Journey/Mediavine just suspended me for invalid traffic sources. Anyone dealt with this before?
I’ve been on Journey by Mediavine for a while and have largely had a very good experience, but I just got suspended for "invalid traffic sources" with no other explanation. I've never paid for traffic or links, and I have no prior IVT earnings adjustments or warnings that I can see in my Journey account.
After digging through GA4, Cloudflare, and my raw server logs, I found a pretty large bot problem I was only vaguely aware of: rotating residential/proxy IPs from all over the world, fake Chrome user agents, and bots crawling thousands of programmatically generated calculator pages. Some of it was showing up in GA4 as normal-looking traffic, but as far as I can tell it wasn't generating revenue with Journey.
I say I was only vaguely aware of it because I could see thousands of weird visits from Singapore and China in GA4, but I ignored it because it seemed like a widespread problem and seemingly wasn't affecting anything but my reporting in GA4. Apparently I was wrong.
I’ve now got Cloudflare rules blocking/challenging the obvious patterns, and the challenges are getting basically a 0% solve rate, so it seems pretty clear this was bot traffic.
I submitted Journey’s review form, but they say it can take 10–15 days. I also posted on their zendesk support forum, but it's basically a wasteland and posts can take days to get approved, if at all. And of course they don't have a public email address for situations like these. Interestingly, I was less than $300 dollars away from making $5,000 for the year, which is the threshold for applying for Mediavine proper.
Has anyone here been through something similar with Mediavine/Journey? Mainly wondering how likely reinstatement is once the traffic source has been identified and blocked, and whether there’s anything else I should be doing in the meantime.