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Rebel Insights
In 2023, Publishers Take Back Control With Subscription Success
Jan 23, 2023
Users are ready to pay for content that delivers
The Rise of the Mature User
It's been a long and winding path, but in 2023 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.
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 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.
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.
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Featured

The Most Secure CMS of 2023
Jan 20, 2023
Why RebelMouse Is the Most Secure CMS on the Web
Delivering a secure, high-performing environment with extreme reliability is essential to all of our clients at RebelMouse. We only use industry-leading, reliable approaches to host our infrastructure. This ensures maximum stability and security for all of our clients’ data. Here are just some of the reasons we’re able to maintain a hard-bodied product that’s flexible, too.
Inside the Most Secure CMS of 2023
- Why RebelMouse Is More Secure Than WordPress
- WordPress Was Built for a Blogger in Their Pajamas. RebelMouse Is Built for High-Value Websites That Are Stable.
- Stability and Around-the-Clock Support
- Web Application Firewall
- Bug Bounty Program
- A Full List of What Makes RebelMouse the Most Secure CMS
- Publish on the Most Secure CMS on the Web
Why RebelMouse Is More Secure Than WordPress
We’ve spent years building the most secure CMS of 2023. Open-source CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal mean everyone has access to your code, and that means your website is completely vulnerable.
Think about it: There are millions of instances of WordPress in the world, and every security update and feature upgrade — no matter how big or small — has to be manually performed for each individual site to avoid outright breaking custom code, plugins, and more. On WordPress, you need a plugin to manage simple things, but those seemingly safe tasks can put your entire site at risk. For example, a plugin to manage affiliate links gave hackers an easy opening to add their own links instead.
Examples like these leave open-source CMS options like WordPress constantly vulnerable to security threats. If you are running a real online business, easily exposed features like plugins are a 2005-era feature that now serve as a major weakness on your site. Security threats created by outdated plugins can put hundreds of thousands of sites at risk, like this breach in 2022 that threatened the safety of 600,000 sites. These constant, sudden spikes in attacks have no end sight, and here's why.
WordPress Was Built for a Blogger in Their Pajamas. RebelMouse Is Built for High-Value Websites That Are Stable.
Every time a WordPress security breach is announced, the proper updates have to be made one by one. This is because the only way WordPress core developers can patch significant flaws within their software is to deploy fixes to users in the form of user-installed product updates.
In fact, WordPress announced that versions 3.7 through 4.0 will no longer receive security updates beginning on December 1, 2022. That's because the task of keeping every version up to the date is too burdensome.
This isn't an issue on RebelMouse. All of our updates are quickly deployed at once to every site we power. We often deploy multiple updates on a daily basis. While many WordPress users count on third-party hosting companies or in-house developers to stay on top of the platform’s updates, RebelMouse users can rest easy knowing that important updates are taken care of immediately.
RebelMouse isn’t a solution for cheap websites. We’re a solution for high-value websites that are high-performing and highly secure. It’s also why we’re able to power some of the fastest sites on the web with superior scores on Google’s Core Web Vitals. Click here to learn more.
Transparency is a priority. The sites in our network subscribe to a status portal that provides up-to-date details on platform performance with real-time updates.
Stability and Around-the-Clock Support
We only use modern and reliable approaches to host our infrastructure for maximum stability. We host our infrastructure in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud because AWS is the most trusted, secure, and reliable infrastructure in the world. We have great relationships with the folks at AWS and utilize the best of their services.
All of our production services are covered with AWS Auto Scaling groups, which means we can sleep at night without worrying that something may go wrong. Our services are self-healing 24/7 as well. And even our stateful services, like databases, are covered with reliable automatic failover and backup solutions.
Since the RebelMouse team spans dozens of countries, we offer 24/7 live support. This means that any vulnerabilities that pop up will never be left unattended. In fact, many updates and patches are deployed across our platform in seconds without any interruption to our site network at all.
Click here to learn more about RebelMouse’s infrastructure.RebelMouse delivers 99.99% uptime with maximum performance, stability, and security.
Web Application Firewall
AWS's Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a firewall that helps protect your web applications (or APIs) against common web exploits that may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives RebelMouse developers control over how traffic reaches our applications by enabling us to create security rules that block common attack patterns, such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting (XSS), and rules that filter out specific traffic patterns we have defined. These rules are regularly updated when new issues emerge as well.
With AWS WAF, we're making sure that all of our sites are covered against some of the most common attacks, as defined by The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). The project is an online community that creates freely available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.
Click here to learn more about WAF.
Bug Bounty Program
To strengthen our commitment to security, RebelMouse offers a bug bounty program. If you believe you've found a security issue on our site, or any of the sites we power, we may compensate you for your discovery. We look at all submitted reports, and if we agree that it's a valid finding, we'll pay $250 for each one.
Click here for more information about what qualifies as a security vulnerability and how to report a bug.
A Full List of What Makes RebelMouse the Most Secure CMS
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- RebelMouse uses the following services that are compliant with SOC 1, 2, and 3:
- API Gateway
- CloudFront
- CloudWatch
- DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)
- EC2 Container Registry (ECR)
- Elastic Compute Cloud
- Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes
- Elastic File System
- ElastiCache
- Key Management Service
- Lambda
- Relational Database Service
- Route 53
- Simple Email Service
- Simple Notification Service
- Simple Queue Service
- Simple Storage Service
- RebelMouse uses the following AWS security, identity, and compliance services:
- Identity and Access Management
- AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) (for access control of users)
- Threat Detection and Continuous Monitoring
- AWS CloudTrail (for tracking users’ activity)
- AWS Trusted Advisor (for general audition)
- Infrastructure Protection
- VPC
- Private Networks
- Security Groups
- Firewall
- VPC
- Data Protection
- Compliance and Data Privacy
- AWS Artifact (for access to compliance reports)
- Identity and Access Management
Fastly
Fastly’s CDN is certified under the Swiss-US framework. We use the following Fastly services:
- DDOS Mitigation
- Edge Filtering
- Origin Cloaking
- Rapid Response
- TLS Encryption
Click here to learn more about our Fastly recovery plan.
Password Management
- We use 1Password to manage all logins across the company.
- Two-factor authentication through major third party applications, including Google.
Publish on the Most Secure CMS on the Web
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.
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