23:33Frey Chu · Essay
The 4 Types of Directories Winning in 2026
A creator grades four directory business models, from pay-to-rank status games to funeral-home lead gen, against the same eleven-point scorecard.
September 4thThe argument in one line.
Across 27,637 ad-network-verified passive-income sites, the ones actually growing are narrow, single-niche directories with light but relevant backlinks and under 1,000 pages, not broad content plays chasing scale.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're building or considering a content site, directory, or niche blog and want real, verified data on what earns display-ad income today, not theory.
- You already have a site nearing 1,000 to 25,000 monthly pageviews and are deciding which ad network to apply to next, and in what order.
- You want proof that tiny, oddly specific niches (hillbilly slang, MPG lookups, random Bible verses) can still get accepted into premium ad networks and earn real traffic.
SKIP IF…
- You're looking for a get-rich-quick play; every example here took months of backlink and content work before it earned meaningfully.
- You have no interest in organic search or content sites; this is entirely about SEO and directory building, not paid traffic or social growth.
The full version, fast.
A database of 27,637 sites confirmed live on Mediavine, Raptive, and Ezoic (verified via ads.txt) shows that 17% joined in 2026 alone, about 24% are directories, and 40% of Raptive's network is food and recipe content. The single largest portfolio is 117 forums from one operator. Across four case-study sites (a car MPG lookup, a slang dictionary, a ship tracker, a scripture generator), the pattern is the same: narrow niche, relevant rather than numerous backlinks, and no reliance on social. Half of all money-making directories have fewer than 1,000 pages. The recommended path is Mediavine Journey around 1,000 to 3,000 monthly sessions, then Raptive at 25,000 monthly pageviews, skipping Google AdSense entirely.
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00:00 – 00:22
01 · Cold open
Announces a database of 27,637 ad-network-verified passive-income sites and previews the fun facts, site examples, and actionable takeaways to come.
00:22 – 01:25
02 · Inside the Raptive Museum
Walks through his dashboard: 6,647 combined sites, 1,699 directories shipped, 47.5M pages published, 2,537 sites owned by multi-site operators, and guided exhibits like The Giants and The Directory Wing.
01:25 – 02:03
03 · Built with Claude Code
Explains the dashboard was built by prompting Claude Code against each ad network's legally-required public transparency data, no paid scraping tool required.
02:03 – 02:58
04 · Fun facts: growth, directories, niches
17% of the 27,637 sites joined in 2026 alone, about 24% are directories, and food or recipe blogs make up roughly 40% of Raptive's entire network.
02:58 – 04:52
05 · The biggest portfolios
Cultured Media owns the largest Raptive portfolio at 117 sites, 111 of them niche forums; Savitz Publishing's 58-site Ezoic portfolio is one printable-template format re-skinned across dozens of topics.
04:52 – 06:05
06 · How directories actually monetize
58% of directories on these networks earn only through display ads; among the rest, affiliate links lead, followed by email lists and owned products, with just 8% running sponsored or featured listings.
06:05 – 08:42
07 · Case study: mpgbuddy.com
A two-month-old car MPG lookup site already growing fast on a DR 3.8 domain, backed by a handful of highly relevant, high-authority backlinks including a DR73 link from hotcars.com.
08:42 – 10:23
08 · Case study: hillbillyslang.com
A DR6 slang dictionary site pulling 2,800 monthly visitors and ranking for 1,200 keywords with almost no backlink effort, because the niche has essentially no competition.
10:23 – 12:22
09 · Case study: aisvesseltracker.com
A visually striking real-time ship-tracking directory (DR 3.1, roughly 2,800 organic visitors) with thousands of backlinks but only 16 that are actually clean, dofollow, and non-spam.
12:22 – 15:24
10 · Case study: BibleDice.com
A decade-old random-scripture generator at DR 1.3 still pulling 10.7K monthly visitors by ranking position two for a single 29,000-search head term, off only nine clean backlinks.
15:24 – 16:45
11 · What social data reveals
20% of Raptive sites and 29% of Raptive directories run with zero social presence at all; where social exists, Facebook leads, followed by email capture, Instagram, Pinterest, X, YouTube, then TikTok.
16:45 – 18:06
12 · Pinterest is the sleeper
The median Raptive site with a Pinterest account has 19,742 followers versus Mediavine's 7,913, an underused channel for repurposing existing directory data into pins.
18:06 – 18:53
13 · How many pages does a directory need
Median page count across the dataset is 1,058 pages, not the 33,132-page mean skewed by giant forums; half of all money-making directories have fewer than 1,000 pages.
18:53 – 19:35
14 · The ad network application sequence
Recommends applying to Mediavine Journey once a site hits 1,000 to 3,000 monthly sessions, then to Raptive at 25,000 monthly pageviews and staying there indefinitely, skipping Google AdSense entirely.
19:35 – 20:16
15 · Mediavine's rejection and sign-off
Shares that Mediavine recently rejected one of his own directory applications for having too little blog content, and closes by inviting requests for more database insights.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Out of 27,637 websites earning passive income through Mediavine, Raptive, and Ezoic, 17% joined in 2026 alone.
- About 24% of all ad-network-accepted sites are directories, and food and recipe blogs make up roughly 40% of Raptive's entire network.
- The largest portfolio on Raptive is one operator running 117 websites, 111 of them niche forums.
- 58% of directories on these ad networks monetize through display ads only, with no affiliate links, product, or paid listings.
- Only 8% of directories use sponsored or featured listings as a monetization method, despite that being the model most people assume is the endgame.
- 20% of Raptive sites and 29% of Raptive directories have zero social media presence and still earn ad income from organic search alone.
- The median Raptive site with a Pinterest account has 19,742 followers, about 2.5 times Mediavine's median of 7,913.
- Half of all directories earning money on these ad networks have fewer than 1,000 pages; the 33,132-page average is skewed by a handful of massive forums.
- Raptive dropped its minimum entry requirement from 100,000 to 25,000 monthly pageviews in 2026.
- A DR 1.3 site with only nine clean backlinks still pulls 10.7K monthly visitors by ranking position two for one 29,000-search keyword.
Small, oddly specific niches are still winning.
WHAT TO LEARN
Across 27,637 ad-network-verified sites, the ones actually growing are narrow, backlink-light directories under 1,000 pages, not broad content plays chasing scale.
02Inside the Raptive Museum
- A public 'museum' of network data works because ad networks are legally required to publish which sites they accept, turning competitor research into a spreadsheet problem instead of a mystery.
- 6,647 combined sites, 47.5 million published pages, and 2,537 multi-site operators show these networks reward a steady volume of decent content, not one clever trick.
03Built with Claude Code
- Ad network transparency data like ads.txt and seller records is public and free to pull; you don't need a paid scraping tool to build the same kind of database, just a prompt.
04Fun facts: growth, directories, niches
- 17% of all 27,637 sites in the dataset joined in 2026 alone, meaning display-ad content sites are still a growing category, not a saturated one.
- Roughly 1 in 4 accepted sites is a directory, and food or recipe content alone makes up about 40% of Raptive's network, so 'niche' still covers real range.
05The biggest portfolios
- The single largest portfolio on Raptive is 117 forums from one operator; the pattern that scales isn't one big site, it's many small ones in the same lane.
- The second-largest portfolio is one printable-template format re-skinned across dozens of unrelated topics, proof a working template can be cloned faster than it can be reinvented.
- Past the top few portfolio owners, most multi-site operators aren't specialized at all; they're running a grab-bag of unrelated small sites, and that also works.
06How directories actually monetize
- 58% of directories earning ad income use display ads as their only monetization method, so a working directory doesn't need affiliate links or a product to be worth building.
- Only 8% of directories monetize through sponsored or featured listings, despite that being the model most people assume is the endgame; it's the exception, not the norm.
07Case study: mpgbuddy.com
- A site started in mid-2026 was already growing fast two months in, built on a handful of highly relevant backlinks rather than a large volume of weak ones.
- Relevance beats domain rating: a low-DR site with a few topically perfect backlinks can outrank competitors with more total links but less focus.
08Case study: hillbillyslang.com
- A dictionary-style site around a hyper-specific dialect gets thousands of monthly visitors with almost zero backlink effort, because nobody else is competing for those keywords.
- Low-competition niches don't need conventional usefulness; entertainment or reference value alone can carry organic traffic if the keyword space is empty.
09Case study: aisvesseltracker.com
- A site can have thousands of backlinks and still only have a handful that count; filter for dofollow, non-spam, one-link-per-domain before trusting any raw backlink number.
- A distinctive, highly visual UI is itself a competitive edge in a directory niche, making a site more memorable and more link-worthy than a plain list.
10Case study: BibleDice.com
- A decade-old site at DR 1.3 still pulls over 10,000 monthly visitors off ranking position two for one high-volume head keyword, proving one well-targeted keyword can beat a large keyword portfolio.
- Traffic tools only capture Google organic search; a site's real traffic, including AI citations and other search engines, is very likely higher than any single tool reports.
11What social data reveals
- 20% of sites and 29% of directories on these networks run with zero social media presence at all, meaning organic search alone sustains many of these businesses.
- Where social does exist, Facebook and email capture outperform Instagram, Pinterest, X, YouTube, and TikTok combined for driving traffic back to these kinds of sites.
12Pinterest is the sleeper
- The median site with a Pinterest account has roughly 2.5 times the followers of the next network's median, an underused channel most directory builders skip in favor of Instagram or TikTok.
- Existing directory or blog data can often be repurposed into Pinterest pins with minimal extra production, making it one of the lower-effort growth channels available.
13How many pages does a directory need
- The median site in the dataset has 1,058 pages, not the 33,132-page mean; the mean is dragged up by a handful of giant forums, so don't benchmark against the average.
- Half of every money-making directory in the dataset has fewer than 1,000 pages, so a new directory doesn't need tens of thousands of pages to start earning.
14The ad network application sequence
- The recommended order is a smaller entry-level program around 1,000-3,000 monthly sessions, then a bigger network once a site crosses 25,000 monthly pageviews, skipping Google AdSense entirely.
- Minimum entry requirements for these networks can drop significantly year over year, opening the door to far more small publishers than could qualify before.
15Mediavine's rejection and sign-off
- Even an experienced directory builder can get rejected for not having enough blog-style content, a reminder that these networks want content variety, not just traffic volume.
Terms worth knowing.
- DR (Domain Rating)
- An Ahrefs metric, 0 to 100, estimating a website's backlink authority based on the quantity and quality of sites linking to it.
- ads.txt
- A text file publishers host on their domain that lists which ad networks are authorized to sell their inventory; ad networks require it, which makes their accepted-site lists publicly verifiable.
- Raptive / Mediavine / Ezoic
- Premium display-ad networks that place and optimize ads on publisher sites in exchange for a revenue share, each with a minimum traffic requirement to join.
- Mediavine Journey
- Mediavine's entry-level program for smaller sites, with a lower monthly-session requirement than full Mediavine membership.
- Referring domain
- A distinct website linking to a page; multiple links from the same domain count as one referring domain, which is a stronger signal than raw backlink count.
- Dofollow backlink
- A link that passes SEO authority to the linked page, as opposed to a 'nofollow' link that search engines are told to ignore for ranking purposes.
Things they pointed at.
12:06toolAhrefs
19:05productMediavine Journey
Lines you could clip.
00:06
“I just found every single website that's making money through Mediavine, Raptive, and Ezoic... over 27,000 websites that are making money through passive display ads as I speak.”
06:04
“It gets a reportedly 149 monthly visitors, but we know that's a lie because it's clearly accepted into an ad network.”
08:27
“If you're not willing to build backlinks, don't even enter this niche.”
17:08
“Facebook and Pinterest, these are massive opportunities that I am not taking advantage of.”
18:06
“Half of all directories in these ad networks are under a thousand pages.”
19:05
“I wouldn't even bother with Google AdSense personally.”
Word for word.
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I just found every single website that's making money through Mediavine, Raptive, and Ezoic, the largest ad networks outside of Google AdSense, and I wanted to break it down in this video. This includes over 27 ,000 websites that are making money through passive display ads as I speak. This doesn't even include the couple million websites that are probably on Google AdSense.
So I wanted to go over this. I created this dashboard here. It's called the Raptive Museum, and this is obviously just for the Raptive ad network, but it is pretty insanely thorough.
You can see all the websites here and I kind of filtered them out by directories and different founders, ones that are still possible to compete with, in my opinion, some of the giants and all this other stuff. So obviously these aren't just directories, they include all sorts of websites. And I just wanted to share some of the cool things that I found after digging into this data for the last few hours.
With this much data, it's actually very difficult to extract anything that is really actionable because every single website I've noticed is so individual in the way that it's grown when it started when it joined the network how it monetizes the data it requires to become what it is today so I just wanted to start off with some fun facts and then I'll go into some kind of interesting websites that I found and then lastly I'll talk about some actionable things that I've observed just common threads that I've noticed as I peel through the layers of this data and look at some of the directories because I build directories.
And by the way, if you're curious about how I built this, you can just simply prompt cloud code. There's no payment. There's nothing you have to do.
I did create these databases within my Shipper Directory Pro community with some added prompts and some other filters, but you can go and create your own by simply prompting cloud code. These ad networks are legally required to share this information so you can get really in -depth and extract your own data if you want to create your own database.
Like this is the Mediavine one, but I like to see the Raptive one because it... just changed their requirements to enter. They used to require 100 ,000 monthly views and now they only need 25 ,000 per month.
Let's just start off with the fun facts. So the first one is out of 27 ,637 websites, there are 3 ,700 websites that arrived in 2026. That's 17 % of websites that have joined these ad networks just this year alone.
which is pretty cool depending on how you define a directory, which I just define as kind of a curated list on a website. There's roughly 24 % of these websites that are directories and they can come in all shapes and sizes and totally different niches.
There's some crazy ones in here, but that is why I like to build directories. There's a lot of them out there. Now there's a bunch of different websites, some really interesting ones, but by far the most dominant type of website is going to be food and recipe websites.
So food blogs in Raptive's case, about 40 % of their entire ad network is composed of food and recipe websites. And then there's other ones that are like travel home and DIY parenting, travel tech. There's so many niches and some incredibly niche ones.
Next up the company with the largest. portfolio owns 117 websites that are on raptive they're called cultured media and what's interesting is that 111 of these websites are all forums so you can see here these are all websites that they own we have everything from beer and wine making forums a flashlight community forum disc golf long range hunting like it's literally all over the place in terms of topics and niches but you can see just how specialized they've become over the years and it's pretty interesting One thing I noticed is that a lot of these companies that have portfolios of websites kind of specialize in their own thing.
When we look at the company with the second largest portfolio on Ezoic, they have 58 websites. They're called Savitz Publishing. And you can see here that it's a bunch of printables.
So they have printable2023calendars .com, freeautomotiveforms .com, formtemplate .com, biblecoloringpages .org. There's just a bunch of these websites and we can check one out real quick. And they all kind of look the same.
look exactly like this, just with a different topic and a different domain, of course. But it's pretty interesting how they found something that works and then basically replicated it across multiple different niches. I've been a big fan of this for directories and specific directory niches that I found work.
You can always try to find an adjacent niche with a lot of search volume and build that out. I found that works really well. But a lot of these kind of top dogs when it comes to portfolios of websites kind of do their own specialized field.
But as you kind of go down the list and you find publishers that have maybe a portfolio of 10 websites or 15 websites, it starts getting really random. Like we're talking about tools, directories, blogs, like they end up creating a bunch of random websites. And so that format works too.
It's just not representative of the top portfolios on these ad networks. Now, the last fun fact, because I can literally do this forever, is that out of all the directories on these ad networks, around 58 % of them are only monetizing through display ads. And then the other 42 % have one or more monetization methods.
Affiliate is definitely leading the pack when it comes. to how directories tend to monetize. A lot of them have email lists as well.
Some of them own their own store or their own product, whether it be digital or physical. And only about 8 % of these directories are monetizing through sponsored content or paid or featured listings, which I know a lot of people kind of want to build towards, but that's not actually representative of the majority of directories and how they're making money.
There's honestly so much data here that it's a little bit overwhelming. And I think the best way that I've learned to use this data is to treat it like a music. which is why I titled my database the Raptive Museum there's a lot of like correlation does not cause causation kind of situations here so I kind of just like to use this for inspiration for different niches different topics different types of websites and it's really easy to get lost in the sauce when it comes to the data side so let me just show you some cool websites that I found these are going to be starting off with low competition directories or websites or tools that you can go and compete in if you want to build something similar so starting off with the first one this is mpgbuddy .com and it is reportedly getting only 149 monthly visitors but we know that's a lie because it's clearly accepted into an ad network there's probably thousands of visitors but look at this chart right here so the person who built this started around mid -july of this year and just experienced a massive
growth chart, early September. It's all US -based traffic, and the website is mpgbuddy .com. This kind of reminds me of gasbuddy .com, the extremely successful gas directory that I covered in a previous video, but this is what it looks like.
You can find a specific car, and you can see all the ads, and I guess it just helps you understand the miles per gallon for every single car. What's the most efficient? What's the least efficient?
Kind of going from there. Fuel economy and gas mileage for every car from 1984 to today. So there are over 50 ,000 EPA rated vehicles.
I mean, this is insanely basic, right? The website's pretty simple and I honestly love this kind of stuff. It's proof that you can clearly create a simple directory in 2026 and have it grow extremely quickly.
To be fair, I can tell that this person already knows what they're doing because I was looking at the types of backlinks that they were creating. So despite the DR... 3 .8 and the really fast growth which we can see with this organic search chart if we go over to their backlinks We can see that this person is a seasoned seo i would say i'm just filtering out all the spam backlinks but a few months into their website they already have a dr73 backlink from hotcars .com it has real page traffic it's relevant but another thing that gives me the tell that this person knows what they're doing is that if you look at the topics of all of these backlinks they're incredibly relevant we even have this article here for the best used car mpg under three thousand dollars it is a low dr but that relevance is honestly solid they're ranking for tacoma hybrid mpg which has 10 000 monthly searches tons of low competition keywords here that they're already ranking for on the first and second page of google and they even have specific pages for the year the brand and the make of the vehicle so super solid this is probably one of my favorite on the list to be honest because i can see how this just invites other ways to monetize once it hits a certain amount of traffic velocity maybe affiliate stuff that you can even incorporate so i'm just really excited to see how this performs i'm rooting for this person and
despite it being low competition now from an seo perspective they clearly know what they're doing so just take that as you will i would say if you're not willing to build backlinks don't even enter this niche there's probably a lot of giants that are waiting to just stomp all over you in this niche the second website that i found that i really like is hillbillyslang .com this is a dr6 with 2800 monthly visitors you can see the traffic chart right over here and i can only go back six months but it's on a nice growth trajectory at least in the last few months, and as you can probably guess, it's around hillbilly slang.
I'm going to click on surprise me and see what we get. Vidalia onions. In southern talk, it's more than a vegetable.
It's a point of pride tied to local soil, state law, country cooking, and even dedicated Vidalia onion festival. In a sentence, you can say ain't nothing like a Vidalia onion. on a tomato sandwich.
Sweet. I would never have been able to predict a directory or website around hillbilly slang, but it is ranking for 1 ,200 different keywords. Hit a lick, mothman, West Virginia.
Look at the amount of volume that these low competition keywords have. There's 1 ,900 monthly searches, 1 ,200 monthly searches. I mean, it's all green because there's probably not that much.
competition when it comes to trying to rank for these kitty corner i gotta like that one up caddy corner means diagonally across from or set at an angle that's actually pretty interesting too just really low competition that explains why they virtually have no backlinks actually 22 backlinks out of 70 that are not spammy that are do follow and that come from one link per domain is actually really solid so maybe this person knows exactly what they're doing as well but just an interesting look at another kind of entertaining directory 488 index pages not a massive directory but a good size and if you want to compete with a hillbilly slang directory then i would say it's pretty low competition you could probably get a few thousand monthly visitors relatively quick so the next website is aisvesseltracker .com it gets a estimated 2800 monthly organic visitors it's a dr 3 .1 and this is by far the coolest directory that i think i found just because the ui is so different than your typical
directories but it takes a little bit of time to load but look at how much data this person has collected and how visually appealing it is clearly they've spent a lot of time aggregating this data i mean there's so many industry terms and acronyms here that i don't know uh you know what it means but insanely cool kind of visual directory that is probably incredibly useful and has perhaps some really solid b2b value to offer super cool way to visualize all of these different vessels and where they're located.
I don't even know how they went about this. Maybe it's some kind of public API that they use, but it's impressive. This is a pretty low DR.
There's a lot of referring domains, which tells me that at a 3 .1 domain rating, they're probably not the best backlinks. So I'm gonna filter this out just to take a quick look. So just as I expected, there's 3 ,800 backlinks on this website, but only 16 are decent in the case of being dofollow, non -spammy, and having...
one link per domain. There is a pretty nice link from theindiaherald .com. It's pretty relevant sounding, and it's a DR56, but there's no page traffic.
There's definitely some spam ones that I didn't actually filter out, so it's probably slightly less than 16, which kind of explains why the DR is low despite having this many backlinks. Either way, they're still getting plenty of traffic. Keep in mind, Ahrefs only shows us the organic search traffic for Google.
This doesn't include other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo. It doesn't include the AI citations. It doesn't include social media.
So we have to really dive deep, and that's why it's hard to understand how much traffic they may actually be getting because this is one of many different distribution methods they might have. So the last website that is low competition from an SEO perspective is BibleDice .com. There's so many low competition sites.
If we really dug deep, they're there, but this is actually not a directory. It's a random scripture generator, and we can see. this is what the website looks like relatively simple looks like you have the option to sign up for a newsletter which is really smart of them and we can simply click get scripture and it just shows us this scripture pretty straightforward nothing too complex about the build and it's getting 10 .7 k monthly organic visitors at a dr 1 .3 so this is a really low competition niche it seems we'll take a look at the backlinks in a second but it has been around for some time so it's been around for over 10 years and it's still a DR 1 .3, which is kind of interesting.
You would think that it naturally gets backlinks after a while, but I guess not. They're only ranking for 145 keywords. So let's take a look at what the story is behind this.
So they're ranking position two for big keywords like random Bible verse, which has 29 ,000 monthly searches at a DR 39. There's also a bunch of different levels of keyword difficulty, but a lot of these have really high monthly search volume. And so that probably explains why they're able to get so much traffic.
I mean, they're really only ranking for one keyword. They have the rankings on the first page in different countries. So we have the Philippines, Canada, India, South Africa, Germany, all sorts of places.
And it's working out for them. They're getting tons of traffic and not even from AI citations, it seems. Let's see.
There's 236 backlinks. If we filter these out, there are roughly 11. backlinks we can do an extra filter to see any other hidden spam okay so there's roughly nine backlinks that are non -spammy do follow backlinks which is kind of shocking there's not a lot of authority it makes sense why they're only a 1 .3 in dr href shows they only have seven indexed pages too which is again adding to the weirdness of it all but i guess most of the traffic is just going to the home page definitely a weird little website i would probably compete with this if you are so inclined to do so just give it a try because everything about this is just showing that it is viable to compete with if you were to build more high quality backlinks I'm sure that could get you pretty far.
The traffic is also really solid. 83 % of the traffic is from the US. For display ads, that is solid.
Why not try to compete with a website like this? It is almost suspiciously low competition. Those are just a few of the ones that I handpicked because I thought they were interesting, but now I want to share just a couple of actionable things that I've been starting to extract from this database.
I could look at interesting ideas all day long, but I'm also curious about where this traffic is coming from as we saw hrefs doesn't tell the full story and oftentimes under represents the amount of traffic a website might be getting by tens of thousands of monthly visitors sometimes so i want to understand from a social media perspective which of these websites on these ad networks have social media and what types of social media accounts are they focusing on that may be responsible for carrying over the traffic to their website so this data is only for raptive because i've been looking at a lot more raptive websites and mediavine less is zoic because I feel like Raptive and Mediavine are more representative of small publisher potential for us.
Ezoic has recently changed their requirements to enter to, I think, 250 ,000 monthly visitors. So it's not very reachable for a lot of us. But here we see 20 % of Raptive sites have zero social.
And there's 29 % of Raptive directories with zero social. But for those who do have social media, Facebook is definitely the leading platform. And then afterwards, it's email.
capture, although we'll just skip that because it's not social media. Then it goes Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and then TikTok. Now I think we have to be careful and we can't say that I'm not ever going to create a TikTok because it's on the bottom of this list.
I think it's incredibly niche dependent and it depends on how well that traffic can be converted to a website visitor. But I would kind of tend to agree that the audience or the user behavior on a TikTok is going to be less likely to click on a website link. than Facebook, but that's just anecdotal and from my own personal experience.
But what's really interesting about this is that Pinterest is a big sleeper. The median Pinterest following for Raptive sites is 19 ,742. Now I've never really invested heavily in Pinterest content, but for years and years, ever since 2022, when I first built my directory and I knew people who were building niche blogs, I knew that Pinterest was kind of slept on.
It was an area where I knew could work really well. well depending on what niche of course but I know for a fact just looking at this there's directories that I own that I could create a Pinterest account for and so I know that I already have data on some of my directories that could be repurposed into incredible Pinterest content in my opinion.
So for me and my particular directory sites I'm looking at this and I'm thinking okay Facebook and Pinterest these are massive opportunities that I am not taking advantage of that I probably should do more of. So if you build a directory or you build a website and you know for a fact that there is more traffic out there because there's existing communities, there's conversations being had, there's social media posts being made, then you should probably try to take some of that attention and convert it into website clicks because that's just going to get you paid.
And I also think it's just a relatively low lift when it comes to repurposing valuable data into text or image posts on social media. So definitely worth it for me to try this. When I saw this, I thought this was great.
takeaway is that half of all directories in these ad networks are under a thousand pages this is a question that I actually get a lot which is how many pages should my directory have the answer it depends especially on the niche but what we do know is that Google spends resources crawling your page so you want to avoid having pages with thin content or pages that don't really provide any information that could improve user signals so I try to just keep those off the page there are some websites in these ad networks that are massive like literally a hundred thousand pages but I think that probably takes years to get to that point and you should definitely build those slowly if you're gonna have that many pages if not just keep it simple keep it less but really valuable and you don't need a lot of pages to get a substantial amount of traffic and start monetizing through these display ad networks I'll leave you with what I think is the best sequence if you're gonna hop from network to network or just decide which ad network is best for you I wouldn't even bother with Google Adsense personally my take is that you should probably apply to
Mediavine journey once your website hits 1 to 3 ,000 monthly sessions. I believe Mediavine journey has a minimum requirement of 1 ,000 monthly sessions and then once my website hits 25 ,000 monthly visitors I would apply to Raptive and then just stay there indefinitely. I did see a stat that said that out of all the new Raptive sites added in 2026 33 % were directories and maybe it's just my own bias and my own anecdotal experience but lately I feel like Mediavine has been harsher with my directories they've rejected an application recently because it wasn't filled with enough blog content basically so i do need to kind of retrofit it for some blog content and maybe reapply but maybe that's wrong maybe that's inaccurate but maybe others have had different experiences i know mediavine journey still accepts directories but maybe they're just being a little bit more nitpicky about the content either way both of them are good i would just start applying worst thing they can say is no and then you can just reapply after some time has passed so hopefully this was helpful hopefully you thought this was interesting
Let me know if you want me to share more insights that I got from this database because there's a lot of cool stuff that I couldn't fit in this video. With that, appreciate you guys watching. Thanks so much for the support and I'll catch you guys in another video.
See ya.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Frey Chu built a database of every website confirmed live on the three biggest display-ad networks outside Google AdSense, 27,637 sites in total, each verified through its own public ads.txt file. He digs through the fun facts, four low-competition sites worth studying, and what the data actually says about monetization, social traffic, and page counts.
Named ideas worth stealing.
18:53list
The Ad Network Ladder
- Skip Google AdSense entirely
- Apply to Mediavine Journey at 1,000-3,000 monthly sessions
- Apply to Raptive at 25,000 monthly pageviews and stay there indefinitely
The order he recommends applying to display-ad networks as a site's traffic grows, based on each network's minimum session or pageview threshold.
Steal forany new content site or directory deciding when and where to apply for display-ad monetization
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
01:24product
“I did create these databases within my Shipper Directory Pro community with some added prompts and some other filters, but you can go and create your own by simply prompting Claude Code.”
One soft, single mention early in the video rather than a repeated on-camera pitch; the real monetization sits in the description links (SYD Pro, the free Circle community, the newsletter, heylinks.ai) rather than a spoken CTA.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
