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.
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.
The leading platform for reach, loyalty, and engagement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Our proprietary social CRM lets you manage relationships created by content:
Clients see massive growth on social traffic.
Our proprietary e-commerce tools enable a seamless integration with the latest in e-commerce.
Clients see huge returns on content and conversion.
RebelMouse makes managing complex workflows efficient and easy. We power site networks and have multilingual capabilities.
We make global content teams hyper efficient.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
We work with brands and media companies that come to terms with these facts:
Contact us today if you're ready to transform your business.
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.
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.
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.
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
Multivariate (A/B) Testing Tools With Dynamic, On-the-Fly Staging Environments
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.
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.
Proprietary Editorial Tools to Propel Your Content Ahead
Wouldn't you like to give your editorial team their dream tools?
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.
First off, and most importantly, Lighthouse has added two new metrics into its formula for page speed:
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
Related Articles
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
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:
Social Login
Your Own Social and Interest Graph
Native Comments
Star Ratings for Users
]
Invites and Applications to Contribute
Efficiently Manage Multiple Communities at Scale
Community Contests
Dynamic and Extensible Workflow Tools
Default Roles
Comments
Posts/Articles
Create
Edit/Review/Annotate
Schedule to Social
Send Emails
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is the AWS-managed Kubernetes environment, and the update was an important part of keeping our AWS cluster modern.
We now have an integration with Chargify that we can use as a paywall for users to access content.
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.
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.
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.
Click here to read our Q2 2021 platform performance updates.
Click here to read our Q1 2021 platform performance updates.
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 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:
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.
Related Articles
So far, our performance updates have improved average response time on AMP pages for clients across our network. Here's a look at the data just one week after the optimizations were implemented. As you'll see, the average response time began to drop right after the changes were pushed live on September 30, 2021.
We will continue to monitor the average response time on AMP pages across the sites we power to ensure that the metric continues to improve. If you have any questions about our AMP optimizations, talk to your account manager or reach out to support@rebelmouse.com today.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Request a proposal and let's start working together.
You can easily add alt text to any image in RebelMouse from our Entry Editor:
Example of an alt tag within RebelMouse's Entry Editor.
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.
From a strategic standpoint, we suggest using your desired search phrase, or the SEO Headline as it's called in our SEO tab, as the alt tag of your lead media. Then, each additional image should be variations of that phrase. But keep in mind that your alt tag should always accurately describe your image. If you don't use alt tags on your images but have a caption, we will use the caption as the SEO-friendly filename instead.
Please reach out to your account manager if you have any questions about SEO-friendly filenames. Click here to read about how images on RebelMouse are optimized for performance as well.
Not on RebelMouse yet? Request a proposal and let's start working together.
