The price is right when the advertiser pays. 100% free for readers.

“I just decided to try it and see what would happen.”

When Andy Dehnart went full time on reality blurred a couple years ago, he wasn’t sure it would work.

But it did.

Andy never relied on the site for his primary salary before now. He launched reality blurred in 2000, after his Real World column had been taken away at another outlet. Starting out like many internet-era journalists have: write first, revenue later.

reality blurred didn’t have a business model until the mid 2000s.

Andy’s written for a bunch of other publications, and he taught journalism for many years, but he always comes back home to reality blurred.

Why? Because it’s fun, it’s rewarding and now, it’s his most stable income source.

What began as a place to just get his work out there is now a full fledged media company that has been covering reality TV and true crime for the last 25 years.

And the price is right for readers because reality blurred is 100% free, with most of its revenue coming from programmatic ads.

Today, we’re continuing our Revenue Series by peeling back the layers of how Andy got here: why the ad-supported model was right for reality blurred and how to know if it could work for you too.

How reality blurred became ad-supported

reality blurred launched the same summer that Survivor and Big Brother premiered in the United States.

Andy knows how to make an entrance and perfect timing like that will get you in front of hungry readers fast. Reality TV was popping off. Both audiences and outlets were craving what he had to offer.

But, as the cast of The Blair Witch Project recently reminded us, fame does not come with a check.

So, how was Andy going to get paid for his work?

Back then, he was still freelancing. He also taught journalism on and off. But reality blurred had a growing fanbase so surely it could be a business.

Andy tested all kinds of revenue streams for his website: affiliate income, sponsorships, reader subscriptions, and even, merch.

But one revenue stream has outplayed them all: advertising.

Ads became the anchor revenue stream that enabled Andy to go full time in 2022 and reality blurred has had fairly predictable revenue since at least 2018 when Andy signed with his current ad partner, Mediavine.

But, before we get into how this is all working now, let’s recap how Andy got here.

Selling the first ad

The first paid sponsor for reality blurred came along in 2003.

Spike TV had just rebranded themselves and they were about to debut their first reality series, Joe Schmo. The network reached out to Andy to get the word out.

Andy had no idea how to even price such an ad…so he thought about what he needed to buy with the money.

A computer came to mind.

He’d been hauling around a giant desktop in his trunk and he needed a backup computer to keep at home. It cost $2000 so that’s what he quoted Spike TV.

Done deal. Spike sent a check. Andy ran the banner on the site.

Talking about this years later, Andy still isn’t sure that the price was right but it’s not far off from how I think about sponsorships today.

To price this ad, Andy played forward two key questions:

• What’s it worth to me?

• What do I need this money for?

The third question you would probably add now is:

• What’s the return for them?

$2000—while Andy admits is low for a TV network marketing budget—was a number that made sense for him at the time. The number itself was arbitrary and sure, maybe it should have been higher, but the thinking was sound. Brand sponsorships are a real Dating Game. It’s basically a what’s it worth to you, what’s it worth to me situation.

We’re going to get more into this pricing and packaging in a couple weeks when I share what I learned from Ted Williams’ sponsorship strategy for the Charlotte Agenda.

Ditching ad sales for automated ads

Andy wasn’t a big fan of selling ads himself so he pretty quickly swapped brand deals for automated ads.

He started with Blogads, which powered ads on sites like Perez Hilton and Gothamist but has since shutdown. They called themselves “the grandmother of all platforms for self-serve content advertising” but Blogads wasn’t the right match for reality blurred and their relationship fizzled faster than a 90 Day Fiancé.

Andy also tested out Google AdSense and Monumetric before being courted by his current ad partner, Mediavine.

The Mediavine guys started as indie hacker types, first running an SEO agency, then becoming bloggers themselves, and later maturing into what they are today: a programmatic ad network. They’re independent and investor-free (and doing pretty well judging by their CEO’s recent home purchase.)

“Weak revenue” and “bad customer support” plagued the other ad platforms, and Andy has had such a good experience with Mediavine, he wishes he had joined them sooner.

What’s so great about Mediavine?

• Higher quality ad inventory

• Faster loading ads

• Better payouts

Ads are served up on based on a dynamic mix of what each advertiser bids and the industry/audience labels Mediavine assigns to the publication.

Mediavine has a clear point of view on how ads can benefit publishers and they’ve built in some quality safeguards for both publishers and advertisers. They set the minimum price for ads higher than elsewhere which weeds out less reputable companies (making the inventory better) and they do a lot of education with both their publishers and their advertisers, which Andy appreciates.

The bar is high for publishers too. Your site needs to get at least 50k visits a month to qualify for Mediavine’s network.

(Update: Andy shared that Mediavine recently launched Journey, an ad network for smaller publishers. You need 10k visits/month to qualify for that.)

Driving traffic to the site

Site traffic becomes a lot more important when you’re running an ad-supported site because the more traffic, the bigger the payout.

Can you believe that Google was invented only 2 years before Andy launched reality blurred?

So yeah, you could say Andy’s seen it all when it comes to search engine whiplash.

The idea of optimizing for search wasn’t ever part of Andy’s practice though. He focused instead on staying culturally relevant, writing great articles and building a relationship with his audience.

Which it turns out is a solid SEO strategy.

It helps that reality shows have built in keywords too. Using phrases people might search like “The Summit” in your headlines makes it more likely Google will index and serve up your page.

I asked Andy tactically how he’s adapted to Google’s changing ways, and even though he’s not that concerned about it, he mentioned three things:

Keeping the page speed fast

reality blurred runs on a custom WordPress instance that Andy built and maintains. He moved to Mediavine’s Trellis Framework when he started working with them which was a tool that managed all the web performance preferences of Google (things like how fast the page loads and how fast the ad loads). But Mediavine sold Trellis off last year so Andy’s looking into WordPress plugins for caching content and lazy loading the site.

Changing up the keyword checker

Keyword checkers score your post based on rankable search terms and other factors so you know how to adjust your metadata for optimal search indexing.

Andy’s used Yoast before, which is the most famous SEO plugin for WordPress, but he was tired of how “bloated” it was so he switched to The SEO Framework, which is run by a fellow solopreneur.

Working with an SEO expert

Andy met with an SEO pro for the first time last summer. Google’s getting more complex and it’s hard to keep up with all the rules, so he may bring on a contractor to help.

One thing Google supposedly hates now is older content. CNET deleted a bunch of their articles thinking it would help their rankings and they got called out by Gizmodo.

Andy says he’d never do that.

Right on, Andy.

Like Alissa Walker shared with us last month, a good story is the best growth lever. Andy’s not going to bow to the marketing gods just to get a page view. The shows, the stories and the fanbase are what keeps the reality blurred world turning.

SEOs eat your heart out.

Speaking of the fans, what’s the role of reader support?

Andy’s pretty tight with his readers, many of whom have been with him from the beginning.

A quick scroll through the comments of his articles shows you how engaged the reality blurred community is. So in 2017, before Mediavine, when one of the other ad networks wasn’t working so great, Andy launched a Patreon page and appealed to his fans for contributions.

Asking for readers to pitch in has worked every time he’s done it and Andy has a solid base of paying subscribers but he’s never pushed this option much with his audience. It’s pretty buried on the site too.

“I feel guilty asking for money when I'm getting other money,” he said.

Bet you can relate! But this is changing for 2025. Andy’s bolstering reader-supported revenue and he’s already made two dedicated appeals to readers in the last couple weeks.

Andy did have a revelation that no one was signing up because of free stickers and that the perks probably mattered less to his crowd than he originally thought, especially since the content would remain free.

[Related: Easy subscriber perks that don’t waste your time]

Now, Andy’s positioning his subscription as expansion support: meaning that readers who want to see all the cool things he has planned come to fruition are being called upon to step up and fund them.

He’s also simplified the options down to two (monthly and yearly) in his email and on site promotions which was a smart move. Too much choice leaves people indecisive.

Having a couple backup funding sources puts Andy in a solid spot heading into 2025.

He gets to do what he loves. The readers partake for the low price of free and the diehard fans feel like they’re part of building something bigger than themselves.

So, is ad-supported the right model for you? Here’s how to know!

Programmatic ads work best for publications that get lots of site traffic because site visits = payouts.

• Site traffic: Does your site already get lots of traffic or can you see a path to that (at least 50k visits a month per Mediavine’s metric)?

• Searchability: Are your stories highly Googleable (are people searching for the topics you cover at heavy volume)? Check here

• Website: Is your website the main channel? This strategy doesn’t work for newsletters. It could work for podcasts though. They have a similar model over in that arena.

One last thing, even though Andy’s running on WordPress, you can plug an ad network into nearly any website frontend, even Ghost.

If ads sound Too Hot to Handle for you, stay tuned next week when we talk about a new pay-per-article option that has me smitten.

Check out reality blurred and find Andy on Bluesky and LinkedIn. He also just relaunched his podcast! 📺️ 

Corrections: Earlier edition of this post said that Andy was going to use Yoast for his SEO plugin but he