
and for those who like vanilla JS:
if (/\?edit_post/.test(window.location.search)) {...}
and for those who like vanilla JS:
if (/\?edit_post/.test(window.location.search)) {...}
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers
It's been a long and winding path, but in 2022 the subscription model continues its upward trajectory as a top revenue strategy for publishers of all sizes. The tug of war between platforms and publishers reached its peak in the last few years of the previous decade, leaving users desperate for a modern user experience that's clear of any clutter from the duopoly that is Google and Facebook. This is why intelligent paywall models are a top choice for users looking to consume content right from the source. When done correctly, the strategy can work for any type of media. The New York Times, a frequent showpiece example of the power of paywalls, is constantly reporting record-busting subscription numbers, with 7.6 million digital subscriptions in 2021.
And it all makes perfect sense. The subscription model eliminates the middleman — such as the platforms — so readers get the experience and content they want, and publishers get the cash they need.
As a creative agency powered by modern technology, we know how to build a subscription experience that's designed for both the modern user who wants an optimized site experience and the modern publisher who relies on paywall revenue to survive.
RebelMouse's subscription features are customizable and easily support:
RebelMouse's Paywall API is available to developers to make it easy to manage subscriptions. Access to paid content is managed via subscriptions attached to email qualifiers. Click here for more information on our Paywall API.
Sites powered by RebelMouse are experiencing enormous success thanks to our subscription strategies, including the Italian newspaper La Verità. While publishers on other platforms typically see a decrease in audience when they implement a paywall, in their time leveraging RebelMouse’s paywall strategy, La Verità has experienced continued, unprecedented growth. They are now one of the highest-growth media properties in Italy, and they've enjoyed significant revenue growth thanks to our paywall tools.
La Verità's superior site performance using RebelMouse's paywall tools.
In the past, there was a stigma around paywalls that signaled they were only sustainable for large publishers with massive audiences already in place. But with today's users maturing, subscription models are more attainable for a variety of emerging media properties and legacy names alike.
It's important to strike the right balance between free content, subscriber revenue, and ad strategy. This is a lot to juggle for publishers who are already maxed out trying to create quality content worth reading.
At RebelMouse, we can help you determine if a subscription model will benefit you, and then build a custom, easy-to-use paywall system that works for your site. If you're not publishing on RebelMouse, we also operate as a world-class creative agency that can help you navigate the subscription business and any other content strategy you may be building toward. Either way, request a proposal today and let's start working together.
Speed, performance, and Core Web Vitals enhancements
Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates!
At RebelMouse, we pour our souls into making sure that our platform is always the most modern, high-performance CMS on the market. In fact, we invested over $100,000 worth of hours into our platform in Q1 2021 alone. This has resulted in updates and performance enhancements that publishers would have to pay for on their own to make happen on any other platform, such as WordPress. We're proud to be at a level of scale where we can invest this way into our platform, and we will continue to invest at this rate every quarter moving forward just as we have in the past.
Here are the major updates that we've added to the platform in Q1.
We've installed and configured an ultra-lightweight open source project from Google that allows you to track Core Web Vitals data directly in Google Analytics. This is so important because the only other place this data is tracked is only available on a monthly summary level. Now we can analyze changes to the platform and any property in Google Analytics and get daily reports.
You can now run your own reports if you have access to the Google Analytics account connected to your property.
CLS is very tricky to understand because the data Google collects goes way beyond the first page load. This creates a lot of confusion in the industry because Google's PageSpeed Insights tool only tracks the first page load experience and misreports the CLS penalties that will be collected by Core Web Vitals through the Chrome browsing experience.
Understanding these penalties is vital to fixing them and going all green on Core Web Vitals. So we've implemented a way to expose this on any RebelMouse-powered site by adding the following query parameter to any URL:
?debug=cls (e.g., site.com/slug?debug=cls)
By using our debugger, you can see your CLS penalties in real time, and the code highlights the offending element(s) so that it becomes immediately obvious what needs to be fixed to get a green score on CLS.
We've figured out a new way to load critical third-party calls, such as ads, much faster, and without resulting in any penalties on performance scores. There is a new option in the JavaScript element in Layout & Design Tool that's called "Post LCP," and we highly recommend using it for any JavaScript that you need on your page.
With the knowledge that Google is rolling out new algorithm changes in 2021 that will place much higher value on metrics such as CLS, we've made several updates in anticipation of the changes.
We've upgraded Redis to the latest version, which has significantly improved back-end performance, as well as helped us stay compliant with the highest standards of security.
DevOps
QA
We hope that you're as excited about these upgrades as we are, and we can't wait to show you all of the things that we plan to accomplish in Q2 2021!
They're here! Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates.
For the first time ever, the Digital News Report authored by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has dedicated an entire chapter to news consumption via email. The report analyzed data from thousands of readers of online news across 46 different markets. While the insights around email are focused on news content specifically, the data is useful for any publisher looking to enhance a newsletter strategy or even launch a new campaign. The findings in this year’s report shows that email continues to rise in popularity as an effective way to reach hyper-targeted audiences.
While email is not the primary source of traffic for most news outlets, it is more popular in the U.S. than in other countries. This year’s Digital News Report found that 22% of users surveyed in the U.S. use newsletters or email alerts, with almost half of them saying it is their main way of accessing digital news.
The report also found that the majority of users who consume news via email are older, richer, educated, and have a heavy interest in news-related content. In fact, one in seven adults over the age of 55 in the U.S. said that email was their main way of accessing news. Additionally, 80% of users who use email to read news are over the age of 35.
While the insights around exactly who gets their news from email and how they do it may seem limiting to the average publisher, there is still plenty of room to leverage email for topics outside of news.
The data from the Digital News Report confirms that email is a great way to distribute specialized content across a wide range of subjects. The minimalist nature of email lends itself nicely to personalized content that could otherwise get lost in the noise.
“Despite its relative lack of sophistication, it remains a key tool for publishers as they focus on building deeper relationships with loyal users — as well as attracting new subscribers.” —Digital News Report 2022
The easy-to-read nature of email also creates an opportunity to show off your content’s unique style. Of the thousands of users surveyed in the Digital News Report, 64% said they valued email for its convenience, and 28% said they favored newsletters because they liked the tone of the author.
As mentioned above, one of the primary characteristics of email news readers is that they are highly interested in news-related content. With the right email strategy, that same effective audience targeting can be applied to any topic.
While newsletters are not likely to be your site’s primary driver of traffic, it’s still prime time for publishers to capitalize on the benefits of email sooner rather than later. Click here for some quick tips on launching a newsletter campaign.
The RebelMouse platform has an intuitive newsletter dashboard that makes it easy to use major platforms like Mailchimp and Sailthru without ever leaving your CMS. Our elegant integrations allow you to turn posts into newsletters, choose templates, and schedule campaigns right from your editing space. Click here to learn more.
Easily schedule newsletters from RebelMouse’s editing interface.
If you aren't publishing on RebelMouse yet, get in touch today and let's get started. We are a full-service creative agency that can help you with all of your website and email marketing goals.
Alt text is an important part of any search strategy, but many content creators may not even be familiar with what it is. Here’s what you need to know about alt text and how it can improve your content’s usability and performance on search.
Alt text, which is short for alternative text for images, is very important for accessibility, and can also have benefits for SEO. Briefly, alt text is wording 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.
Here’s a quick three-minute explainer on alt text from Google:
Since alt text is designed to describe an image for someone who cannot view it, it should be more detailed than a traditional photo caption.
Differences of wording between caption and alt text. Both are easy to implement on the RebelMouse platform.
Alt text is an HTML tag included alongside an image attribute. As you can see from the image above, the RebelMouse platform makes it easy to incorporate alt text during the editing process.
Google’s Search Advocate John Mueller has said that Google has no specific guidelines regarding alt text. This came up during a recent Google SEO office hours hangout, when Muller dispelled speculation that Google only crawls the first 16 words of an alt text tag.
Mueller said that there are actually no restrictions for how long your alt text can be, and that in terms of SEO, you can add a lot of wording to an alt text tag as long as it's relevant for that particular image.
Here’s a helpful example from Mueller of what kind of relevant text can improve your alt text:
If you have a picture of a beach, you could use an alt text and say, ‘Oh this is a beach.’ But you could also say, ‘this is the beach in front of our hotel or this is the beach that we took a photo of when we were doing a chemical cleanup.’ And kind of those intents are very different and people would be searching in different ways in Google Images to find more information there. And giving that extra context always makes sense, in my opinion.”
While this guidance from Google may seem vague, it’s safe to say that any effort to describe an image with helpful context is better than nothing. However, Google does clearly mention in its best practices for images documentation that you should not stuff keywords into your alt text tags. This means you should not use the alt text field as an opportunity to mindlessly input your desired search phrases, or even the name of your company, with no context.
Here’s an example from Google of keyword stuffing in the alt text attribute:
From Google.
The impact of alt text on your search rankings is, like most things related to SEO, a bit hard to determine. While Google hasn’t directly mentioned alt text as an official search ranking factor, it has given several clues to its importance. For example, their guidelines do state that keyword stuffing alt text attributes like mentioned above could cause your site to be marked as spam and negatively impact your site’s search rankings.
In 2020, Mueller gave another nugget of insight into alt text’s impact on SEO. He said the alt text attribute is particularly important for image search, and that “using the alt attribute is a good way to tell us this is on that image and we’ll get extra information from around your page with regard to how we can rank that landing page.”
So the quick answer is yes, alt text is an important part of your holistic SEO strategy.
While making sure that every image on your site has appropriate alt text will not be a quick fix to better performance on search, it is an important part of your site’s usability and overall SEO strategy. Plus, when done correctly and with appropriate context, it’s another chance to reinforce your content’s search phrase for Google’s crawler.
Today’s modern search strategy requires putting together a lot of moving pieces, including the implementation of technical SEO, putting together a search-centered content strategy, and publishing to a high performance website.
RebelMouse is a modern CMS that weaves in every aspect of SEO into our product and your content creation workflow. Not only do we follow all of Google’s best practices for images, but you can easily manage alt text directly from our editing interface and optimize every piece of content for success on search. Additionally, our platform is known for delivering industry-leading page performance, and includes SEO must-haves like structured data right out of the box.
Stop stressing about checking off every box needed for a perfect SEO strategy. Let us do it for you. Request a proposal today to get started.