Check out Houston CityBook's growth just 30 days after launching on RebelMouse. It's normal to be fearful about replatforming to a new CMS. But when done correctly, it can create epic growth.
Check out Houston CityBook's growth just 30 days after launching on RebelMouse. It's normal to be fearful about replatforming to a new CMS. But when done correctly, it can create epic growth.
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers
It's been a long and winding path, but in 2022 the subscription model continues its upward trajectory as a top revenue strategy for publishers of all sizes. The tug of war between platforms and publishers reached its peak in the last few years of the previous decade, leaving users desperate for a modern user experience that's clear of any clutter from the duopoly. This is why intelligent paywall models are a top choice for users looking to consume content right from the source. When done correctly, the strategy can work for any type of media. The New York Times, a frequent showpiece example of the power of paywalls, is constantly reporting record-busting subscription numbers, with 5.7 million digital subscriptions in 2020.
And it all makes perfect sense. The subscription model eliminates the middleman — such as the platforms — so readers get the experience and content they want, and publishers get the cash they need.
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
Why RebelMouse Is the Most Secure CMS on the Web
Delivering a secure, high-performing environment with extreme reliability is essential to all of our clients at RebelMouse. We only use industry-leading, reliable approaches to host our infrastructure. This ensures maximum stability and security for all of our clients’ data. Here are just some of the reasons we’re able to maintain a hard-bodied product that’s flexible, too.
Most websites get hacked. RebelMouse has never been hacked.
We’ve spent years building the most secure CMS of 2022. Open-source CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal mean everyone has access to your code, and that means your website is completely vulnerable.
Think about it: There are millions of instances of WordPress in the world, and every security update and feature upgrade — no matter how big or small — has to be manually performed for each individual site to avoid outright breaking custom code, plugins, and more. This leaves open-source CMS options like WordPress constantly vulnerable to security threats. If you are running a real online business, easily exposed features like plugins are a 2005-era feature that now serve as a major weakness on your site. Security threats created by outdated plugins can put hundreds of thousands of sites at risk, like this breach in 2022 that threatened the safety of 600,000 sites.
Every time a WordPress security breach is announced, the proper updates have to be made one by one. This is because the only way WordPress core developers can patch significant flaws within their software is to deploy fixes to users in the form of user-installed product updates.
This isn't an issue on RebelMouse. All of our updates are quickly deployed at once to every site we power. We often deploy multiple updates on a daily basis. While many WordPress users count on third-party hosting companies or in-house developers to stay on top of the platform’s updates, RebelMouse users can rest easy knowing that important updates are taken care of immediately.
RebelMouse isn’t a solution for cheap websites. We’re a solution for high-value websites that are high-performing and highly secure. It’s also why we’re able to power some of the fastest sites on the web with superior scores on Google’s Core Web Vitals. Click here to learn more.
Transparency is a priority. The sites in our network subscribe to a status portal that provides up-to-date details on platform performance with real-time updates.
We only use modern and reliable approaches to host our infrastructure for maximum stability. We host our infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud because AWS is the most trusted, secure, and reliable infrastructure in the world. We have great relationships with the folks at AWS and utilize the best of their services.
All of our production services are covered with AWS Auto Scaling groups, which means we can sleep at night without worrying that something may go wrong. Our services are self-healing 24/7 as well. And even our stateful services, like databases, are covered with reliable automatic failover and backup solutions.
Since the RebelMouse team spans dozens of countries, we offer 24/7 live support. This means that any vulnerabilities that pop up will never be left unattended. In fact, many updates and patches are deployed across our platform in seconds without any interruption to our site network at all.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse’s infrastructure.RebelMouse delivers 99.99% uptime with maximum performance, stability, and security.
AWS's Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a firewall that helps protect your web applications (or APIs) against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives RebelMouse developers control over how traffic reaches our applications by enabling us to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting (XSS), and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns we have defined. These rules are regularly updated when new issues emerge as well.
With AWS WAF, we're making sure that all of our sites are covered against some of the most common attacks, as defined by The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The project is an online community that creates freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.
Click here to learn more about WAF.
To strengthen our commitment to security, RebelMouse offers a bug bounty program. If you believe you've found a security issue on our site, or any of the sites we power, we may compensate you for your discovery. We look at all submitted reports, and if we agree that it's a valid finding, we'll pay $250 for each one.
Click here for more information about what qualifies as a security vulnerability and how to report a bug.
Fastly’s CDN is certified under the Swiss-US framework. We use the following Fastly services:
Click here to learn more about our Fastly recovery plan.
A lot of publishers may think uncertainty in the digital space means it’s time to double down on in-house developers to create a site experience that stands out against the noise. But it's actually the opposite: It’s time to invest in an external team that creates and manages tech for you, so you can instead focus on creating content that resonates with new and existing audiences.
Our infrastructure summary may come across as Greek to you, but that’s all right. Let’s create something together that isn’t just powered by next-level strategies, but also innovative and stable technology. Your content will be both protected and optimized for long-term growth.
Request a proposal today and let’s start working together.
Most publishers are bogged down with day-to-day content strategy and creation, which usually means their technology suffers. That translates into poor search rankings, traffic dips, and loss of revenue.
Even so, the idea of replatforming to a new CMS, migrating your data, and overhauling your site’s architecture can sometimes feel more daunting than simply fixing the issues your website currently faces. But the stumbling block here is that most publishers aren’t even sure what the exact problems are with their current site.
That’s why RebelMouse offers a free website health check. This comprehensive audit will help you make a data-backed decision on what the best and most cost-effective next steps are to brighten your site’s future. Here’s what our health check includes:
1. Core Web Vitals Evaluation: Google has established that its Core Web Vitals are the new benchmark for measuring a site's performance, and they are now a high-level ranking signal for search on both desktop and mobile. This means that while page speed may have started out as a luxury for savvy webmasters and lucky readers, it's now a make-or-break component that deeply impacts a site's longevity in a highly competitive space.
Our Core Web Vitals Evaluation will let you know where your site stands on these critical metrics, in addition to other performance indicators that are likely impacting your site’s bottom line.
2. SEO Performance Check: How exactly Google determines search ranking largely remains a mystery for publishers, but what we do know is that the search engine continuously rolls out updates to its algorithms. And while sometimes these updates are small and nearly unnoticeable, other times they result in massive changes around the way Google crawls content, often disrupting the rankings of webpages all across the globe.
Our SEO Performance Check will provide you with a well-rounded assessment of how well your site is optimized for the current search environment. We’ll be able to identify pain points and recommendations around how you can tweak your strategy to get better traffic from search.
The way your website performs from a technical standpoint is vital to generating more traffic and revenue. Sign up below to receive your free website health check from RebelMouse. You will receive your results within two business days.
The post-pandemic user landscape is still ripe for subscription revenue
You can get a subscription for everything these days. Whether it’s a cheese-of-the-month club or annual access to read your favorite content, the subscription-based model has continued to gain steam in recent years. In fact, the market for digital subscriptions is valued at $650 billion according to a new report from Lineup, a subscription management solution.
The power of the subscription model has been growing since even before the COVID-19 crisis began, and isn’t showing any signs of slowing as we enter a post-pandemic landscape. According to What’s New in Publishing, Gannett reported a 46% year-over-year increase in digital subscriptions in November 2021, putting them at 1.5M total subscribers. Hearst grew its digital subscriptions by 50% in 2021.
But subscriptions aren’t just for big name publishers. Users in 2022 are ready to pay up for legacy names and new media companies alike, as long as it’s for an experience that’s beneficial to them, reliable, and free of the clutter that can come from third-party platforms. Speaking of platforms, even TikTok and Instagram have started to gauge their audiences’ temperature on subscription experiences. So, the competition has never been steeper for publishers looking to build a subscriber base. Unfortunately, launching a simple paywall may not be enough.
According to Lineup’s report, “as available options continue to increase, so does demand for flexibility. The media companies that understand their audiences’ needs and craft highly personalized packages will come out ahead of those that take a one-size-fits-all approach to their subscription strategy.”
So how do you create a well-rounded approach to subscriptions when some industries in the subscription market are reporting a 30% customer churn?
Creating a personalized content experience is of course key for a successful subscription model. However, that content has to be supported by the right technology to have a lasting impact. As mentioned before, there isn’t a one-stop solution for generating ROI from subscriptions. That’s why it’s important to diversify your revenue streams to see what works best for your audiences. On RebelMouse, we help you build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
Click here to read more about RebelMouse’s subscription model.
Creating resonating content that’s supported by the right subscription technology only gets you half of the way there. Once you’ve made it to this mile marker, it becomes critical to nurture your subscriber base to encourage customer loyalty.
In fact, recent data from Chartbeat found that in Northern Europe, 40% of traffic in the first quarter of 2022 came from what Chartbeat calls “loyal readers.” A loyal reader is someone that returns to your site at least 50% of the days in a two-week period.
If loyalty can account for almost half of your traffic, it’s important to invest in technology that focuses on the full user journey beyond just a subscription signup. From high-performance standards to industry-leading SEO features, RebelMouse has innovative ways to support customer loyalty for your customer base. Click here to learn more.
If you’re looking to start a subscription model for your site, request a proposal today and we’ll help you create a holistic revenue plan that’s centered around personalization and loyalty.