Houston CityBook: Epic Growth 30 Days After Launch
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.
Why RebelMouse Is the Best Content Marketing Platform
Our company has built massive pop culture hits like The Dodo, Axios, La Verità, and Motherly, but we also power United Airlines' content hub, Mikkeller Brewing NYC's site and shopping experience, and FSA/HSA Store's content journey, among many others.
A Next-Generation Website and Publishing Platform
Working with RebelMouse means you can experience the following and more:
- High Pages per Visit
- High Loyalty
- High Engagement
- High Reach
- Social UX for Media
The leading platform for reach, loyalty, and engagement.
The Always-Modern Platform
Unlike WordPress and custom CMS solutions, RebelMouse continuously iterates in the cloud for you.
We help you keep up with Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, e-commerce, etc.
The only way to stay modern at scale.
Blazing Fast
Our platform offers unparalleled page speed and scalable performance.
Check out your own website's PageSpeed Insights scores. RebelMouse is state of the art.
Speed is vital to success with content.
Multivariate Testing Built In
It used to take entire departments, teams, and agencies to do what one person can now do on our platform. Enable creativity efficiently using RebelMouse.
We empower creatives to launch ideas quickly and iterate based on data.
Proprietary SEO Tools: Win With Every Post
We offer proprietary SEO tools for editors, writers, and creators to help them understand how to build site traffic.
Clients see massive growth on social traffic.
Proprietary Social Tools Grow Organic Reach
Our proprietary social CRM lets you manage relationships created by content:
- Social Scheduling
- Instant Articles
- Apple News
- Google AMP Support
- Native Email Integrations
Clients see massive growth on social traffic.
Proprietary E-commerce Integrations
Our proprietary e-commerce tools enable a seamless integration with the latest in e-commerce.
Clients see huge returns on content and conversion.
Elegant, Efficient Workflows to Optimize Content
RebelMouse makes managing complex workflows efficient and easy. We power site networks and have multilingual capabilities.
We make global content teams hyper efficient.
Native Support for Paywalls and Sign-up Walls
RebelMouse lets you deploy paywalls for digital products with sophisticated multivariate testing. This also includes sign-up walls to capture emails and social tokens.
Launch revenue-generating digital properties.
Build Thriving Communities
Our platform allows you to launch communities on your site that can have leaders, contributors, and custom workflows. Get premium content from your best creators and grow traffic organically.
Launch vibrant, mobile-first communities.
Launch Robust Contests With Voting and Submissions
One of the most important forms of premium content is systematically discovering who are the great creators in your audiences.
We power one of the web's most popular contests of the year, PAPER Magazine's Break the Internet Awards. Click here to learn more. Click here to view a simple and elegant video submission page we created for RebelMouse-powered Dance Magazine.
Create a premium content flow to grow reach and impact.
An Intuitive Platform
One of the first things clients tell us when they onboard is how easy and intuitive the platform is to use. Everything on desktop works for mobile. Editors, writers, and product teams never want to use anything else after using our platform.
Empower your team.
Insightful Native Data
We offer velocity alerts, traffic data in dashboards, sophisticated data tools, and data visualizations to help you make important decisions quickly.
"The RebelMouse stats that we get help us learn from our audience and, in turn, grow that audience."
—Joanna Harp, Chief Revenue Officer, DanceMedia
The Hyper-Connected, Developer-Friendly CMS
RebelMouse offers native integrations with all the social giants and distribution platforms — including enterprise-grade APIs — and is developer friendly.
Connect RebelMouse into your stack easily.
We Were Built for the Acceleration of History
WordPress and Drupal offer crippling page speeds, hidden costs, and product backlogs.
Adobe Experience Manager is something no new media company would ever choose to use.
We built our platform from the ground up for today's world.
We Are the Last Mile — Where Content Reaches Your Customers
RebelMouse has been used to build mass pop culture hits that grew organically to become household names.
Our platform transforms your business and relationship with your customer.
The Strategic CMS and Agency
RebelMouse has a unique background that gives it a strategic advantage in the market.
Marketers and digital executives trust our platform and agency to modernize and amplify their content efforts.
What Do You Need to Succeed With Us?
We work with brands and media companies that come to terms with these facts:
- You can no longer just buy names and ads to reach people.
- You know you need a direct connection with your customers.
- You have to give your audience what they want with content, not just product.
Contact us today if you're ready to transform your business.
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Why Premium Creative Agencies and CTOs Choose to Develop on RebelMouse vs. WordPress and Drupal
RebelMouse has solved this problem in a way that combines a creative expression layer on top of an iterative, highly secure, and scalable platform that is developer friendly. We enable content marketing and media teams to be lean and efficient so they can focus all of their time and energy on driving success. It's why we're the best CMS platform you could choose to help move your company forward in 2019.
RebelMouse: Cloud-Based and Always Iterating
In 2019, publishers need a high-performance site that produces sustainable reach and consistent revenue for publishers. Users need a straightforward content experience that travels easily across channels and platforms, including site, search, and social.
Our platform is the sweet spot in between those two needs. Needs that drive agencies made up of experienced WordPress and Drupal developers to create the best and highest-performing sites possible. But with RebelMouse, you get a cloud-based, API-driven, extensible, scalable, and secure environment that gives development agencies, CTOs, and technical teams a huge advantage in what they can deliver to their clients and teams.
Trying to manipulate big-box CMS platforms into something completely new and aesthetically pleasing requires design overhauls, numerous plugins, and frequent troubleshooting. On top of all this, every WordPress instance is totally distributed. This means that every single upgrade has to be applied individually to each instance — leaving 80+ million versions of WordPress outdated at any given time if left unattended.
This antiquated administrative process requires heavy, ongoing site management to keep these behemoths stable and updated. It's why there are entire agencies dedicated toward only managing and monitoring them. It could cost as much as $10+ million a year to keep a WordPress, Drupal, or custom CMS modern. And even then, these sites would still fall drastically behind what RebelMouse offers.
But it doesn't have to be this way. At RebelMouse, we blur the roles of designers, developers, and strategists to create a publishing experience that is built to support content creators, optimized for distribution and speed, and monitored and protected around the clock — all at a reasonable cost.
Stay Ahead of the Algorithms
Media powerhouses like Google and Facebook are constantly changing and updating their algorithms. While these shifts may not always be as explosive as the friends-and-family update of January 2018 that devastated some publishers, even the smallest of tweaks can impact content strategy. It can be tough to keep up with these updates on top of creating quality content capable of sustaining reach across social.
Thanks to the massive scale of our platform, RebelMouse has access to deep data that often sheds light on the evolving algorithms of Facebook and Google. The dupoly generates more than 400 million page views and billions of impressions, and our insights allow us to see how that data shifts as the algorithms change. We then take this data and use it to fuel helpful platform updates and strategic recommendations for our clients.
For example, Facebook and Google both implemented heavy penalties for full-screen light boxes and pop-ups. Many media sites and brands didn't understand this update when it first went live and assumed it meant that they could no longer succeed on Facebook, accepting massive declines in organic traffic. At RebelMouse, we were able to quickly help clients understand the update when the algorithm changed so they could update their promotions accordingly, primarily by moving full-screen takeovers to second and third clicks so they are out of the view of Facebook and Google's crawl. It was also at that time that we discovered Instant Articles with a video in the lead media position has a massive advantage over other articles, so we updated our platform quickly to make it easy for editors to take advantage of this feature.
RebelMouse updates its platform weekly to keep up with the algorithms. As other publishers miss opportunities and windows for growth, content fueled by RebelMouse has already adapted.
If you're working for an agency, or your site is currently powered by one, here's more about the kind of experience you'll get by making the switch to RebelMouse.
The Perks of Custom Tech at a Fraction of the Cost
As you'd expect, we have a team of developers and designers ready to create a website from scratch that can meet any client's needs. But for agencies, our role as custom site builders expands and contracts as much as needed. We work with the languages of the open web, and help agency developers and freelancers acclimate to our platform quickly, allowing them to let their creative talent shine with full support from us.
No Developer Operations (DevOps) or System Operations (SysOps) Required
- We are massively scalable, redundant, and secure. We have multiple CDN contracts, and have every New Relic and monitoring scaling tool plugged in to ensure that your site experiences massive, scalable performance for far less than custom builds.
- Our infrastructure is hosted on Amazon Web Services' (AWS) cloud. Our 24/7 support team can help you track any errors that occur to help provide as much visibility as possible into every potential issue.
Multivariate (A/B) Testing Tools With Dynamic, On-the-Fly Staging Environments
- Each new product update and feature release is deployed to a small percentage of traffic, and then A/B tested for performance impact.
- Our testing includes how each version affects page speed and user experience. We then take these results and see how they correlate with conversion to goals — such as new shares, subscriptions, and purchases.
- It's extremely fast to make changes to staged layouts, and easy to compare their performance to your or your clients' key KPIs.
- RebelMouse testing tools are not a JavaScript plugin that rewrites script from the server. Our solution is full-stack and extremely powerful.
RebelMouse Design Is Flexible and Performance Focused
If you're an agency or freelancer operating as your own agency, our content and design suites offer ample flexibility to create enterprise-level experiences for your clients.
- You have full control over logos, fonts, and color palettes out of the box, and you can completely customize these aspects and more to your liking with advanced HTML/CSS tools and flexible control over JavaScript.
- Every page is tested against Google PageSpeed Insights to help you optimize pages and stay in tune with necessary integrations.
RebelMouse Is a Creative Platform
Often times, agency developers may not be up to speed on the latest winning content strategies. By switching to RebelMouse, you don't just get full product support. You also gain access to a creative agency that's able to guide your site's strategies around content optimization, and drive success across all platforms.
- Use a premium editorial suite with intuitive, sleek content organization capabilities that require just a few clicks from content creators.
- The only limits are your imagination. Our team can build any custom features, or creators can leverage the premium suite already available, including contests, e-commerce options, collaborative networks, dynamic ads, and pixel-perfect placements. Between our design tools and APIs, there is virtually no limit to what content creators can do without special requests.
Proprietary Editorial Tools to Propel Your Content Ahead
Wouldn't you like to give your editorial team their dream tools?
- Real-Time Insights: Adjust content strategy as needed with native stats like page views and time on site, visible right from within our Entry Editor.
- Organic SEO: Leverage proprietary technology to see how an article's topic is already performing on Google's page one. Then, take that data and use it to set up every article for success in the search rankings.
- Social: Make the most out of distribution through a proprietary, built-in influencer database that lets you define and reach out to your content's organic audience.
Agencies — treat your clients to a new kind of sustainable growth this year, and join our growing league of successful media properties. Request a proposal today to see what it'll take to include our platform in your portfolio of game-changing solutions.
If you're not an agency or freelancer currently working on premium sites, but you are interested in a site replatform, contact us today and let's create something viral together.
Google Made Major Changes to Its Formula for Page Speed. Here’s What to Do About It.
First off, and most importantly, Lighthouse has added two new metrics into its formula for page speed:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page.
- Total Blocking Time (TBT): TBT measures a page's load responsiveness to quantify how long a page is non-interactive prior to becoming interactive. You want your site to have a low TBT to maintain its usability.
Here's a look at how these new metrics stack up against the previous version of Lighthouse:
From web.dev.
As you can tell, First Contentful Paint (FCP) has gained a bit more weight in Lighthouse 6.0. FCP measures the time from click to the time when a user's browser renders the first bit of content from the Document Object Model (DOM), which is your site's HTML structure.
By contrast, two metrics dropped considerable weight in the formula. The first is Time to Interactive (TTI), which measures the time from when the page starts loading to when its main subresources have loaded and it's capable of reliably responding to user input quickly. You want your site to have a low TTI to maintain its usability. Second is Speed Index (SI), the measurement of how quickly the contents of a page are populated. Both dropped in Lighthouse's speed calculation by 12–18%.
What Lighthouse 6.0 Means for Your Site
These new metrics haven't changed Lighthouse's primary function — to determine if your website loads as quickly as possible. The new insights are just a new way to measure this more accurately. LCP measures load time, and TBT determines how long a page remains inactive for a user, two data points that have the potential to diminish the overall user experience if not optimized correctly.
It's now even more important to focus on how long it takes your page to render for every use. This means JavaScript, third-party applications, and any other dynamic media must be optimized for speed. Any slowdowns will dramatically hurt both your LCB and TBT scores.
Here's another way to visualize these changes:
From web.dev.
Understanding Core Web Vitals
Shortly after the launch of Lighthouse 6.0, Google announced an update to the way it evaluates overall page experience. This change is measured by three metrics called Core Web Vitals, that can be tracked and evaluated specifically using Google Search Console. Core Web Vitals now play an important role in how Google measures overall page performance, and could be a make-or-break factor for your site's survival.
Google says 2020's Core Web Vitals consists of the following data points:
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
First Input Delay (FID): This metric quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. This usually occurs between First Meaningful Paint (FMP) and TTI. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift Score (CLS): CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google wants pages to maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
These three metrics will work alongside Google's other ranking factors, including a site's mobile friendliness and safety features, to determine its overall page experience and visibility on search.
From Google
Google says it will always consider informative, quality content as its number one search signal. However, if two websites both have quality content, but one site has better Core Web Vitals, the site with a better page experience will always outrank any site that isn't optimized for performance.
"By adding page experience to the hundreds of signals that Google considers when ranking search results, we aim to help people more easily access the information and web pages they're looking for, and support site owners in providing an experience users enjoy." —From Google's page experience announcement, May 2020.
Secure Your Site's Future
Our platform evolves alongside Google's algorithm, and our team of growth experts spans all time zones to make sure our sites are optimized for page experience with every new article.
To do this correctly, it takes a lot of optimization to perfect every moment of your site's load time. We've mastered Lighthouse 6.0's formula already, and our scores are drastically outperforming every other CMS on the market.
Our jaw-dropping page speeds have empowered us to guarantee a PageSpeed Insights score of 90+ for every site we power. We've done this through a simplified version of code that still allows for ads, videos, and third-party applications to load quickly.
Now that you're well up to speed on how Google measures site experience, let's take a look at some of our performance scores:
Here's how those scores compare to some of the biggest names on the web:
At RebelMouse, performance is a pillar of our company's culture. We've taken Lighthouse scores seriously for years, and have leveraged them to ensure our sites are constantly high performing. It's why we outperform some of the biggest sites on the web. And like with any pillar of a company's culture, optimizing for high performance is never a one-time effort. Our engineers have been crafting and tuning our platform to address these new standards long before they surfaced.
If you want to publish alongside the speed of the web, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
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Native Multivariate Testing at Scale With RebelMouse
Natively Test Across Multiple Dimensions With Core KPI Measurements
Creative teams with great ideas are most successful when they have an environment where ideas can easily be tested against each other instead of trying to find total agreement on one idea. One of the biggest problems we observed while studying CMS platforms in our space was that creative teams were forced to test a "new design" or a "redesign," jamming a ton of very interesting decisions into one. The amount of lost opportunities to quickly build and test great ideas across the industry is staggering.
We're proud of how we've solved this problem with our Layout & Design tool. Any idea can easily be built out from the base of an existing one. You can be knee-deep in the middle of redesign work and then quickly pause for a moment go test a variant of an idea with users or colleagues.
For creative environments to stay focused while being enabled with this type of creative capacity, it's vital that all ideas end up getting measured. An idea might sound awesome to the group or a team member, but it may not always perform. All of the variant testing we enable is measured against the core KPIs that were established at launch by default. So pages per session, bounce rates, total engagement, and conversion goals are all easy to measure for your exact mission.
Knowing that this data will get measured also has a huge impact on how meetings end up being conducted and creative ideas are expressed. It's often easier to be passionate about the importance of a new idea when you know there will be no hard measures of its performance, and those are the types of creative ideas and passions that often misalign with actual growth. When teams know every test can and will be tested against core KPIs, it keeps everyone's creative energy focused on actually moving the needle.
In addition to all these elements, we've discovered that dynamic multivariate testing has to happen across the site and existing users. Testing should also be based on traffic sources. For example, Facebook has declared full-screen ad pop-ups to be an obtrusive user interface, and is heavily penalizing sites for it. However, that's very often the most premium and desperately needed source of revenue for a media site. On RebelMouse, we enable you to serve different layouts (and variants of those layouts) to Facebook so that you can keep that premium revenue, but serve it safely away from Facebook. The creative potential — when you understand how to test variants with our platform — is unlimited.
We always think about happiness at RebelMouse, and this feature has made our clients very happy. But it's not just because of the growth it creates. It's also the positive structure it gives teams to not only work with each other, but grow strong creatively together.
Request a proposal today to learn more about multivariate testing that works.
The RebelMouse Approach to SEO
Faster Page Speed: Google has set a high bar for the open web on what top performance should look like, especially on mobile. Each algorithm update further solidifies the do-or-die importance of page speed as a key ranking factor, often causing top sites to plummet off of page one.
Luckily, we power some of the fastest sites on the web.
Higher SEO Audit Scores: It's common to approach your SEO strategy from a place of reaction instead of being proactive — after all, SEO is likely only one facet of your responsibilities. But this usually results in a post-publish frenzy to tweak articles to boost search results. At RebelMouse, our front-end code is designed to give your content search success from the start.
Get higher SEO audit scores with RebelMouse
Rich, Sophisticated AMP: Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a fantastic tool to increase mobile performance. The hyper-fast mobile format delivers a longer time on site for each reader, which encourages better conversion. RebelMouse is fully optimized for AMP, and offers a game-changing way to generate revenue on AMP without sacrificing the experience it offers to readers. Our Particle Assembler allows for multiple page views and ad placements to occur within a single AMP article.
Learn more about how we support and monetize articles that use Google AMP.
Rich, Well-Formatted Structured Data: Part of the way we optimize our sites for SEO is by ensuring that your HTML passes Google's preferred formatting for key metadata. By giving Google all of the data about your site in a way that the search engine's crawlers can easily read, Google can both understand your content and rank it quickly.
Learn more about structured data and how we use it here.
Proprietary Editorial Tools That Teach Writers SEO: RebelMouse's Entry Editor features a rich SEO toolset that guides writers and editors to think about the right search phrase behind every story, as well as how to focus on small but meaningful modifications designed to improve organic search performance. Adding an SEO headline, a relevant URL slug, and a meta description to your article makes it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content. We recently expanded our proprietary search functionality to include recommendations for keywords that are of high value to Google.
Learn more about our SEO tools for editors here.
Iterations at the Speed of Google and Other Tech Giants: Our team is continuously launching updates that keep our platform modern. We've tracked social and search algorithm changes and how they impact the publishing industry for many years. And thanks to the massive scale of our CMS, we live close to various data points around site performance, which allows us to identify the key strategy changes publishers need to make to stay ahead of and on top of industry standards.
Understand Google's SEO roadmap.
Case Study Snapshots: Google owns most of the referral traffic on the internet, and your site should reflect this reality. Every success we have at RebelMouse is ruled by data. Here's a look at some of the amazing surges in traffic from Google that our clients have seen by being on RebelMouse:
See how much you can grow on RebelMouse here.
Start Winning on Search
RebelMouse's approach to search works for any kind of site, whether you're a brand, new media company, or traditional publisher. SEO doesn't have to be something that only developers and analysts understand. Our product is designed to put the power of search in the hands of content creators, editors, and social curators.
Start winning search with every publish. Request a proposal today and let's start working together.
The New Content Lifecycle: Build a Creator’s Universe with Discovery
The good news is that content creation doesn't have to be an inside job only. By using the power of social feeds, your content can snowball into opportunities for new and dynamic content with every publish. Here's what we mean:
- Start with Core Content: Use original content to amplify your message on social. At RebelMouse, we've done this with our Particle Accelerator, which breaks down articles into micro pieces of content that can be shared individually across social platforms.
- Build Relationships to Accrue More Content: By sparking engagement with your content, you can start forming relationships with publishers interested in your message. The best way to secure these partnerships is to reach out and ask influential Facebook Pages and social profiles to share and send you their creations — whether it's a video, an article, or a part of an article (what we like to call a particle).
- Validate Your Own Message: The social ecosystem is built on reciprocity, and that sharing always has to go both ways. The best part of engaging in a sharing partnership with other influential Pages is that those relationships validate your own Page, deepening your roots as a publisher and establishing a foundation for continued growth both on social and on site. It's the Holy Grail of the creator's universe.
Using this content creation cycle alongside our Discovery tool, RebelMouse clients are able to experience growth and revenue gains, often from the ground up. The Dodo is a prime example of Discovery's magic. It's how The Dodo quickly became the center of the universe for animals on the internet. The formula is simple, but it takes experience to get right. Ask creators for their content. In return, repurpose it in a way that makes it both beautiful and validate their original message. Then, amplify the content. It's all about creating the kind of relationship where creators can't wait to share what you've come up with using their content as a basis. This content repurposing lifecycle is what fueled The Dodo's climb to the top.
By capturing content and making the remixing process systematic, you can create organic growth. But these tools need strategy and know-how to work, which is why we spend time with editors, social media managers, and even CEOs to help them understand how to shift their digital strategy. It's the only way they can take part in this amazing emergence of the creator movement that embraces organic social media strategy.
Take a deeper look into how we mimic this relationship-building, content creation cycle with every publish on the RebelMouse platform. Here's a breakdown of how our social Discovery tool works:
Utilize Article Tags
Discovery automatically pull in tags you've assigned to your article. These are the same keywords connected to your search metadata. In addition, Discovery will find relevant tags based on any videos or images you upload into or discover within the RebelMouse Entry Editor. These tags help slice and dice topics, so no detail or theme gets overlooked. The tags then automatically surface suggested Facebook and Twitter accounts that you can start reaching out to directly or via social signals.
Foster Relationships
Based on the suggested accounts that Discovery pulls in, you can reach out in a number of different ways. Socially, you can send pings to "like" their recent content, comment on an article, and begin to establish a reciprocal-sharing relationship. Or if they have a Facebook email address, you can take it a step further and send them an email. This initial outreach is crucial though, so you first have to figure out how to build in self-interest that isn't completely self-serving. Create your voice, tell them you'd appreciate their involvement, and ask if they'd like to share your story. Once you've established a clear message that works for you, you can utilize Discovery's email templates to streamline your reach-out attempts to other influencers.
Life After Publish
You're not done with your content the moment you click publish. Here are ways to get the most out of repurposing and monitoring your content with Discovery to drive even more engagement:
Optimize: It's important to continually optimize your content to increase its shelf life. Whether or not the content needed refreshing, you can easily click on any article's headline in the Discovery dashboard to re-perform outreach and grow more relationships.
Understand Your Ecosystem: The Discovery dashboard includes information on all of the social accounts that you've selected for each published article. You can then flip through each social platform to focus on a particular network. Clicking on any target account gives you even deeper insights.
Spot Your Wins: We identify any influencer who shares your content and mark it as a win. You can easily keep track of these accounts in the Pages Sharing section of the Discovery dashboard.
Interested in how Discovery can benefit your business? Request a proposal today to get in touch.
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Modern E-Commerce: Blur the Line Between Content and Design
At RebelMouse, we write a lot about the rise of mature users. The modern, mature user of today is willing to pay subscription fees in lieu of dealing with overwhelming advertising, happy to take alternative routes to consume quality content that matters to them, and is ready to transition from platforms to site and search. To generate revenue effectively, publishers and advertisers in the e-commerce business have to keep these mature users in mind. This means a shopping experience should be an environment that feels dynamic and designed for the buyer, not the seller.
PAPER Magazine + Neiman Marcus: A Case Study in Elegant E-commerce
We create immersive online retail experiences that are easy to create and even easier to reuse. Recently, we helped our client PAPER Magazine create an e-commerce page with Tiffany & Co that's next level. The industry-bending magazine also did a previous collobration with Neiman Marcus.
Here's a look at the campaign:
The shopping experience is intuitive and free of additional tabs and unnecessary pop-ups:
While the experience looks very developer-heavy, it was created entirely in RebelMouse's Layout & Design tool. The design starts with a foundational layout that is easy to clone and update, and different products can be swapped in and out whenever needed.
Here's how easy it is to copy and paste product layouts from the back end of our platform:
The Beauty of Frictionless Design
It's likely that if this campaign was replicated on another CMS, the content and design would be completely separated. This means collaboration from content creators and developers would have to run its course before the campaign could launch. Our dev-free designs eliminate this friction so design and content can work together seamlessly. The result is a user experience that stands out among the noise.
If you're interested in launching an e-commerce campaign, or just looking to optimize your monetization strategy, request a proposal today. Let's start working together.
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Instagram-style E-commerce Features on RebelMouse
Instagram has experienced explosive growth, with a record-breaking one billion active users per month. That growth hasn't slowed in 2021, and now the social platform is evolving into a place that isn't just for friends and influencers, but also a vibrant e-commerce platform. While the social network has always been a strong way to showcase products, the app built on this strength with the launch of its Shopping on Instagram feature in March 2020. The new functionality allows users to browse and purchase products without ever leaving the platform.
The new shopping capabilities are a brilliant addition considering that 130 million users tap on shopping posts every month on Instagram, and around 50% of those users will take action on those products or services, which includes visiting a brand's website.
The reason Shopping on Instagram works is because it diminishes a seller-heavy environment and allows users to discover the products they want in an immersive experience that's already familiar.
Personalization and quality UX are key for modern monetization. Read more about this here.
Instead of heading to a traditional site that's full of banner ads for sales and intrusive product suggestions, Instagram's shopping function gives users more control over which products they browse while simplifying the purchase process.
But what if this same shopping experience could be mimicked when users make it to your website? Instagram is a beautiful place to showcase products in a way that's relatable to target audiences, so why stop when the app closes?
Driving Purchasing Behavior Is an Important Monetization Strategy
As part of RebelMouse's enterprise e-commerce solution, we have a feature that resembles the product-browsing experience you can find on Instagram. In their app, interactive dots lay over images that, when clicked, expand to show a product's image, title, price, and link out to buy it:
We've replicated this functionality in our Particle Assembler so that users can easily browse products directly from an image:
In a couple of clicks, users can purchase the items they want by directly going to the respective product page, whether it's a RebelMouse internal page or an external link.
Not only does this experience give users more control over their purchase journey, it's a fast and intuitive process aimed at triggering conversions and building loyalty. When users have a pleasant experience purchasing a product, they're more likely to return. RebelMouse is built on these simple truths.
Check out this live example of the feature being used by our client PAPER Magazine in partnership with Prada.
If you want an e-commerce solution that's visually stunning and designed to create organic engagement with a social-forward experience, request a proposal today and let's create something beautiful together.
Related
- New E-commerce Feature: Product Links Inside Images
- Modern E-commerce: Blur the Line Between Content and Design
- New E-commerce Option: Easily Feature Products With Just a Few Clicks
- RebelMouse Shopify Integration
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Building Premium Communities and User Journeys on RebelMouse
The good news is that, in the current competitive landscape, you can scale premium content with small, dedicated content teams. It's about investing in the right tech to support writers and their mission to build lasting communities that validate your brand's message, and to build sustainable reach and revenue.
Along with many other examples, we power one of the most robust millennial communities on the internet in The Odyssey Online. The Odyssey Online doesn't just have one community, but thousands of communities — one for each university, and many around emerging topics. Each community has a dedicated president and editor in chief, and their roles are to find and invite in great members.
Many of our sites are building massive engagement and huge traffic growth by employing our in-depth community features. Here's a breakdown of our premium, online community engagement platform and experience:
The User Journey
Social Login
- Complete support for logging in to your communities through Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Your Own Social and Interest Graph
- Members can follow each other, your star editors/creators, and topics of interest.
Native Comments
- Community members can begin their journey by commenting before contributing.
Star Ratings for Users
- Administrators can control the star ratings of users, allowing you to highlight the best community members, feature their comments and posts, and save time around the worst members by categorizing them with low stars and hiding their content efficiently.
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Invites and Applications to Contribute
- Avoid having your communities get overrun by spammy user-generated content (UGC) by having complete control over the invitation and application process for new members.
Efficiently Manage Multiple Communities at Scale
- Having one community is so 2010. You can now have a community per section/category/vertical, as well as clear leaders and members for each community. This is far more powerful in today's digital ecosystem.
Community Contests
- Easily launch contests designed to give you access to the best contributors and creators in the world, create a traffic splash and spike in organic traffic, and amass a content library of media and articles submitted by users that you can then repurpose to build more traffic.
Dynamic and Extensible Workflow Tools
- Our platform allows you to create a simplified and streamlined experience to protect the integrity of your communities. This means you can ensure that a certain level of contributors can only send content for review, not publish. Once submitted, other members who are allowed to review and edit, as well as members who can publish to your site and/or publish to social, take the submitted content to its final destination after a thorough review.
- RebelMouse makes setting up this type of environment easy, provides strategy advice in the right ways to approach and implement it successfully, and has a completely customizable setup that you can configure to match your own voice, audience, and needs.
Default Roles
- Community Member
- Community Creator
- Community Editor
- Community Editor in Chief
- Community President
Privileges
Comments
- Create
- Moderate
- Feature
- Ban Users
- Star Rate Users
Posts/Articles
- Save (to read later) (default for any signed-in member)
Create
- If you don't have a publish permission, you "send to review" instead.
Edit/Review/Annotate
- Publish
Schedule to Social
- LinkedIn (coming soon)
Send Emails
- Newsletters
- Breaking Alerts
- Groups, Categories, and Multiple Lists are supported
It's time for publishers to take advantage of the opportunities content creators and their networks — which are often formed organically — have to offer. Our community platform is not only designed to encourage these relationships, but nurture them into a loyal follower base. Request a proposal today to get started.
Related:
Launch a Community on RebelMouse
How to Create a New Community on RebelMouse
Conquer Roles to Make Content Creation Seamless
A Guide to User Permissions on RebelMouse
Stepped Entry Editor: Guide Your Users Through Content Creation
Tools to Master the New Content Workflow
For years, the role of the publisher was isolated, and the inner workings of how content was created was confined to the hands of creators. Publishers once operated a behind-the-scenes news desk that facilitated content for its readers. Now it's become a gigantic whiteboard meeting attended by the entire social ecosystem.
Today's audiences are craving authenticity and transparency, which has created the rise of the social influencer and birthed a universe of creators. Whatever your message may be — whether it's to sell a product or simply inform your users — it must be validated by others.
That's why we've created a workflow for our publishing solution that nurtures a community of creators. Because in the current climate, it takes a village to build user loyalty. Here's what it entails:
A Synergetic Platform: We've created an intuitive process that allows each article to be created as a collective process between team members, influencers, or any contributor to your content experience.
Detailed Approval Workflows: A post submitted by a community member never goes live without the review and approval of an administrator. Writers with zero publishing rights can submit drafts for approval rounds, and drafts can also be saved at every stage of the editorial process.
Built for Creators
No matter how big your content team may be, each article likely starts with a core creator. Once completed, their draft content is typically submitted for review and revisions before publish. RebelMouse's Entry Editor now makes this process seamless for creators, so they can spend more of their time focusing on creating quality content that's optimized for both search and social.
The workflow for a creator is comprised of:
Content Creation: A creator begins crafting a post using our powerful publishing software, taking care to get the most out of our integrated media bar to increase reach and the likelihood of a click.
Tagging: The creator then organizes their content with applicable tags to make sure it shows up in all the right places on the site. These tags are also used as search keywords.
SEO Best Practices: Next, the creator optimizes their post for the search phrase they want to win in the SERPs. By targeting a specific phrase for each article, each piece of content has a better chance of ranking high against Google's search algorithm.
Submitting for Review: Finally, the creator submits their post for review before heading off to their next assignment.
Dynamic Collaboration
Creators can add annotations to drafts at any time during the editorial process. Within the platform, there's a companion notifications-and-comments feed for writers and editors to review annotations, as well as a timeline that tracks edits.
Add Annotations: If you're reviewing a post in the Entry Editor, you can add annotations to any part of the content for the author to see.
Receive Notifications: There's an alert icon that appears in the top-right corner of the Entry Editor each time there's a new annotation or comment added to the post.
Comment Thread: Keep the communication open with a thread of all comments and annotations that've been left on a post.
Methodical Transparency
The dashboard is where content creators, administrators, and contributors can see the current queue of posts and where each article stands in the content lifecycle. Based on a users' rights, they can also look at real-time stats to keep track of trends and any potential peaks or dips in traffic.
Stay up to Date
Never wonder where a post stands. Every phase of the workflow is clearly marked in the dashboard. If an article is still in review, it's marked with a yellow bar across the top of the draft.
Monitor Every Post
Within the dashboard, users can see the latest pieces of content in the queue, their status, and when they were created. Preview, edit, or search for any article right from within the dashboard.
Stay on Top of Stats
The post dashboard houses not only the post queue, but also customizable statistics on performance, including the number of pageviews for each post and on site overall. Posts can be further filtered by date published, author, and keyword. The metrics available to each user are dependent on a member's role on the platform. For example, an editor may not be able to see as many stats as a user with administrative rights.
Improve Your Content Workflow
The new content workflow is designed to make each step of the content lifecycle intuitive and easy to control. Administrators are able to see the flow of content being published, and can quickly note any turns in reach, engagement, or even publishing cadence.
At RebelMouse, this workflow is just one part of our CMS that's helped launch new media powerhouses like Axios and The Dodo. It's why legacy brands like United chose our platform to launch their content hub.
Start optimizing your content and its lifecycle today. We launch sites fast. We also offer strategy services to make sure your media property reaches its biggest audience at scale while still generating revenue. Let's create something together today.
In 2021, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
RebelMouse's Subscription Features
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:
- Free Trials: Create one-day, weekly, or monthly subscription plans.
- Coupon Codes: Use promotional codes to give access to strategic partners and complement B2B deals.
- B2B Subscriptions: Use email matching to sell access to companies.
- Testing Powered by Data: We have a sophisticated suite of A/B testing tools — complete with Google Analytics integrations — that give you the ability to test what works, what doesn't, and how to better cater to your readers' needs.
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.
The Success of Our Subscription Model
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 first year leveraging the RebelMouse paywall strategy, La Verità saw 800% audience growth with an average of 16 pages per visitor, far above the industry standard. Their continued, unprecedented growth makes them one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've experienced significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
Is a Subscription Model Right for You?
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.
Dynamic Voting: Grow Traffic and Engagement Organically
Our passion to fuel engagement with every click is also why we built out a new feature that lets you create professional-looking quizzes and surveys that are easy to use and monetize. Our client PAPER Magazine leverages this feature for their Break the Internet Awards, and has snagged impressive engagement as a result.
Here's how it works.
The voting feature is controlled through Entry Editor's Assembler feature. You can turn it on via the gear icon located in the top-right corner of Assembler. As you can see in the screenshot below, real-time voting stats are also available in the Stats tab of Entry Editor's sidebar menu:
Here's a look at what the voting process looks like live on site:
We've even built out a quick voting example for you below, so you can see and interact with it as it would exist live. Let us know what your favorite feature in the RebelMouse Entry Editor is!
Assembler
SEO Tools
Social Scheduling
If you would like to implement our voting feature on your site, contact support@rebelmouse.com or talk to your account manager today.
Note: Voting in Assembler will soon be supported for Facebook Instant Articles (IA) and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). Currently, Apple News does not support a voting component.
How to Monetize Your Website in Today’s Publishing Environment
It's a tricky catch-22 that haunts marketers and publishers across the digital space. Clear ROI driven by content marketing and digital advertising has a history of being far from tangible, but it's becoming clearer as technology advances and users mature.
Now that a few years have passed since Facebook's fake news fallout and misuse of data scandal, platform dependency has subsided. This has resulted in more opportunities to create sustainable revenue for publishers. Still, if one lesson can be learned from the maturing age of social, it's that relying on one outlet for survival is not a great idea. Just like content diversification is key to growth, using a multipronged approach is just as important for any monetization strategy.
Here's a look at some of the best ways to generate ROI in today's digital climate.
To Create Any ROI, Performance Is Everything
In late 2018, Google revamped how they measure page speed. PageSpeed Insights now includes new data from Google's Lighthouse platform. Lighthouse is a tool built into the latest version of Google Chrome that helps you determine how well your site is performing, and tells you which pages on your site need improvement.
These new updates ushered in harsh scoring for desktop and mobile page speed performance, and many top publishers saw their pages report failing scores. Google has set a high bar for the open web, and with users ready to consume content off the platforms, the change comes at a vulnerable time.
To put it simply, you can't monetize your site if it takes too long to load and instantly turns users away. In Google's eyes, the faster your pages load, the faster the search engine is able to crawl and index them. If it takes too long for Google to crawl the content of a website, it's possible not all pages will get indexed, making them less discoverable in search results. With Google edging out Facebook for top referral traffic, this means every publisher's SEO strategy has to be flawless, and it starts with a high-performing site.
A faster page speed also means a better user experience, and a boost for your bottom line. That bottom line can be significant, considering sites that load in five seconds experience 70% longer average sessions compared to sites that load in 19 seconds.
The PageSpeed Insights scores for a RebelMouse-powered property.
At RebelMouse, we've made performance our top priority this year. Click here to learn all about how we do it.
Users Are Ready to Pay for Content
Think of the internet as being in clean-up mode. As the platforms work to make their offerings safer and profitable for publishers, the ad space is getting easier to navigate as well. Users are maturing along with technology, which means the stigma around paying for content, usually via a paywall, is subsiding.
Recently, The New York Times reported a new high for paid digital subscriptions — 3.3 million, which is a 27% jump from 2017. The news outlet has a goal of reaching $800 million in digital sales by 2020. While it seems publishers like The New York Times already have a massive enough audience to grow digital subscriptions, the paywall model is gaining steam across the industry. In the UK, subscriptions are serving as a driving force of growth for digital revenue, accounting for a 15% increase over the previous year according to the Association for Online Publishing.
The rise of subscription success can be attributed to an ongoing prioritization of user experience. Users are ready to consume content that isn't held hostage by ads and obtrusive slowdowns, 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.
Stats from a client powered by RebelMouse using a subscription model.
We've seen incredible success with paywalls for a variety of different media companies. Click here to learn more.
A Modern Approach to E-Commerce and Direct Sales
The steady prioritization of user experience becomes even more relevant in the world of direct sales, including e-commerce. It's estimated that the number of online shoppers will rise to 230.5 million by 2021. The rise of online shoppers also means that competition will increase. For the first time ever, big-box brands have to compete with small buyers on Etsy and similar sites for the same audience. What sets each experience apart is ease of use and personalization.
RebelMouse client PAPER Magazine's collaboration with Neiman Marcus.
For example, publishing conglomerate Condé Nast is not only committed to a subscription model for all of its publications in 2019 as evidenced by its launch of Vogue's VogueWorld — a digital brand that combines style with e-commerce. Pairing the effective content strategy of Vogue with an e-commerce twist is the kind of differentiation that will set digital retail efforts apart. To succeed in direct sales, the experience has to be built for the buyer, not the seller. Buyers in this climate are more compelled to find a shopping experience they can relate to rather than scroll through.
More of PAPER Magazine's collaboration with Neiman Marcus.
Click here to learn more about our modern e-commerce solutions.
Leverage the Rise of Influencers
The start of 2019 saw a number of writer layoffs at major publishers, including Mic and Vice. Feeling crushed by the unpredictable swings of the platforms and the failure to monetize their own tech stack, many in the industry find themselves at a crossroads on how to generate revenue.
However, the answer is not to fire writers. In fact, your writers are more important than ever. Even small creative teams equipped with the right tools to create quality content can reach massive audiences and drive fruitful engagement. In order to do so, they need to tap into the existing universe of creators. The industry has seen a tremendous swing toward influencer marketing, and even micro influencers are overtaking celebrities and accounts with huge followings, accounting for up to 40% of brands' ad spend.
Every brand and new media company already has an audience of influencers that can be leveraged with the right support. That's why we've upgraded our community engagement features at RebelMouse. Our sites can leverage multiple communities at scale through a robust user journey that makes it easy for influencers and writers to contribute to your digital presence. Whether these contributors are monetized or used organically, they help validate your brand's message in a way that's transparent and relatable.
A look at RebelMouse's Community Dashboard.
Click here to learn more about leveraging the creators who are already passionate about your content.
The Power of Brand Storytelling
Media companies are increasingly finding additional and impactful revenue by providing creative services to advertisers instead of only selling their audiences through banner ads. Thanks to the aforementioned universe of creators, it's now easier for brands that were once shackled by their legacy reputations to create dynamic content hubs. These content hubs can produce beautiful stories that expand your brand's personality via a humanized approach to digital strategy. In fact, branded content is quickly becoming an industry standard. 84% of people expect brands to create some kind of content.
An example of a sponsored content placement on RebelMouse-powered Motherly's site.
There are a number of key ways to make brand storytelling work effectively while drumming up revenue at the same time:
- Sponsored Articles
- Sponsored Landing Pages
- Content-First Ads
- A Full Brand Content Hub
RebelMouse client United Airlines' #HerArtHere campaign.
For more information about each of these key offerings, including how we implement them for impactful revenue, click here.
Advertise With a Priority on UX
When it comes to the more traditional display style of advertising, publishers are faced with risking the now-coveted user experience more than ever. This means publishers are forced to work harder than ever to keep traditional ads on their sites for a couple of different reasons: 1) Users have become increasingly blind to ads and/or use ad-blocking software to completely remove them from their content experience, and 2) advertisers, in turn, demand that their dollars only apply to viewed ad impressions.
Here's the secret: Audiences are fully aware that advertising exists, and that it's a necessary trade-off to freely consume your awesome content. But it has to be done in an elegant way that doesn't impact page speed (we've come full circle now!) nor obstruct the way users consume content because they will click away.
Since user experience is so important, our platform has a multidimensional ad manager that lets our sites optimize their ad experience, including automatic lazy loading to ensure faster page speeds. Our ad manager can support a mix of media too, including video ads.
Above is an example of how easy it is to customize ad behavior on RebelMouse.
For a full overview of our intuitive and user-focused ad integrations, click here.
Understand Social's Advantages and Limitations
The idea of social ROI has always been a bit ambiguous to say the least. This is why it's important to leverage the strengths of the platforms without ever relying on them completely.
For example, a best practice is to take advantage of offerings that increase readability, such as Facebook Instant Articles and Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). These options combine coveted load times and user experience with options to monetize. On the flip side, these options are only an extension of a broader, varied ad strategy that uses multiple channels to create revenue.
Social platforms also serve as a great way to learn more about your audience. Through the use of targeting, social platforms make it easy to learn about the kinds of demographics that engage with each particular piece of content, allowing you to adjust your monetization strategy accordingly. While at times it may seem like the age of social is truly over, it's important to remember that social channels still remain a gateway to massive new audiences. 68% of Americans were using Facebook as of early 2018, and 73% were using YouTube. With that, it's up to your own content and site experience to take them past the feed.
Foster relationships with social audiences using RebelMouse's organic growth tool Discovery.
RebelMouse has integrations with Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP to make cross posting a breeze. Click here to learn more about our social Discovery tool to unlock your audiences on social.
Find Your Monetization Strategy
The beauty of each one of these ROI opportunities is that they can be mixed, matched, and blended to create a strategy that makes the most sense for your website. Because if this industry has taught us anything, it's that it takes more than one strategy to create a broader digital architecture that's not only profitable, but personable.
If you're having trouble monetizing your own site, request a proposal today. Let's start working and making money together.
What Makes RebelMouse Secure, Stable, Redundant, and High Performing
Four Mantras of the RebelMouse Environment
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
We use modern and reliable approaches to host our infrastructure for maximal stability. This means we host our infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud because AWS is the most trusted, secure, and reliable IaaS 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.
Scalability and Performance
It's a crucial part of our work to make our application and all the related services we utilize scalable. All of our application services are stateless and covered by AWS Auto Scaling groups, and we monitor our services' performance and capacity on all levels. We use Nagios, AWS CloudWatch, New Relic, and Kibana to provide clear and accurate information about our performance. All of these tools are important as our clients grow on our platform.
Speed
RebelMouse leverages the most advanced content delivery and caching technologies on the market. All of our public endpoints are covered with custom content delivery network (CDN) configurations to provide maximum speed for end users across the globe.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Ensures Quality
Ansible is our primary orchestration tool. Ansible stepped into the market quite some time ago, and has been hugely popular ever since. We ensure that our code used for orchestration is of the highest quality, giving us the ability to move quickly and safely.
If something goes wrong, we don't panic. Our team of Rebels, which straddle almost every time zone, investigate and solve issues as fast as possible. Sentry and New Relic track any errors that occur to help provide as much visibility into every code issue, making it possible to resolve every issue quickly and mitigate any potential consequences.
Be Supported
2018 has been a turbulent year for both platforms and publishers. The ups and downs have been a good opportunity for publishers to rethink how they plan to nurture their audiences and generate new revenue. 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.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search
The RebelMouse platform features a rich search engine optimization (SEO) toolset that guides writers and editors to think about the right search phrase behind every story. It also empowers users to focus on small but meaningful modifications designed to improve organic search performance.
Here's a checklist of how we ensure the sites in our network consistently surge on search.
RebelMouse’s High-Performing Search Strategy Checklist
Site Performance for SEO
- Core Web Vitals
- AMP optimization
- Performance
- Google Discover
Structure Your Content to Reinforce Your Search Phrase
- RebelMouse's Particle Assembler
- Alt tags
Structured Data
- What is structured data?
- RebelMouse's out-of-the-box integration
Optimize Your Website for Search: A Successful SEO Strategy Starts With Speed
From web.dev
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 algorithm. 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.
One of these massive disruptions came in June 2021 with Google's page experience update. Developers are now feeling the impact of how their publishing platforms stack up against the new standard.
The update means Core Web Vitals are now a major factor in Google Search's ranking methodology, and sites big and small that haven't been prioritizing performance have seen their organic traffic hit stumbling blocks as a result.
The update has solidified the do-or-die importance of page speed as a key ranking factor. All too often, sites with poor performance plummet off of Google Search's page one results.
Core Web Vitals scores are critical to your search performance. RebelMouse outperforms traditional platforms on the metrics that matter most.
Optimize Your Website for Search: Prioritize Google's Core Web Vitals
Google has set a high bar for the open web on what top performance should look like, especially on mobile. The following is a brief description of Google's Core Web Vitals.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): A website's LCP is the time it takes to load the main content on a page. Google wants LCP to happen within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
First Input Delay (FID): FID quantifies a user's experience when trying to interact with unresponsive pages. You want your FID score to be low to prove the usability of your site. According to Google, pages should haven an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS determines how often your users experience unexpected layout shifts or changes on a page. To ensure visual stability, you want your CLS score to be low. Google wants pages to maintain a CLS score of less than 0.1.
The RebelMouse Approach: We are able to outperform competitors on Core Web Vitals because site performance isn't just a goal, it's a company pillar that's woven into our culture. We use this focus on performance to help new media powerhouses and legacy brands alike make the most of the open web by growing traffic and building revenue without sacrificing user experience.
Through never-ending performance optimization, the sites powered by RebelMouse score higher on Google's Core Web Vitals over other CMS platforms, including WordPress.
RebelMouse's SEO optimizations result in big traffic improvements.
Click here to learn more about how to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.
Optimize Your Website for Search: Make the Most of AMP
Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a fantastic tool to increase mobile performance. The hyper-fast mobile format delivers a longer time on site for each reader, which encourages better conversion.
AMP pages are built to be fast and load almost instantly when clicked from Google Search, increasing user engagement and dropping bounce rates.
AMP is a rich environment, but implementing it properly can be time-consuming. AMP pages, in order to be fast, are highly structured, and companies need efficient tools to take full advantage of the opportunities that AMP provides. When implemented correctly, the impact on search traffic is remarkable.
The RebelMouse Approach: Our platform is fully optimized for AMP, and sites in our network use it as an often game-changing way to improve search performance.
Content creators can publish to AMP on RebelMouse with one simple click:
On RebelMouse, optimizing your content for AMP is a one-click process.
Plus, our team is constantly making little tweaks to improve AMP performance for our clients. For example, we automatically enabled a required large-image setting across our sites to optimize for Google Discover. While the update may seem small, it has resulted in a significant and positive impact on traffic when an article makes it into Discover's feed.
Check out the visible boost it gave one of our clients, as tracked by Google Search Console:
Our behind-the-scenes optimizations on AMP drive boosts to readership.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse's AMP optimization.
Optimize Your Website for Search: Leverage the Right SEO Editorial Tools
RebelMouse's SEO tools increase search traffic.
Our SEO technology centers around best practices for search, including detailed metadata that helps Google's site crawler identify, index, and rank your content quickly.
Here's a look inside our proprietary technology that helps our clients experience quick search boosts that turn into long-term SEO wins.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Define Your Search Phrase
It can be tricky to nail down which search phrase you want to win. Within RebelMouse's SEO tab, you can brainstorm your ideas in real time. Through the creative usage of APIs, we ensure writers and editors are armed with the right information when optimizing content for SEO. In the example above, the drop-down list is suggesting search phrases that are already performing well on Google. The number next to each recommended phrase is its monthly search volume.
This helps you determine which phrases are easy to win, or perhaps too competitive to strategize for, on an article-by-article basis. Click here to learn more about this feature.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Match Your Slug to Your Search Phrase
Easily update your URL slug to match your desired search phrase on RebelMouse.
The SEO tab in our Entry Editor is designed to repeat your desired search phrase throughout your content so that Google's crawler has every chance to index it correctly for search. With this methodology in mind, it's a best practice to have your article's URL slug match your desired search phrase. From the SEO tab, you can click the "Optimize Slug" button to automatically match your URL slug to the search phrase you want to win.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Pick Smart Recirculation Links
Access outlinks for your search phrase directly from RebelMouse's editing interface.
After you've defined your search phrase and optimized your URL slug accordingly, you can select highly relevant links to add as related content to the end of your article. We call these Around the Web (ATW) links. The SEO tab in our Entry Editor allows you to pick the best links from your own site, as well as from around the web, which leads to truly amazing traffic boosts. This is a proven SEO practice that's rewarded by Google. Since your article will link to pages already winning your search phrase, it can increase your own post's relevance score in the eyes of Google's crawler.
We automate the surfacing of both ATW and internal links for you, so it's as easy as ticking a handful of checkboxes to add them to your post. We've also done the math, and the data is clear: Adding ATW and internal links to the end of your articles can increase traffic coming to your posts from Google by over 300%!
Click here to learn more about this feature.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Craft Metadata Before Publish
Update your content's metadata easily on RebelMouse.
When it comes to Google's site crawler, providing clever metadata is one of the best ways to contextualize your content for search. From there, Google's search algorithm will rank your site for search queries that it determines are relevant to your content. Our SEO tab allows you to write your metadata right from within our Entry Editor. Plus, our character counter will help you make sure that your SEO headline and description match Google's best practices for metadata text length.
It's important to make sure your metadata is clearly written in a succinct way so that Google can quickly understand the nature of your content.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Structure Your Content to Reinforce Your Search Phrase
RebelMouse's Particle Assembler is a content creation tool within our Entry Editor that makes it easy to transform your posts into media-rich micro pieces of content, which we call particles, that can both be shared individually and crawled separately on search. Our Assembler functionality gives your content more legs, which means more chances to generate more traffic.
Assembler is accessible via a couple of clicks in the formatting toolbar of our Entry Editor. From there, an organizational layout gets inserted into your article that guides you through the process of building out the particles that will shape your Assembler.
A look at how to add particles in RebelMouse's Assembler.
The best way to think of Assembler is by treating it as an enhanced list format. If your article is about vegan cooking trends, each particle can feature a new trend. But Assembler does not need to be a simple list. It can also cover the main points of your article and feature user-generated content or even related stories.
Assembler is a helpful SEO tool because it can generate a unique URL slug for each particle, maximizing your article's ability to get indexed by Google for more than one key search phrase.
Click here to learn more about this feature.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Make the Most of Google's "People Also Ask" Module
Strategize search phrases to win with Google's "People Also Ask" feature.
Particle headlines are a great way to make use of Google's "People Also Ask" module. This will help you identify search patterns of users who are interested in your search phrase. By tailoring your particles to those patterns, it's likely that your post will move up in Google's search rankings.
Click here to learn more about this strategy.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Use Alt Tags on Every Image
Easily update alt text with your desired search phrase on RebelMouse.
Each particle is another opportunity to add relevant media to your post, and Assembler makes it easy to add alt text to every image you upload. Alt text is very important for accessibility, and can also have benefits for SEO. Briefly, alt text is text that is added to an image to describe it to search engines. It also allows people using screen readers to be able to know what the image is without actually being able to see it. You can easily add alt text to any image in RebelMouse from our Entry Editor. Adding your search phase into every alt text field will only bring you one step closer to the top of Google Search's first page.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Conquer Structured Data
Google's Rich Results Test tool will make sure your structured data is entered properly.
Google's algorithm is now savvy about robotically written articles designed to win a specific set of keywords. As Google's search engine has gotten smarter, its web crawler software, known as "Googlebot," has also evolved in terms of how it indexes data.
But what if you could tell Googlebot the story of your website so that it doesn't have to make any assumptions? This is possible through the use of structured data, or as Google describes it, a set of "clues" provided to its crawler about what defines your content. Using schema, or a vocabulary you share with Google about every page on your site, you can tell Googlebot the story of your content in human language.
Rank higher on search by populating structured data for Google's snippets on search returns.
By following these rules, you're giving the search engine explicit clues about the meaning of a page. Structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying its content. For example, on a recipe page, these classifying components could be ingredients, cooking time, temperature, and nutritional information.
The better Google's crawler can understand your content, the more easily it can index it highly on search.
The RebelMouse Approach: If structured data sounds like a big undertaking, it doesn't have to be. Every RebelMouse site automatically populates key structured data so that Google can better understand your site. This, in turn, optimizes your pages to win in search results. Our out-of-the-box integration populates all the standard schema data with information about article content. This works on desktop and mobile web, and the data also gets populated for Google AMP.
RebelMouse properly marks up structured data for content with our out-of-the-box integration.
Click here to learn more about our out-of-the-box structured data integration.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Be Mindful of H1 Tags
To put it simply, an H1 tag is a piece of HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, that marks the heading of your web page. Here's an example:
This Is the Title of My Content
For SEO purposes, H1 tags are designed to win a specific search phrase for your page. In fact, a recent study from Moz found that the HTML title tag is the second-most important ranking factor for SEO, behind only the actual content of the post.
This is because Google recognizes the H1 tag as the highest-level tag on your page. Think of it as your chance to summarize what your content is about clearly and succinctly for Google's web crawler. The more accurate and relevant you make your H1 content, the easier it is for Google to index it for search.
When writing HTML, there are six different heading tags available to you: H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. Each heading has a different font weight. You can use this scale to organize your content's headlines and subheadings accordingly.
Example of headings from W3docs.
The RebelMouse Approach: You can easily choose your desired heading in RebelMouse's Entry Editor by using the formatting toolbar:
Select which headings you want to use right from RebelMouse's editing interface.
Once you choose your heading, it's automatically reflected in your site's code:
RebelMouse's headings are automatically implemented correctly to your site's code for search.
Note: You may have noticed that the H1 tag is not an option you can select in the formatting toolbar's drop-down menu. That's because it's best practice to use only one H1 tag per page. On our platform, we reserve the H1 designation for your article's headline. This is inputted into your site's code automatically.
Click here to learn more about H1 tags.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Follow Google’s Image Guidelines
An example of Google Images information populated by structured data. Image from Google.
Google Images is undoubtedly the leader in image search online, and they have many guidelines on how images should be handled. Here at RebelMouse, we make sure that your site is able to follow those guidelines right out of the box. Google's recommendations fall under a number of general topics:
- A great user experience
- Be descriptive
- Structured data
- Speed
- Alt text
- Make images discoverable
The RebelMouse Approach: Being certain that everything on your site is optimized both for performance and for following Google Search's guidelines is an exhausting task. Fortunately, RebelMouse takes that worry out of your hands by building our platform around the principles of page experience and the belief that all sites built on our platform should be flawless. We follow all best practices for Google Image's guidelines.
Click here to learn more.
How to Optimize Your Website for Search: Measure Success with Google Search Console
A look at page experience data from Google Search Console.
Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you to understand and optimize your site's performance on Google Search. When Google visits your website for tracking purposes, it performs what's called crawling and indexing, a process of adding web pages into its search results.
Search Console will allow you to add or remove certain content from Google Search's results. The tool will also help you learn which keywords trigger your site to appear in Google's search engine results page (SERP), as well as which third-party sites are linking to yours. It also allows you to monitor your site's performance on search, including locating any errors on your pages.
The RebelMouse Approach: We offer full support to help our clients connect their sites to Google Search Console. Our strategy services also help you understand which content and site layouts are working the best for your audience through our custom Google Data Studio dashboards.
Optimize Your Website for Search With RebelMouse
Google owns most of the referral traffic on the internet, and your site should reflect this reality. That's why the sites on our network follow all of Google's webmaster guidelines.
RebelMouse's proprietary technology works for any kind of site, whether you're a brand, a new media company, or a legacy publisher. SEO doesn't have to be something that only developers and analysts can understand and augment. Our product is designed to put the power of search in the hands of content creators, editors, and social curators, too.
Start winning on search with every publish. Get in touch with us today and let's start working together.
RebelMouse Matches Google’s Best Practices for Images
Google Images is undoubtedly the leader in image search online, and they have many guidelines on how images should be handled. Here at RebelMouse, we make sure that your site is able to follow those guidelines right out of the box. Google's recommendations fall under a number of general topics:
- A great user experience
- Be descriptive
- Structured data
- Speed
- Alt text
- Make images discoverable
Read on to learn how RebelMouse handles images in line with the guidelines from Google.
A Great User Experience
User experience is a major hallmark of Google's goal to send traffic to the best-performing, high-quality sites that are out there, and this is true when it comes to the images on your site, too! A key element to consider, is to make sure that your site is created with a user in mind — not a search engine. That mindset is what creates the best sites for people, and that in turn leads Google to prioritize those sites. Your content will even affect how well your images show up in search. Higher-quality sites with higher-quality content will generally rank higher.
There are many ways to optimize the way that you use images in a general sense. First, make sure that your images are contextually relevant and are placed near content that describes them. With RebelMouse, it's very easy to use our Particle Assembler to keep images and text that are related to them organized.
You also want to make sure that your site is mobile friendly. We start with mobile first when we design and build sites, so this is never a concern. If you want to check your site to see how it performs on mobile, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test.
Be Descriptive
Just like regular Google Search, Google Images uses titles and snippets to give people the bite-sized details about an article. While Google's algorithm automatically determines what will appear in a snippet, ensuring your metadata (title and description) is clean and accurate can help Google to determine where to surface your content. Metadata is very easy to add to any article using our built-in SEO tools in our Entry Editor, and can easily be added to home pages or section pages (or any other page!) using our Layout & Design Tool.
Structured Data
Structured data is important markup on a page that essentially describes the type of content (among other things) that a particular article is. Google Images recognizes structured data for product, video, and recipes. RebelMouse has many tools that help to set up structured data on your site and help you to be sure you are following Google's guidelines for structured data.
Speed
If you've been following along with search trends over the last couple of years, this one will come as no surprise! Having a fast page is more beneficial to your showing up in Google Images' results. As images are often one of the heaviest parts of a page, they commonly hold up page loads. Our technique for this is to update all images to the next-generation WebP format. This gets you great load speeds, and if you're in a browser that doesn't support WebP, we simply fall back to the original format of the image.
Alt Text
Alt text is a critical element to add to images, as it provides a description of the image for screen readers to bring a site to life for people who are visually impaired. It's also very helpful for SEO and landing on Google Images, as it aids the search engines in understanding what the image is. Imagine an image of Mick Jagger strutting across the stage during a concert. If there's no alt text, a search engine's visual-recognition algorithm might be able to pick up that it's a person on a stage, but that's probably as far as it could go. With alt text, you can label the image "Mick Jagger strutting across the stage during a concert in Barcelona." This way, the search engines and the screen readers can deliver the details!
On RebelMouse, we do some really fun things with alt text! For starters, it's very easy to input alt text onto images directly from our Entry Editor. We have three fields that you can simply add data to when you upload an image: alt text, caption, and credit.
Next, we make sure that the URL path of the image follows best practices as well, by assigning the alt text to be the image's filename. This allows for the image to have an SEO-friendly filename that's helpful in landing on Google Images, too, since it gives the engine details about the image.
Make Images Discoverable
Google recommends that you add the correct semantic markup to each image so that they can be correctly parsed, and we do this by default.
Images are included in RebelMouse sitemaps, and images can be stored on your own domain or on a RebelMouse subdomain.
You'll also want to make sure you're using appropriate file types that Google supports (e.g., BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, and SVG), and you'll want to make sure that your images are responsive as well. This is easy on RebelMouse since we automatically convert images into the preferred next-generation format WebP.
Need help optimizing your images for Google or want to learn more? Contact support@rebelmouse.com or reach out to your account manager today.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Let's chat!
RebelMouse Q3 2021 Platform Performance Updates
Performance Improvements
Light/Vanilla JavaScript Application for Logged-in Users
We have a highly optimized version of our JavaScript application for logged-out users that was implemented in the fall of 2020. This quarter, we released a highly optimized version of our JavaScript application for logged-in users.
We first released this latest update for the sites in our network that have a large percentage of their traffic logged in to RebelMouse, and the impact was very clear. We saved on file size, and Core Web Vitals performance improved dramatically. We're now carefully releasing the new experience for the rest of the sites in our network so that writers, editors, and other internal teams can enjoy similar types of page-speed experiences that their logged-out users already do.
AMP Optimization
Our team of traffic-obsessed developers recently implemented performance optimizations to enhance our platform's integration with AMP, and that has improved the average response time for our clients. This means that users are able to access your AMP pages more quickly, which, in turn, improves your site's traffic from Google.
Here's a breakdown of the changes we've made:
- Our developers analyzed key requests that could be merged into one to reduce back-and-forth time between the microservice and the data source. Then, we removed requests that were duplicates or where data could be retrieved through other, more efficient methods.
- Our developers also reimplemented our stack. This allowed us to decouple the data-fetching phase from the rendering phase, which was causing duplicate requests.
- The way we receive information from AMP pages was re-engineered so that we can understand it more before starting the rendering phase. This optimizes the way we fetch data for a page.
- Cache logic was implemented so that we don't refetch data that is unlikely to change across similar requests.
- So far, our performance updates have improved average response time on AMP pages for clients across our network. Click here to see the results.
Faster-Loading Ads
We've developed a method to load ads after content and before everything else, and we are currently measuring the performance impact on ad visibility and revenue across several sites in our network. Stay tuned!
SEO-Friendly Image Filenames
- Our proprietary search technology helps content creators prep every article for success on search. This all-encompassing approach includes the use of SEO-friendly image filenames.
- On RebelMouse, if you assign an alt tag to an image in Entry Editor, that alt tag will also become the image's file name. Briefly, alt tags describe images for search engines, and also allow people using screen readers to know what the image is without actually being able to see it. Adding your desired search phase to every alt text field, and in turn every image file name, will reinforce its relevance to Google's crawler, bringing you one step closer to the top of search returns.
- When used consistently, we expect SEO-friendly image filenames to positively impact your search traffic, trackable via Google's Search Console. We also believe alt tags will improve your site's search returns because it gives additional weight to vital keywords.
- This feature also improves performance in a minor way because the URL of the image is smaller, so it reduces HTML size with shorter URLs. Click here to learn more.
Optimized Fastly (CDN) Hit Ratio
We've found a way to isolate patterns of query parameters that are added across the web for a variety of different reasons. These parameters are used for tracking purposes for JavaScript and dynamic applications, but don't change the way a page renders. We have isolated the majority of these parameters and now pass them through Fastly without breaking cache in the way that query parameters usually do.
This update has driven a huge performance boost to core performance metrics like Time to First Byte (TTFB) across the platform.
Platform Infrastructure Updates
Kubernetes Integration: RebelMouse Anywhere
Kubernetes is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Our infrastructure team has built an integration that allows us to deploy RebelMouse as a container service that you can install anywhere. This has been incredibly helpful to set up developer instances on the fly, replacing what was once a very long and complicated process with something that's simple, powerful, and fast.
Also, RebelMouse can now run on any Amazon Web Services (AWS) account that isn't owned by RebelMouse. This gives our clients more flexibility when working with us, improves the potential to scale in more efficient ways, and gives us another level of opportunity when it comes to implementing complex disaster recovery procedures.
Continuous Delivery and Deployment
We're proud of the setup that we continue to advance that allows for sophisticated, automated testing of tens of thousands of possible scenarios through Docker containers. This setup also makes it possible for us to move faster on the deployment of new code and features in a safer way. This is vital to keep up with the speed of change on the web. We can now use rolling deployments with automated testing that use monitoring and alerts to minimize the impact of bad code and optimize the speed of rollouts.
MySQL Server Upgrades
After our platform-wide traffic reached over 500 million pageviews per month, our MySQL server cluster that manages native stats started to experience some scaling issues. As a result, we prioritized resolving significant architecture issues to avoid deadlocks. We are particularly proud that we did this in a way that resulted in no downtime for our native stats. Our latest infrastructure deployment technology has the ability to create a new cluster that can handle all the past, present, and future stats in a way that can scale exponentially.
Node.js Upgraded to Version 14 for Microservices
This upgrade keeps all of our microservices modern and in sync with the latest technologies The release notes for Node.js 14 are available here.
Amazon EKS Upgraded to Version 1.18
This is the AWS-managed Kubernetes environment, and the update was an important part of keeping our AWS cluster modern.
General New Features and Updates
Chargify Integration
We now have an integration with Chargify that we can use as a paywall for users to access content.
Improved Brightcove Integration
We previously had an integration with Brightcove for embedded videos, and we upgraded it so that you can now search for Brightcove videos in your RebelMouse Library.
Large Images for Google Discover
Through metadata, we are now able to support a large-image setting that follows Google's best practice for its Discover feature. So far, it has boosted traffic from Google Discover on our platform.
RebelCare Team Updates
- 57% less escalations
- Instant communication between Zendesk and Jira
- First response time is now under two hours
- Time to solve a task has decreased
- Total client wait time has decreased
RebelMouse API Updates
- Disable the automatic adding of groups to Mailchimp
- Replace ga with gtag inside Layout & Design Tool
- Site extra to choose channel in Layout & Design Tool
- Improve "move_posts_from_section" Celery task
- Fix user ID implementation for gtag
- Break up loops when creating redirects
- Remove deleted sections from feeds
- Remove additional options on MongoDB index specs
- Allow users to save the site domain
- Sections service refactoring
Team Updates
We've added amazing talent to our team. The following new Rebels will help scale our ability to continuously update our platform while simultaneously delivering as a creative agency.
Creative Strategy Team
- Nicolás Scattularo, Strategic Account Manager
Services Delivery Team
- Katherine Osorio, Platform Engineer
- Lennin Troya, Quality Assurance Engineer
- Mariano de Simone, Solutions Architect
- Raphael Ribeiro, RebelCare Agent
- Roman Krychun, Platform Engineer
- Taísa Vasconcelos, Platform Engineer
- Turabi Ozturk, Project Manager
- Vitória Natália Caetano, RebelCare Agent
Sales Team
- Bernardo José Leite da Silva, Sales Operations Analyst
Minor Bug Fixes and Minor New Features
Entry Editor
- The "Keep Reading" and "Horizontal Line" features are now clearly separated in Entry Editor's UX
- Resize and floating feedback has been addressed
- Optimized source URL handling
- Upgraded Sentry libraries for better error reporting
- Upgraded style loader libraries
- Added tool tips for short codes
- Added a new element to enable showing a confirmation prompt before publish
Importer
- Added better support for fast import formats
Performance
- Stopped preloading gtag
- Upgraded Bitly API
- Upgraded blinker component
- Upgraded Layout & Design Tool performance
Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates.
Click here to read our Q1 2021 platform performance updates.
RebelMouse Optimizes Images for Google Discover
What Is Google Discover?
You may have noticed that when you visit Google on your phone, several articles appear below the search bar. This is a feature called Discover:
Image from Google.
According to Google, Discover is a hyper-personalized feed that "actively tunes itself to a user's interests and displays content that aligns with those interests." Since Discover's feed is curated by a user's previous web activity, it's a great opportunity to expose your content to an ultra-targeted audience.
Google has its own content policies for Discover that you can read about here. Discover also has its own guidelines for images.
Google Discover Image Guidelines
Google recommends that the preview/thumbnail image for a Discover article, which is pulled from the lead media position of an article on RebelMouse, should be larger and more compelling than other traditional content previews. This can be automatically enabled with a meta tag on your site. If your image is high quality and at least 1200 pixels wide, your article has a higher likelihood of appearing in Discover.
At RebelMouse, we've automatically enabled this large-image setting across the sites within our network. While the update may seem small, it has resulted in a significant and positive impact on traffic when an article makes it into Discover's feed. Check out the visible boost it gave one of our clients as tracked by Google Search Console:
Get Your Content "Discovered"
If you're using RebelMouse's AMP integration, your content is already optimized for Discover. Also, it's important to note that Discover doesn't just feature newly published articles. If your content is helpful and high quality, it can appear in a user's Discover feed at any time. If you have any questions about Discover, talk to your account manager or contact support@rebelmouse.com today.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Request a proposal to get started.
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