an agency license. In the case of an agency license, we’re not going to have your email because your host or the agency that has the official license key, that’s the person that should be receiving those emails and that’s the person that should be supporting you. That’s the idea behind an agency license.

So I know a ton of people that were running this didn’t get an email. And a lot of times, it’s because you weren’t the one that actually paid for the license. If you are officially the license holder, just make sure you log in to marketplace.mediavine.com and put in your latest email address to make sure you get these in the future.

JENNY GUY: OK, awesome. If you have questions though and you’re confused, you don’t know what happened, still wondering about whether this is impacting you, email us at grow@mediavine.com. We’re here to talk to you. We have specialists on-hand that are well-versed in the plugin and can give you assistance with all of those things.

Shifting to something pretty exciting and positive. We talked about this a little bit the last time you were here, Eric, and weren’t in a basement. But this is so new, it’s barely in beta Grow.me.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: Onboarding has started– oh, FedEx is here. If you hear sounds, that’s what’s happening. Eric, talk to us a little bit about– people are now on here. And if you guys are on the Grow.me and you’ve got the beta on your site, please give us a shout-out in the comments if you’re doing that.

And then we’re really excited about Grow.me. And it’s not just because of what it is now. It’s what it’s going to be in the future and what our goals are for this plugin. So will you talk a little bit about that and what the heck I’m talking about with Grow.me?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Grow.me is what we’re kind of calling the next evolution of Grow. And it’s basically going to be user engagement, marketing, social networking, social media, whatever you want to look at it as. It’s going to be a chance for your readers on your site to engage better with your content, and share it, and be social. It’s everything that Grow was.
And it’s going to slowly be– more and more features are going to come to Grow.me. And it is free for all Mediavine publishers, at least the initial feature set. It allows your users right now to favorite content on your site, allows them to view bookmarks across all of the sites running Grow.me. It allows them to share your content. And it has a lot more coming, including options and a search feature.

So we’re really excited about everything Grow.me is going to be. And I think we have 250 people that are going to be starting the initial beta test already. So thank you, guys. It’s also going to be using similar technology as how we do our ad management, our script wrapper. So we need people to basically help us test things. Because that’s how we’re always innovating so much on the ad side.

We have publisher sites. So we’re able to run small percentages of traffic to be able to test things on. We’re going to be able to do that with Grow.me. So what you’re seeing today is– we call it an MVP, or minimum viable product. You can think of it as version zero or version one.

And in the future, everything is going to be adding upon this. So it’s all going to be based upon your feedback. Use this thing. And I think the most exciting things is it’s going to help everyone gather first-party data, which we have– we talked about a lot in the blog post. A little complicated to go over here, but it’s basically to help you survive what’s going to be known as the cookie-pocalypse, or when third party cookies go away in Chrome. So it’s going to help you make money and help readers engage with your content more.

JENNY GUY: And I’ll just explain this in the way that I understand it. Because when Eric talks about this stuff, I’m like, what? I don’t know. Cookies are going away. Cookies are the way that you serve personalized ads. Personalized ads are the ones that pay the most.

So if you want to have good ad earnings, you have to find a way to get this personalized data. And the way that we’re going to do that is through Grow.me. So help us develop the plugin that’s going to help us down the road when the cookies die. Cookies death sound sad, and should happen in 2020 to go along with everything else that’s horrible that’s going on in this year.

Can we please post the sign-up for the beta in the comments so that people can jump in there and sign up? I’m excited about this. I think it’s going to be amazing.

So we’re going to talk about the plugins here in a second. But right now, I want to talk a little bit more about Mediavine ad management. We’ve had some pretty cool features that kind of quietly released. We’ve been talking about them for a while, though. And I want to talk about them since I’ve got you guys here.

And most of it is in our very favorite video realm that we love talking about. So let’s– where do you want to start, Eric?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Video, video, video.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, the video, video, video, video– the meta video. Eric, where do you want to start?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I think we should go with the quickest one that we should just announce. Because I think people been waiting on this one for a while. So you’re now going to be able to include basically a default caption track if you don’t have any spoken word inside your videos. That’s going to be something you’re going to be able to enable under Video Settings.

Hopefully we turned that online. And if not, if anyone is listening from our product or engineering team, turn the flipper on, please. We want basically to offer you guys a chance– if you have music only, click one button, and that will be the default for all of your videos. And then you can upload captions for anything that needs more specific captions.

It’s going to show a little musical note at the bottom to indicate that music is playing. And that’s, again, if you have no spoken word and you want to be able to help for your ADA compliance or basically helping people with disabilities know that there’s no spoken word, this is only music playing. That’s a quick and easy one we should probably start with.

JENNY GUY: That’s an exciting thing to bring in. And then the next thing, which I know you’ve been very excited about discussing for a long time, is playlists. So let’s talk about that.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, so after– I think, two years ago when I first started announcing this.

JENNY GUY: It’s been a while.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: And we kind of launched a preliminary version, the Up Next, which basically shows videos after your video continues– finishes. So that’s the first version of playlists we could release and it was the quickest. Now we’re allowing you to create your own custom playlist right on the Dashboard.

So that’s going into beta testing– actually right now, it’s already in beta testing by what we call our internal publications, or our poor Support Team that runs their own blogs also has to test everything and also people on the brand team. Sorry, guys. Thank you– I mean, thank you guys for helping with the initial round of testers.

And then after that, we’re going to release it to more of the public beta. So you should start getting invites or hearing more about playlists probably in the next couple weeks. Because we’re finding all the initial bugs on our own sites. And then we move on to our publishers. And that should be coming very soon. You’ll be able to create your own playlists, which are– yes, your own, not just up next. They’re really here.

JENNY GUY: Super exciting. We’ve been waiting on that for a while. And I want you Sue to know– Sue asked a question about Create. We’re going to come back to Create in just a little bit. And I’ve got your question. So do not worry, I will get that.

And then finally, Outstream, talk about that.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, so this is still in the year of video. We want to make sure that all our publishers– or sorry, decade– what are we calling it now, century?

JENNY GUY: It was the year of video, then the decade of video. Now we’re the new decade of video–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: The new decade.

JENNY GUY: –the roaring 20s of video, yeah.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, in the roaring 20s of video, we want to make sure that even if you’re not producing video content, you’re able to monetize the high earning video CPM. So we developed our own, what’s called Outstream player, and the idea of Outstream is– it’s called in-stream if it’s a pre-roll ad or a mid-ad. So the ad plays in-roll, or in-stream. It plays alongside the stream, the stream being your video content in this case.

Outstream means there is no stream, so it’s outside of the stream. It’s a terrible, gross name. But Outstream just means that it’s a video ad without video content. It gives video advertisers a chance to still get the reach they would have gotten. It’s going to appear inside of your content as if it were an ad, but now it’s going to be animated.

Because we built the player ourselves, it’s optimized for pagespeed. Do not worry. It pauses when it’s out of view. It only plays when it’s in view. So it’s not going to be a very disruptive user experience. It’s not going to earn quite the same as in-stream. So please still continue to upload your videos. It’s going to be the best earning potential you have. But these are a great way for content creators to be able to monetize basically text–

JENNY GUY: How do I–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –on the same levels.

JENNY GUY: –get those?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Good news, on this one we actually went opt-in for everyone on this one. You can opt out if you want email in or change your settings. But I don’t think most people are going to have complaints with this. It’s already boosted CPM significantly since it’s been live the past, I believe, month or so. So it’s doing very well. Unfortunately, we do not offer different reporting on it. It’s just going to be blended in with your in-content ads.

JENNY GUY: Michelle Palin just said what I think all of us are thinking. So it’s out, but it’s in, and it’s video, but it’s not. Got it, exactly. And then throw in Eric saying stream like 75 times. And that’s basically a synopsis of our last few minutes.

She also said making custom seasonal playlists will be awesome for fall and really any season. That’s– do you guys see other ways that this will be great for user experience and revenue, moving up with playlists or any of our new video features?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, I mean, Sam, one of our lovely Publisher Support people, the other day was talking about like a custom list specifically for her cocktails I think. That was going to be really cool to sort of specify on her cocktail posts that that gets the playlist, the cocktails playlist.

And then you can basically think about it in the same way that you think about categories. You can provide a venue for a category or an event, like fall, you know? I think there are lots of ways to creatively think about this. And I would encourage everybody to also think outside the box, like what’s going to be most useful for your reader? And that’s how you should create playlists.

JENNY GUY: Kylie says, will the captions be available on already updated videos, uploaded videos, or just new ones? Like can we go flip a switch?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So you’re going to flip the switch and it’s going to be the new default. So any video you did not upload a caption to, existing or new, is going to get those automatic captions. So existing videos will be captioned for you with one click.

JENNY GUY: Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s going to be awesome.

JENNY GUY: One click, quarantini playlist.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Technically two, you’ve got to click it and I think hit Save. But yeah.

JENNY GUY: I mean, Save is important. Save is always– although Google Docs has broken everyone of the save. I used to be like a spastic saver. Every 30 seconds, I would save to make sure everything was backed up. And then Google Docs–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I have so many Google Docs thoughts right now. They’ve changed everything.

JENNY GUY: I know. It’s awful. Is anyone else– Google Docs, like was this supposed to be better? Because it is not better, whoever did that.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: And also, could have maybe not done it in 2020? We’ve got enough going on.

JENNY GUY: It’s also with Facebook that keeps updating. And people are like, where’s my button? I can’t push anything– just irrational anger. Michelle Hall says, will that be in Video Settings? So she’s not seeing the captions yet. Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I went ahead and I turned the flipper on. Engineers, come on.

JENNY GUY: Oh.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah. So if you go into Video Settings now and just refresh it, you should see. You might have to do– it’s called a hard refresh. Hold on the Shift button as you refresh. That will clear out your cache. And then you should be able to get access to the setting under Video Settings.

JENNY GUY: Awesome, it’s there you, guys. It’s on. It’s live. Whoo.
Another headline feature that is relatively new at Mediavine are our PSA campaigns. We started with a COVID-19 option. We’ve since added the We Stand With You. And I have heard rumors that there are additional campaigns and feature causes in the works. Amber, will you tell us a little bit about how these started, why they’re so important to us, and how people can still get involved?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Sure. Yeah, so they started with a wonderful idea by Laurence Norah, who is one of our travel publishers, wanting to give back with regards to information around COVID-19. And once we had built it, it was just kind of like, oh, we can do a lot more with this.

And so the PSAs, the idea behind them is that instead of the ad collapsing if there’s not an ad to fill, we will send out a PSA instead and fill that spot so instead of it not being there at all, you’ve got one of our designed PSAs for whichever cause you’ve opted into. So we’ve got the COVID-19, we’ve now got We Stand With You in support of Black Lives Matter.

And so enrollment there, we’ve got 1,307 for COVID and 644 for We Stand With You. It’s a quick opt-in on your Dashboard. You can do one, you can do both. You can actually– if you opt into both, the engineers are so clever they’ve made it so that you get an equal distribution of them. So you don’t have to worry about, oh, I’m only going to see this one kind. In fact, I was Food Fanatic the other day and I got both.

JENNY GUY: That’s cool.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Because I’d been there for a while. And it was Susannah’s beautiful artwork. And then it was the UN artwork that we– we worked with the United Nations. They have an entire database of artwork that can be used. And so we’ve– they’re just so pretty. And I love that we’re able to give back in that way.

And with the We Stand With You, we’ve now got– I was getting there. We’ve now got art that we commissioned specifically from Black artists because we really felt like that was the way we could support the Black community right now, is by displaying art from Black artists. And so you’ll now see those instead of our original designs. Or, I can’t remember– are we doing both, Jen?

JENNY GUY: We’re emphasizing the work by Black artists. That’s what we wanted to do. And it’s really incredible. If you guys look– and if you visit our landing page for the We Stand With You, you can then go check out all of those artists.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: The artists, yeah. Yeah, so that’s really, really lovely. And then on social, we are doing Amplify Melanated Voices. We’re making sure that we are amplifying our bloggers of color. And we also have a new social giving campaign internally that started with all of this, realizing that we really should be providing our employees with more ways to give back to the things that are important to them.

And so now we’ve got a matching program internally so that employees can choose charities that are important to them. And we will match– I forget the exact numbers of how much we match per employee. But I know it’s pretty awesome.

And then the other thing that we’re doing is we’re looking for more charities and causes to amplify, including things like childhood cancer research, maybe childhood hunger. We really want to give people a lot of ways to opt in.

And as happens with so much of our technology, we don’t realize always the other positive effects that these things are happening. And I’m going to hand it over to Eric to talk about that because the PSAs have actually solved an additional problem that we weren’t even thinking about.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so there is a new web vital statistic called Cumulative Layout Shift, CLS. Probably have gotten some notices of it in your–

JENNY GUY: Flies right off the tongue.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Exactly, right in your inbox and you have no idea what it is. But basically, it’s does your content shift and move around as you’re scrolling through the page? That can happen if you’re lazy loading images, or as ads load, or in our case, as they collapse if we didn’t have an ad to serve.

So that can, if a user is scrolling super fast, have kind of a layout shift as it goes to collapse. So we’ve done, instead now, we’ve served a house ad, it never has to collapse. So it actually helps you solve for CLS. So that’s why, as Amber mentioned, we’re going to have a lot more PSA options coming to make sure that everyone has a cause they can hopefully want running on their site. And if not, we’ll eventually be bringing the ability to upload your own house campaigns as well.

JENNY GUY: So lots of– yeah, Brenda just said I love this idea of helping other causes too. I have some ideas. And Michelle Palin said yes on childhood cancer. So there’s a lot. We’re uploading, and getting more ideas, and talking with different groups that have been impacted by COVID-19 and their fundraising efforts in ways that we can continue to give visibility to these really worthy causes.

Going back, sorry, Michelle was saying a kid– a kid made me miss the answer to the question of whether flipping that switch affects only new videos or if we already have to do something to apply it to uploaded videos. No, the switch does all of it.

And then Zona said– Zona told her– sorry, and then Sue said, where do you set– where do you set that all your videos are just music?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So once you turn that on, it’s just going to assume everything is music unless you–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Unless you–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: –upload it– right, unless you upload a caption track to it. So it’s just going to be under Settings under your video player, which will be basically a default closed caption. They’re just going to enable.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. Luke is excited about our own house campaigns. We’re excited about that too. Noreen just said, this is just another reason for Gary to ignore those other guys. Which, Noreen– for those that don’t know, while the lives are happening, my team, the Marketing Team, is putting all of the awesome comments into a channel that we have. And every time you type Gary now in Slack, something happens. And it made me crack up.
But Eric, just Gary– does Gary have anything to say today?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I think we should leave my alter ego to the couple of Facebook posts. And the problem is, I honestly prefer not to waste our on-air time talking about the competition’s dubious tactics. I prefer to focus on all the awesome stuff we’re doing here at Mediavine. So Gary will occasionally pop up on a Facebook post. But that’s about it.

JENNY GUY: OK, Gary. Well–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: It’s because I don’t have a mustache right now.

JENNY GUY: I mean, if we had a disguise, maybe we could talk about it. But without it– no.

OK, I want to talk– I promised Sue we would talk about Create. It is our OG Mediavine plugin. It’s our flagship, our most valuable content plugin. And we actually just put out a long-awaited feature. And users are pretty pumped about it. Talk to us about Indexes, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so Indexes are also now in beta testing again, only amongst our internal publications. We don’t want to do this to our publishers just yet. And those are basically going to allow you to create custom recipe index pages. But more than that, you can use them for custom home pages, custom category landing pages.

You can basically build what we’re calling Indexes. And they are a list of either your most popular posts, your most popular cards. You can hand-select them. You can do them based upon category. And if you’re using Create, you can do them based upon even things like cook time. So you can say, like, here are my five-minute recipes. I don’t know if we have five-minute recipes. That’s very fast, sorry. Here are my 20-minute recipes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: There you go.

JENNY GUY: Well, it makes more– I mean, like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s my only five-minute recipe. Perfect, so it’ll be an index of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

JENNY GUY: Just all the different variations.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: It makes my heart go pitter-patter. I love it so much.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Indexes are going to be absolutely beautiful and super flexible. We’re going to use Gutenberg, basically, as the page builder it’s meant to be, and allow you to build beautiful-looking landing pages.

JENNY GUY: That’s exciting. I’m going to pause for a second because Noreen said, could we pair up with Operation Underground Railroad? I think that’s an amazing idea. Let’s have– if you guys have suggestions for charities that you’d like to see us maybe reach out to for potential PSA campaigns, give us a email at sponsored@mediavine.com. We can take that, and reach out, and see if they’re open to working with us. We just shared Gary’s recent post–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Especially if you have a contact there, include that in your email.

JENNY GUY: Super helpful. If you’ve done work with them, if it’s like St. Jude’s, or something like that– if you have a name that will help us a lot cut through the red tape and get the ads rolling.

OK, Sue’s question– I’m going to go back to that now on– going back to–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Amazon– something about Amazon.

JENNY GUY: Yes, she is having problems with Create Lists not working right with Amazon affiliates. Is this getting fixed? I add the link, and then after saving, it is gone.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I would definitely email create@mediavine.com with that issue. I haven’t heard of that issue right now.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, I haven’t heard about that. So it might not be widespread. And so definitely, the team should take a look for you at the email Eric said.

JENNY GUY: Fantastic. We can take a look at that. OK, so let us move forward a little bit. Eric, is there anything else going on for Create though, coming up that we should be on the lookout for?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I think a big part about Create is similar to what we’re doing right now with Grow. And that’s making sure that we’re going to tie everything into our support portal a little bit better to make sure that if, you know, heaven forbid something does happen again, we’re able to notify everyone as quickly as possible.

So I think you’re going to see Create right now focus on Indexes, getting everything integrated a little bit better with our support portal, working on any bugs such as Amazon issues you might have with the list. But then the next round of features, we’re going to be very excited to announce soon. But basically, they’re going to focus a lot around recipe cards. And in particular, bringing things like better nutrition calculation, imperial metric conversions, all the kind of stuff that I think people have been asking for, we’re going to give recipe cards a little bit of love after kind of house cleanup and indexes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So Diane Herrera, I believe, just made me think about what might be the issue with the Amazon API. And that is– and I had this problem myself– if you don’t have at least three sales through your Amazon affiliate account–

JENNY GUY: Diane said, I had this issue with Amazon and it was the API issue with Amazon.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Right, right, right. So this is what I’m saying, is I had the same problem with the API. And basically, you lose your account, your specific affiliate account loses API privileges if you don’t have at least three sales a month, is what Seth explained to me, one of our engineers.

And sure enough, I had a few friends buy through my affiliate link and then API access came back. So if you haven’t had sales for a while, that may be the thing that’s happening. But if you have had sales, definitely email us.

JENNY GUY: Or email anyway. We can tell you that via email. Whatever you want to do, we’re here. Yeah, if you guys have suggestions for anything, e-mail sponsored@mediavine.com. That’s great for the landing page.
Brenda was asking– she said her dog was barking because he’s sick of Zoom calls and webinars. Which, like, same, dog. So yes, email. And it’s sponsored@–

OK, even though we’ve decided to largely ignore the corona, the ‘Rona, for this live, and talk more about upcoming things with our business, we can’t talk about the current state of things without acknowledging all of the pretty seismic changes that have been happening as a result of COVID-19 this year.

And one of them is absolutely the cancellation of almost every in-person event for all of 2020, all conferences, including our own conference in Baltimore that was supposed to be last month. So a lot of– we all have the sads. Everyone has it. We all have cabin fever. But we are working a lot on ways that we can continue learning, and community, and all of those things, building those virtually for content creators.

So Amber, would you give us a little teaser, please?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, we’ve been talking about ways that we can support folks that want to try and pull together learning opportunities. As you know, we, over the past few years, have sponsored people who are planning retreats. And we, as a company, have decided we should probably pull back from encouraging in-person events, even when we’re not the one pulling them together, at least right now.

And so– I mean, I live in Texas. So COVID is definitely an impact on in-person events right now. And so what we’re thinking is we’re going to do some updates to our retreat form. And then if you are potentially planning a virtual retreat and looking for sponsorship, that we might be able to help out.

So we don’t have everything in place yet. But we will make an announcement and probably do a blog post and all of that once we’ve figured out all the particulars.

JENNY GUY: So yes, please be thinking. We’ll make sure everyone has the information. And we will open up the form again to– since we had a lot of things that we’re not able to do right now, we’re trying to think of what we could do.

And what we can do is support– yes, for you guys, and give you guys the opportunity to– it’s not the same. But at least you can choose your Zoom background. That’s kind of cool. We do that every time we have our monthly Mediavine call. It’s always a fun adventure to see what terrifying and wonderful backgrounds people have put on their Zooms.
So at least you’re talking to other humans. That’s good conversation.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: We have some special souls that work for us.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yes, we

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: They make my heart melt everytime.

JENNY GUY: It takes a special, special– I mean, it’s a competition. It’s definitely a competition voted on by emojis on the favorite.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Mine is always the Ferris wheel at Disneyland, now that I’ve finally been, thanks to some lovely travel bloggers back in February.

JENNY GUY: Doesn’t that seem like that was a different life?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That was like nine years ago, is what it feels like.

JENNY GUY: I mean, Eric and I were sitting in a pub in Dublin listening to live music. And we were crowded in this tiny, little room. And it was all these people. And they’re all just breathing and talking.

JENNY GUY: No, it’s horrible. It’s scary.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Think about it now and you’re like, nope. Mm-hmm.

JENNY GUY: No. I have visceral reactions looking at pictures from past things that I did. Like, it’ll pop up and I’m like, they’re too close. Don’t breathe.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: When you watch movies now that were recorded. And you’re–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Obviously pre-COVID, right?

JENNY GUY: Unsafe. Diane says the other issue with the API is the key codes not syncing up on Amazon. So deleting the old keys and getting new ones fixed for me the access key and secret key. So maybe try getting new keys and entering in Settings. This thing happened when Amazon change their API.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yep. That’s another good idea.

JENNY GUY: Aw, thanks, Michelle. Michelle I just just want to say that I appreciate these live sessions you do. I can watch while folding laundry right now. And I feel like I’m not only learning some things, but having adult interaction outside of my fam. I mean, the adult part is a little bit dubious. But–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Interaction.

JENNY GUY: But it’s a social interaction, for sure– for sure. OK, Jordan Cauley is trying to reach me even though I have my notifications muted. And then said never mind. So that’s fun. I thought he was trying to call me because we’d said something tragically wrong. No, he said never mind.
OK, let’s pivot to last but not least, what do you think we saved to our last prepared topic for the live? It could only be the one thing– Trellis.

OK, Eric, we talked about this a lot the last time we were together. But there’s always room for more. So tell us, do you have a update on how many sites we have now that are uploaded that are running Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: That’s probably why Jordan was messaging you. He probably launched another two of them. He wrote, “no, never mind.” So– [LAUGHTER]

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, the live is happening right now. I guarantee it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Honestly, the blog post that we posted during my last live is probably the best place to go and get updates on everything that happened with Trellis. I actually don’t have a recent count. I think like 70-plus was the number we had before, right?

We basically launch like five to 10 of them a week of beta sites right now. New stuff I can talk about that’s happening to Trellis that I think are pretty exciting– so we already have one plugin called Trellis Images that helps you kind of optimize images for you automatically so you don’t need something like Short Pixel. And that will be included in your Trellis monthly fee. So it’ll be basically free if you’re already running Trellis. You now get all of your image optimization done for you. No need to pay for another service.

In Addition, to that, we’re going to be working on other plugins to help supplement all the cool things that Trellis does for you, including making things prettier. So one of the next things we’re working on is a category landing page plugin for Trellis, so to help you make a custom category landing pages, add content to your category pages. If you follow my SEO like a CEO series, this is awesome for keystone or cornerstone content when using Yoast term. Don’t worry.

JENNY GUY: Better than Outstream.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Better than Outstream, exactly. Though– OK, we’re not going to go in the architectural nerding.

JENNY GUY: No.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: OK, so cornerstone content categories are sometimes very key for that. So that plugin is going to be awesome for Trellis. In addition to that, we’re bringing in all the hook functionality that people come to expect from Genesis. So we’re working on that next for Trellis.
So if you’re wondering if anything is happening during this beta from now until likely September when you’re running it, yes. It will be only better by the time you get to launch this thing in September.

JENNY GUY: For anyone that missed, why are you saying September, Eric, in case they haven’t read that blog post?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, the big news. OK, so we are going to officially open up the beta in September to anyone. So right now, the way we’re doing it is that everyone who applied to the beta– and there’s like almost 1,000 people that have– we are just going down the list and sending out invites in small batches as we try to test out various different scenarios to different hosts, different plugin combinations.

We’re trying to get right now as many testers as we can but in as many different unique combinations as possible. And so it’s going out in kind of small waves. But the plan is by, September just to open it up. If you want to help us beta test or basically Trellis on your site, it’s going to be open for anyone.

JENNY GUY: OK, so much exciting and so many comments. And I’m also finding out why Jordan is messaging me. So standby on that. OK, people are so excited to be in the Trellis plug-in, in the Trellis beta.

Luke Ward says, I love Trellis Images as a standalone plugin. Will that be happening?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Oh, sorry. When I say standalone plugin, I mean it is a plugin that you can run in addition to Trellis. So both that and the category landing pages are going to be built specifically for Trellis. They will not run with non-Trellis themes. I don’t think we’re working on standalone versions at this time.

JENNY GUY: OK, give me a second. I’m going to go back. I’m going to scroll back through to Sue’s comment. Sue said, she does have sales– we’re talking about Amazon’s API from Create, just to refresh everyone’s memory.
She does have sales with Amazon last month. She e-mailed to someone. She said they’re working on a fix. But she said she was worried that we do not know it is a problem. We do know that it’s a problem. Jordan was messaging me– Sue, I know, like, this is a thing that I am always shocked to learn, but Eric doesn’t know everything at every moment, which is such BS. I’m like, it’s a let-down every time.

We are working on it. That’s why Jordan was messaging me. And that will be with the next er-release of Create. The next update will be addressing your particular issue. So someone is dealing with it, Sue. We love you. And we would not not deal with you.

OK, the other thing– so many questions. OK, Diane said, will Trellis be compatible with Element and will it work OK with Rank Math for SEO?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So I can tell you Element, or really any page builder, we are not going to be optimizing Trellis for. And we have no intention of. Those basically go against the idea of page feed.

JENNY GUY: Whomp-whomp.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I’m sorry. They may work, which will be great. But we’re never going to make sure those are optimized. We’d rather– like, we’re going to work with plugin traders like WPRM and Tasty, right, we know that you’re going to want to have a recipe card that maybe is not Create. So those will be optimized hopefully for Trellis.

But something like a page builder that goes against the idea of pagespeed, that’s not something– it goes fundamentally against what we’re trying to do with Trellis. Gutenberg is what we’re going to be recommending. We’ll be releasing styles, and additional blocks, and things that can help you turn Gutenberg into what you want it to be, a page builder built for page feed, built for SEO, and built for ads.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Well, and also, other page builders aren’t great for ads, right, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right. So we’ve developed insane amounts of technology to get around the issues caused by page builders over the years to make sure that it disrupts your ad earnings as little as possible. But at the end of the day, they don’t produce good quality HTML. You know who loves good quality HTML? Google.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Google.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So if you’re not doing it for our script wrapper, do it for Google, where they tell you to use proper HTML in their SEO starter guide and everywhere across Google. It makes your pages load faster. And yes, it’s easier for our script wrapper to find where to insert ads if it’s easier to read your HTML. Good, clean HTML helps everyone.

JENNY GUY: OK. So with Trellis, the point of it is to make it easy to create those beautiful-looking pages the way a page builder would without using a page builder that’s going to fork up all your HTML. Eric, will you please talk about– someone talk about that in English. Thank you.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Amber, you’re better at English. You want to try it?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Well, I haven’t played with that part of it yet. So I feel like–

JENNY GUY: Eric, you talk about it.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: –I’m not great at it.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: All right, I’ll do my best to speak in English.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I can translate him once he says things.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So yeah, the idea is going to be basically turning Gutenberg into a page builder. That is the idea behind Trellis. That was the idea originally behind Gutenberg. But Trellis was built after Gutenberg. We had that awesome advantage. That’s the idea behind what we’re doing with Trellis.

So you’ll be able to create all the beautiful home pages that you’ve seen on the internet, using combinations of basically Create, which gives you Gutenberg blocks, Trellis core stuff, and things that are going to be available in the child theme you’re running. You should be able to build a home page, category landing pages, regular pages that you want. Let’s say you’re selling an e-book, whatever it may be. You should be able to build that without needing a third party page builder. You’re just going to use the built-in stuff in WordPress.

JENNY GUY: OK, that being sense to me in English. It worked.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: So that was good.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Good job. Good job, Eric.

JENNY GUY: OK.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I didn’t need Amber to translate. Good.

JENNY GUY: All right. Hold on.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I’ve trained you well.

JENNY GUY: Michelle, what are you asking? If we are on Trellis, will we need to go in and activate the plugin?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, for Trellis Images.

JENNY GUY: Trellis Images.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: No.

JENNY GUY: No, right?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Trellis Images is going to be a separate plugin, yes. It’s not actually– it doesn’t work with all host yet. So as much as we wish everyone would build a Trellis-optimized plan like Agathon– shameless plug– not everyone’s going to have support for Trellis Images as it currently was. We’re working on a new version that’s in beta testing now that should work across a wider range of hosts.

So chances are, if we did the install for you, one of our support engineers already tried it. And if it worked, its on and running on your site. If it didn’t work, it’s deactivated.

So it’s best, if you’re in the beta, to email trellis@mediavine.com. Work with our support engineers. This is what they’re here to help you do right now. And we will get Trellis Images configured for you. Come September, obviously we have to have all these kinks worked out so that anyone can just go and install it if you’re running Trellis.

JENNY GUY: No pressure, engineers. Also, this episode is brought to you by Agathon.

[LAUGHTER]
Good job, guys. Diane–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Random question– random question before you go any further.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, what’s up?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Can you hear the music that is blaring from behind me or not? No?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No. Is it good?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I have a four-year-old that’s decided to jack up the Car’s playlist behind me.

JENNY GUY: Oh.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: And I can hear it. But if you can’t–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Life is a Highway– what do we have right now?

JENNY GUY: Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, it’s like the wall is shaking, guys. I’m so proud that this microphone is not picking it up. Yeah.

JENNY GUY: I missed that. OK, Diana says, what if your information has changed since we applied for the Trellis beta? I am sure I have changes that would make you pick me before September.
[LAUGHTER]

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Email trellis@mediavine.com with your great– I don’t know, reason why we should run you. I don’t know the best way to do it, honestly.

JENNY GUY: Can you talk a little– give us a little insight– first of all, how many sites are running it, like 70-something? And how many applications, over 1,000? So this is not a personal affront.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Right.

JENNY GUY: Why are we choosing the sites that we’re choosing for the beta?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I mean, it’s literally going down to I think one group we did were hosts. So we wanted to test all the different hosts out there. So if you are on Agathon, we love you. But, you know, we didn’t need 100 Agatha people or 70 Agatha people. We needed 10 from Agathon, 10 from Big Scoots, 10 from WPOpt, wherever they may be. We’re basically going through the hosting companies.

That’s just one example. We want to test different PHP versions, different WordPress versions, different themes that you may have been coming from, whatever it may be. I can’t give you the exact formula behind it. But you’re welcome to email in and say why you think you have a unique case that we should run it. We’re always looking for new beta victims. So maybe you’ll be selected.

JENNY GUY: That is not the official marketing for any of that.

JENNY GUY: So let’s not– and we did a different niches, and we did different sizes, and we did different– like, we wanted as many different things, so different variations on all the stuff.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: First site, true story, to launch on Trellis was not a food blog. I know people probably think it’s built for food blogs. It was actually a gardening site, right? Which I think is the more fitting thing for Mediavine.

JENNY GUY: Yeah. OK, Lance, has a great question that wasn’t even planned, as opposed to Eric’s really awesome segue into Agathon. Lance said, do you guys have a recommend Gutenberg training? I need to get with the program. Lance, do I have good news for you?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Next week on the Summer of Live, I have Lynn Woll coming on to talk about going Gutenberg.
[EXPLOSION NOISE]

You don’t even have to ask. It’s already happening. That’s how great we are. OK, Cyd, who is working on Food Fanatic and also is a blogger at the Sweetest– I think it’s the Sweetest Occasion. Yes.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: She says, my site was moved to Trellis– oh god, the comments moved. My site was moved to– Cyd, that was last week. And The pagespeed improvement was insane right out of the gate.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, she went from like 50 to 97 or something on mobile within– like, before they even–

JENNY GUY: She showed us screenshots of it. It was really cool.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, we were all really excited.

JENNY GUY: OK, Sue said– OK, Michelle, do we have to switch to Gutenberg? Can we continue using classic with Trellis? Eric, do you have to switch to Gutenberg to use Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You don’t have to. But if you want to get all those page builder features and build custom home pages, you’re going to need to. And a great thing that I’m sure we’ll cover next week is you can also use Gutenberg on certain posts and certain pages, and not on others. So if you want to write most of your posts in the Classic Editor and just slowly work your way into Gutenberg, you’ll be able to do that. But there’s no hard rule that you have to run Gutenberg to use Trellis.

JENNY GUY: But if you want to learn more about Gutenberg, you should tune in next week to the Mediavine Summer of Live. So just saying that. Amber, did you have something to say?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Oh, I just– you know, I was scared of moving here to Gutenberg. And I watched a couple of tutorials that I think next week will be very helpful for people who haven’t delved into research yet. And now I’m a major convert. Like, on my site I’ve got Trellis, Create, and Grow, Social Pro. And it’s magic how they work together.

So I personally think once you make that dive, you won’t regret doing so. Like, it’s just a mental block right now. And I totally understand that because I was there for a long time.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, there’s so many tricks you can do with Gutenberg too that people will reveal, that you couldn’t even do it the Classic Editor. You’ll be in.

JENNY GUY: Super exciting and fun. And we’ll learn more about that next week. OK, Sue says, will I be able to use my child theme with Trellis that I’m using with Genesis? Or do I have to find a new child theme that is made for Trellis?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You would have to use a new child theme that’s made for Trellis. One of the things that we want to work on on the next few months is working with major theme developers, including Feast Design Company, that we’re working with, to port over some of the child themes over to Trellis. But they would need to be updated to be Trellis-compatible.

JENNY GUY: Awesome, OK. Noreen says Trellis kicked up by site speed amazingly paired with Agathon’s new host server. Mind blown. Rose says, Gutenberg is definitely not as scary as it looks. I was a reluctant convert and I love it now. That’s very exciting. We’re so glad to hear–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, she and Palmer are also trying to get me to karaoke the car stuff on the live.

JENNY GUY: Yeah, I just wasn’t going to–

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Do it!

JENNY GUY: You brought that out. I was going to leave that where it lied– where it lay, where it lied? I don’t know. OK, any other questions about Trellis while we’re here?

And let’s do like a little preview for why people should want to switch to Gutenberg. You said there’s lots of tricks, lots of different ways you can use it as a page builder without having to use– without all the bad things that come from page builder. So why else should you want to use Gutenberg?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Why don’t you go, Amber. You’ve actually used it.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: You’re not supposed to admit stuff like that, Eric.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I will. I will be a blogger one day, I promise.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So the reason I like it so much is exactly what Eric was talking about, right? Like, I don’t have to go and find the individual things or go into my recipe card plugin to create my recipe, and just use a short code. Like, there’s all these different– it’s literally just building blocks.

Like, they call them blocks. And I think that’s a scary word for some folks. But literally, just think of it as your vision board. And you’re building blocks in your blog post. And some of them are text. And some of them are images. And some of them are your recipe card, or your list, or whatever the case may be.

And it’s really easy once you put that building block in to move it around and to change it. And then you can make blocks that you reuse over and over again. So you can have your Amazon affiliate disclosure that you don’t have to retype every time or you don’t have to have a separate plugin to display that.

And that’s coming from someone that has barely used it, right? Like I’ve updated Bluebonnet Baker to use Trellis and use Gutenberg in Create and Grow. But I’m not blogging everyday like so many of you guys are.

And I think that just those are just the limited things that I have found that I thought, oh, this is so smart, this is so cool. And I think once you start playing around with it, you’re just like, there’s so many little things like that come out.

And you’re just like, well, that’s a lot easier. Like even making updates to certain things where you used to have to go into the Media Center, now it’s in your sidebar. And so you don’t have to open up a separate window or anything like that. You’re just able to fix stuff much quicker as well. I think the user experience is just better.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Yeah, so I was playing with Create Indexes. And it’s a great example of you’ll be able to go into a new page, you’ll be able literally drag and drop the hero image here, and your index, then a heading, then your index.

And it’s all just going to render beautifully on the front end. And you don’t have to worry about what the HTML is under the scenes. It’s going to take care of that. And it’s going to actually output correct HTML, which I cannot stress enough how that does not happen when you use a page builder normally.

JENNY GUY: And why is it bad when your HTML is incorrect, Eric?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You confuse Google, in short. There is something called semantic HTML. And that’s using HTML semantically, or the way it was meant to be used. So you use something like a P for a paragraph of text, a paragraph, Right? It makes sense.

When you use the built-in, either Gutenberg or even the Classic Editor, that’s what it’s putting all your text in. When you use a page builder, it’s going to insert everything into divs. Divs are just a generic container, right?
That’s a small example. But that’s the kind of stuff that you lose when you use a page builder. They’re not going to use proper HTML where it’s meant to be used. They’re going to use it to give them the customization they need. It’s going to produce also what are called a lot of Dom elements. Those are a bad thing for pagespeed. It’s one of the warnings in pagespeed insights. Dom page builders–

JENNY GUY: Divs and Doms– and I’m laughing hard. I’m sorry.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: Everywhere. You don’t want Divs and Doms

JENNY GUY: Lousy with Divs and Doms.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: You want Gutenberg.

JENNY GUY: OK, Brenda said, I was afraid to switch. But I’ve been using Gutenberg for almost a year now and already love it. She can’t wait for the live next week to learn even more features.

Michelle said, Amber, did you go back and switch over all your old posts or just used for your new ones?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So huge disclaimer, I used to plugin to switch all of my old posts to Gutenberg blocks. I started out just doing a post that way and playing around with it. And then there is a plugin that I used that will convert everything to Gutenberg blocks. And then I sort of spot-checked the older stuff to make sure it looked OK, which it did.

And so I will say, look, I can’t vouch for that plugin. It worked for me. But you can search for it. It’s like Gutenberg Block Converter, or Classic Converter, something like that. And that’s what I used so that it– I’m just using the same editor throughout. And then I was able to ditch a plug-in, I was able to ditch the Classic Editor plugin. I don’t even have it anymore.
And then once I had converted everything, I didn’t need the converter plugin. So I mean, with Trellis, I think I have like nine plugins now. And they’re all just like little things that I had before. Once I finished getting everything converted from– because guys, I’ve been blogging so long, so much of my old posts don’t even have a recipe card in them. They use a plugin called Print This that hasn’t been maintained for like 10 years, which is terrible. This is terrible of me.

And I need to get them all converted to Create. But because they’re just a block of text, I can’t run the importer that we have. That’s just not how it works. And so I’m slowly converting everything into Create. And then I’ll be able to ditch that plugin. And I’ll have like eight plugins. And it’s amazing. Like, the site is so fast. And it’s so pretty. And it just makes me happy. And it’s one of the things that I think is going to get me blogging again. So, exciting!

JENNY GUY: Christine Cook says, I’m finding myself constantly updating old posts to Gutenberg because it’s fun. I mean, that–

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: It is fun.

JENNY GUY: You can’t really– basically the best endorsement you can get is that I’m doing it voluntarily because I just like doing it. That’s exciting. OK, Emily says, can we create a new home page with categories even if we don’t have Create?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: If you’re running Trellis without Create, is that the–

JENNY GUY: That’s what– I think that’s the question, yes.

ERIC HOCHBERGER: So Create is going to power the Indexes, which I think you’re going to want to use for your home page and for your category pages. But it won’t be required. You’ll be able to use just regular Gutenberg blocks.

But Indexes are going to give you a lot of power to be able to do like– I think the recipe indexes and the home pages, you’d probably want to be able to generate. They’re going to look beautiful.

And it’s important to note that you can run Create alongside a different recipe card plugin if you don’t like create as your recipe card plugin or just don’t want to move everything over. And you can just try it out. You can mix and match. Create will play very nicely alongside other plugins.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah.

JENNY GUY: Megan said she’s only switching old posts are she updates for other reasons. So it’s not something that you have to go in and do right now. Like, it’s not it’s not a mandatory thing. It’s an as you have time. Plus if it’s fun, like instead of needle point like I’m doing– I’m needle pointing 700,000 things during quarantine– you can update posts to Gutenberg. Why not?
OK, Sue said, what is the plugin to convert recipe cards to Create?

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: So–

JENNY GUY: She has WP Tasty.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Yeah, so this is one of the things that I think people assume that when they install Create, they have to convert everything. Because every other recipe plugin, their converter is part of the plugin. With Create, it’s a separate importer so that we can keep Create itself nice and fast.

So if you have Create installed, there is a link to the importer in your plugin list. When you find Mediavine Create there, you’ll find a link to the importer plugin. And Tasty is one of the supported ones, I believe.
So, yeah. And then once you’re done converting, you can just uninstall the importer. One less plugin.

JENNY GUY: I love less plugins. OK, we’re almost out of time, which is a real bummer.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: I feel like Eric had something to say then.

JENNY GUY: Eric, did you have something?

ERIC HOCHBERGER: No, I was just going to say, I want to make it very clear. With Create, you can run it just to be your index builder. You could run it just to be your list builder. People do that. We at Mediavine are making a conscious effort to make sure that even our ads are optimized for WP Tasty and WPRM because we know a lot of our bloggers run those. So we’re not asking anyone to move over.

We’re even working on– we already launched it– the idea of Jump to Recipe, even optimizing for that on other cards. So by no means do you have to use Create for your recipe card plugin just to use it.

JENNY GUY: Also, it’s free. So like, you’re not going to have anything to lose. It’s not super heavy. There’s no reason to not try it. If you think it might be something that you’re into, you might as well just try it. It’s not going to hurt anything.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s something that…

ERIC HOCHBERGER: I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to use it for your recipe card plugin.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: That’s also something that’s super fun, right? You don’t have to install it, and install the importer, and import everything. You can install it, and try it on a couple of recipes, and see if you actually like it, like the UI, like how it looks on your front end. You can have different recipe card plugins running recipes in different posts. It doesn’t hurt anything.

And so you can actually give it a try before you commit to changing forever.

JENNY GUY: Nothing is forever. It’s all temporary. OK, we have two lives coming up that I’m going to talk to you guys about. And we’re almost out of time. Yes, Trista is in our Lead Launch Engineer said, free, free, free. Love the list. Can’t wait for Indexes. Thank you, Trista. Good to know you’re here.
Next Thursday, July 23rd at 2 PM, as I’ve already mentioned, Lynn Woll of the website Create Whimsy, is coming by to get everyone going Gutenberg and convince everyone who is still on the fence– yes, I am still on the fence– to jump off the fence and go. OK, so Lynn, that is your– that is the Gauntlet that has been thrown. Please come.

We also have another live in between these lives on Tuesday July 21st. It’s at 2:00 PM. It’s happening exclusively in the Mediavine Facebook group. I’m going to be talking to Jake Poses, who is the co-founder and CEO of Jumprope. I don’t know if anyone out there has heard of it. I’m using it.
We’re going to be talking about ways to rock out your stories with easy to make how-to videos, and then also using those how-to videos, uploading them to your Mediavine Dashboard, having more video– video, video, video– high CPMs, all the acronyms you could possibly want at the same time.

Sue said, I like it as Create card has a nutrition card for free. We love that too, Sue.

OK, guys, we also heard loud and clear in the Mediavine Facebook group that some of you would like transcripts of these published as blog posts. So that is the next thing we’re going to be adding to our content so you have it.
And then the other thing that everyone wanted, which Eric has commanded us to start doing, is the podcast. So we’re going to be working on a podcast as soon as we can. We’re going to keep getting this content out to you. We really appreciate having Eric and Amber here with me, guys. Thank you.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: You’re welcome.

JENNY GUY: Thanks for coming.

JENNY GUY: And I think we’ve probably slayed Eric’s voice at this point. So we’re going to end it. And you guys have a great, great rest of your afternoon. Thanks, guys. Bye.

AMBER BRACEGIRDLE: Thanks, everybody.

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