Copyright © RebelMouse 2020
PAPER Magazine has been on our platform for four years, and saw another record year again in 2018. In one single day, they did 21M pageviews alone. Although that day dwarfs other aspects of these particular charts, they had continuous organic growth and premium campaigns with major brands.
RebelMouse is a unique platform and company. The company was founded on the vision that media companies would need an always-modern solution to thrive in the new connected internet, and that brands would have to behave like new media companies and use the same platforms.
The Intersection of Design and Development: Where Your Clients Thrive
We started RebelMouse seven years ago knowing that there was a fundamental design flaw in the world of traditional CMSs: Every instance, on every platform, had to be updated independently. It's similar to an era when users had to manage their own Microsoft Exchange Server for email. The costs of managing, maintaining, and iterating on a CMS to keep it awesome and world class is typically a $10 million-a-year endeavor. But even then, these cost-prohibitive CMSs are still behind the times.
Performance scores are dropping dramatically for top sites.
In October 2018, publishers received warnings via Google Search Console that their sites were performing too slow. Then, in November 2018, the search engine debuted a redesign for their widely used PageSpeed Insights tool. Among other updates, 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.
What Differentiates Our Approach
There are many popular tools that allow you to perform experiments and A/B tests on your users — primarily Google Chrome Experiments and Optimizely. But all of these solutions are JavaScript additions to your web page that sidestep the problem of old, outdated, and clumsy CMSs. These solutions work by calling on a third-party JavaScript library that rewrites a page after it's rendered. This approach adds extra page weight and creates strange user experiences due to having to wait for everything to load and be rewritten on the fly.
At RebelMouse, we've solved this in a very elegant way. At the core level of our platform, we can natively render different layouts and track the exact differences in performance when comparing a test to your other layouts.
An SEO Strategy That Wins With Every Publish
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.
With each one of these algorithm changes comes a new approach to search strategy. It's a lot to keep up with in a competitive digital landscape. Publishers are already burdened with the task of creating high-performing quality content that's easy to find on Google and, in turn, easily shared across social. It's a job that can't be solved with advertising dollars either. It's estimated that nearly 80% of users disregard paid search results. Pair this with the fact that 93% of all online experiences begin with a search query and you're left with the realization that it's never been more important to prioritize search engine optimization.
The good news is that RebelMouse has a unique approach to SEO that leverages the tools available to us from the open web alongside our proprietary technology that enables users to win key phrases with every publish. The best part? The platform is designed to empower the people who live closest to content: writers and editors. Here's how it works.
Become the center of the universe on your topic.
In today's digital world, organic growth is everything. The old pay-to-play mantra adopted by many publishers is putting them at the mercy of Facebook's temperamental News Feed.
If you want to survive the constant algorithm updates and technological changes, your focus must be on building a community that constantly sparks conversations among its audience. To do so, you have to connect with likeminded Facebook Pages and social profiles at scale, and that starts with quality content. But sometimes good content isn't enough. At RebelMouse, we have a saying: "If you create quality content without distribution, does it even exist?" That's why we created Discovery, an integral part of our suite of sophisticated enterprise-level tools. Using proprietary technology, Discovery is designed to help you figure out the social ecosystem that's already having conversations related to your content. But before you can reach out to potential influencers, your content has to be set up for distributive success.
Create Modular + Reusable Design Patterns on RebelMouse
Content saturation is an industry-wide problem, and the e-commerce space is no exception given that it's filled with big brands, small Etsy stores, and everyone in between all fighting for similar audiences. The best way to fight this symptom is to understand your audience and provide them with what they want.
Revolutionizing E-commerce on RebelMouse
Whether you're a brand with a blog or a media company with a site, driving purchasing behavior and building an audience that uses your content to find things they love to buy is vital. We're very proud to have built out the same functionality that everyone is now used to on Instagram, with layovers on images that lead to products with attribution.
RebelMouse is much more than just a replacement for a traditional CMS. Our platform is a tremendous community-building experience. Today's social ecosystem has given us a seemingly limitless number of premium creators who understand how to create gorgeous and relevant content that drives the growth of their own audiences. These creators and influencers are either experts in certain topics, or heavily engaged in targeted content that drives their interests. They're not only consuming the content they're passionate about, but they're contributing to the conversation, too. The new role of the editor is not just to cover the most important topics and people around their expertise, but also to invite those preferred influencers into their community and get them to participate in creating premium content.
Content creation has never been static. Since the early days of social, the relationship between publishers and readers has blurred and warped into what's now the state of digital publishing in 2019. At RebelMouse, we started out as a social feeds aggregator and subsequently went viral as the "social front page." Since then, we've obsessed over the best ways to share content in today's social world despite its unpredictable seasons.
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers.
The Rise of the Mature User
In 2019, readers got clued into the tug of war between publishers and platforms that had been stewing for years. The year began with users all over the world harboring disdain toward the platforms following the fake news fallout of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Facebook's data-misuse scandal. This damaging shadow prompted Facebook to launch its so-called "family and friends" algorithm update in January 2018 to rebuild trust with its users. But it's been an uphill battle ever since.
Help your audience find its voice.
Creating quality content is no longer on marketers alone. We live in a universe of creators who are willing to not only consume content that resonates, but play a role in the creation, promotion, and conversations surrounding it.
Since the start of RebelMouse, we've been on a journey to create dynamic media that is easier for content creators to curate and amplify on social. It's why we've built an online engagement platform centered around the power of communities that thrive naturally in the digital ecosystem.
In order to define distributive publishing, we have to ask the following question: If you have quality content, but nobody sees it, does it even exist? The answer is no, because your content needs to be supported in a way that lets it move seamlessly across all channels, especially site, search, and social. But let's take this question a step further: If you can't monetize your content to generate the support it needs, how do you create quality content in the first place?
Why massive enterprise organizations are switching to RebelMouse.
Delivering a secure, high-performing environment with extreme reliability is essential to all of our clients at RebelMouse. We only use industry-leading, reliable approaches to host our infrastructure. This ensures maximum stability and security for all our clients' data. Here are just some of the tools and practices we leverage to maintain a hard-bodied product that's flexible, too.
These are the next-gen updates you need to stay ahead of the competition
Content creation is still the most powerful engine that propels every publisher forward. But in 2020 and beyond, quality content won't sustain a site on its own. The modern content lifecycle hinges on a number of things working together in unison — including page speed, intelligent SEO, and effective distribution, just to name a few.
However, there's one thing that can throw a wrench in the entire system, and that's platform updates. Whether you're publishing on a common CMS solution like WordPress, using a custom in-house CMS, have access to a dedicated team of developers, or any option in between, platform updates can be both costly and frustrating.
Why women, minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community will restructure workplace norms
Entering a new decade means a new opportunity to change how we approach diversity. In a joint interview alongside Leanne Pittsford of Lesbians Who Tech, RebelMouse founder and CEO Andrea Breanna said that the only way to fight patriarchal dominance is to encourage and nurture more women, minorities, and members of the LGBTQ+ community in the workplace, particularly in tech.
Over half of RebelMouse's employees are women or identify as LGBTQ. Read our full diversity and inclusion report here.
Check out the full video below.
Related Articles
Google's Publisher Center creates new opportunities for audience growth
Just before the start of the next decade, Google announced an important change to its Google News offering with the launch of Google Publisher Center. The new interface merges Google News Producer and Google News Publisher into one to streamline the partnership process for publishers.
Overall, the change should make it easier for publishers to manage their Google News settings, including updating themes, directing URLs to section pages, and configuring user permissions. Read the full list of features here.
Tips from our CEO on making the most of an office-free lifestyle
Working from home is becoming increasingly popular, with an estimated 66% of companies now allowing remote work and 16% operating completely office-free. RebelMouse is one of those fully remote companies, and over the years we've mastered how to stay close to each other despite being spread across more than a dozen countries. We believe working remotely is good for both our personal lives and our productivity. Read more about this here.
Still, working free from the shackles of an office environment doesn't mean every day is a dance party in your pajamas from 9 to 5. Working from home comes with its own set of challenges just like any other job.
