Both sell advertising on your website. They work in opposite directions: Mediavine brings advertisers to your slot, and Perch lets your own readers buy it.
| Network | Minimum to join | Publisher share | Payout threshold | Self-serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mediavine | $5,000+ in annual ad revenue for the main programme; the Journey tier starts at 1,000 sessions | Not published | Not published | No |
| Perch | None | 75% | $65.00 | Yes |
Sources, checked 2026-08-26: Requirements (www.mediavine.com/mediavine-requirements)
You clear $5,000 of annual ad revenue, or 1,000 sessions for Journey, and you want someone else to run ad operations entirely.
You are below Journey's entry point, or you want to choose the advertiser and the price rather than hand the slot to a programmatic stack.
Revenue per thousand views, once you qualify. For a content site that clears the bar, a managed programmatic partner will almost always out-earn a direct-sold slot, and they handle the ad ops entirely.
Nobody finds your advertiser for you. There is no demand pool to fall back on — the slot fills when one of your own readers, or a business you approach, buys it. On a site with no local or niche connection to its audience, that is a real disadvantage against a matched network.
On Mediavine the rate is an outcome — set by an auction, a matched advertiser, or a managed partner, and reported to you afterwards. On Perch you type a number: what one advertiser pays for one day in your slot. Nothing sells below it.
On Mediavine they come from a pool you do not choose. On Perch the slot itself carries an invitation, so the buyer is usually someone already reading the page — a local business, or another site in the same niche.
Full programmatic stack; consent management included. Perch's embed sets no cookies and writes nothing to the visitor's device, so it does not itself create a consent-banner requirement. The full detail is on the security page, including the exact byte size the script adds to your page.
Mediavine does not publish a payout threshold. Perch pays out at $65.00, into your own Stripe account. For a site earning a few dollars a month, that gap is the difference between money arriving and a balance that only ever grows on a screen.
Usually yes, and plenty of sites should. They are not the same slot: a direct-sold space in a prominent position alongside network fill elsewhere on the page is a normal arrangement, and it is worth checking Mediavine's own terms about what may run beside their units.
No published traffic minimum, but every site goes through an approval review
The full comparison table covers every network here with sources, or work out the numbers for your own site with the earnings calculator.