Publishers large and small will be faced with an important question this year: Build or buy? To generate reach and revenue in the current digital landscape , every web property needs to be focused on content and hyper personalized. This leaves very little room for creativity when opting to host your site via high-maintenance, costly, and cookie-cutter solutions like WordPress and Drupal. This drives publishers to seriously consider the next option: Build.

Building custom tech not only requires more resources, but it distracts precious time and money away from what truly builds audiences: Content and, its best friend, distribution.

This new media company is a case study in how to turn a website that is severely underperforming into a massive growth engine.

Despite the rocky road that was 2018, new media and brands have plenty of opportunity to grow alongside the ever-fickle industry giants, Google and Facebook. At RebelMouse, we've perfected a full-stack platform that brings together the best of both "buy" and "build" to create something that we call lean tech .

After two years on our platform, this client continues to grow significantly, made up of enterprise B2B paywall content and free, high-traffic media.

What Is Lean Tech?

Lean tech means investing less money in an all-encompassing solution that fuels more growth. Our platform was born during the age of social back in 2012, and since then our developers, strategists, and traffic experts from all over the globe have become exceedingly good at anticipating industry changes and algorithm updates to help our clients flourish alongside each one.

This site is a tiny non-profit that has the budget to pay for our platform and use it in a very savvy way, with only light touches from us. Their growth over the past year has been impressive.

There are three pillars of lean tech that we abide by:

1. Full-Service, Enterprise Tech: With developers all around the world, RebelMouse provides Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Our cloud-based CMS operates on a centralized model, meaning every update and security patch is pushed live to all of our clients at once without interruption.

A massive year for this client with huge organic reach for an entrenched brand. Contests and content expansion led to organic growth on all platforms and deeper engagement with customers.

All of our application services are stateless and covered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) Auto Scaling groups, and we monitor our services' performance and capacity on all levels. We highly prioritize all the pivotal elements of site success such as security, ad configuration, how we code CSS and JavaScript, configure CDNs, and scale servers. It's why we're a high-performing platform that's more than just a CMS. These kinds of processes typically require massive monetary investments in third-party, managed hosting companies — often a prerequisite when you're on WordPress. They would cost even more if created and managed internally.

This client is an SEO and e-commerce case study in using our tools to effectively capture key phrases that drive purchases from users. They have had a phenomenal year.

2. Content-Focused: RebelMouse's platform and its team never rush to keep up with the industry giants. Instead, we've grown up right alongside them. We blend product and strategy before and following the launch of any site to ensure our clients' content is set up for success across search and social in the current digital ecosystem. Our product will acclimate to every algorithm change or update within days, even if it's something as simple as the new character count recommendation from Google around SEO meta descriptions. Before you even realize a change has taken place, our product has usually already adapted.

It has taken this site less than 30 days on RebelMouse to see the growth numbers you see here. They had been in significant decline before us, and the growth now isn't stopping.

Our clients enjoy a comprehensive content suite full of proprietary technology that fuels search engine optimization and influencer outreach with every publish. We also double as a creative agency with full strategy services available. Any custom feature you desire is not out of reach, and there's no product tweak that's too small for us to make if it means more organic growth and engagement.

The move from WordPress to RebelMouse has caused IMMEDIATE, mind-boggling growth in reach and loyalty for this client.

3. High Performance: It would be a little too easy if every site's success revolved only around content, however. This is why we prioritize high-performing page speed above all else. Google recently changed its rules for how it measures site performance through its PageSpeed Insights tool, and many leading sites are now failing to achieve a passing score on simple things such as server response time. We make sure every site we power is scoring high on both desktop and mobile, often outperforming other leading new media sites.

These insights are from less than a year after launch. This news property is experiencing high-depth engagement and growth behind a successful subscription model.

This is important because as digital publishing ages, so does its users. Today's users want a site experience that's unobtrusive and seamless. To us, this is the true path to securing and growing audience loyalty. We strive to create site experiences that are high-performing because it spurs audiences to consume more content more quickly. Being able to deliver this sort of experience across platforms opens up more opportunities for readers, which in turn, creates a diverse distribution strategy. And it's this strategy that fuels loyal followers who generate meaningful revenue. This has always been, and always will be, our goal.

This client is a case study for moving from a bad CMS (that was "good enough") over to RebelMouse. For more than a year they were stuck with either no growth or declining. Since moving to RebelMouse, the growth has been incredible.

The Data Does Not Lie

Our formula for growth briefly outlined above is why media powerhouses like Axios and The Dodo launched on our platform. New media properties like Motherly and The Odyssey Online trust RebelMouse to power their messages, right alongside legacy brands like PAPER Magazine and United Airlines .

This site has been on our platform for five years, and saw another record year again. In one single day, they did 21M page views alone. Although that day dwarfs other aspects of the charts shown, they also had continuous organic growth and worked on premium campaigns with notable brands.

As you can see from the screen shots above, this is what RebelMouse-driven success looks like. The images consist of raw, anonymized data showcasing just some of our clients' increased performance. You won't see this kind of information paired with this kind of traffic growth this fast anywhere else.

Request a proposal today and let's start working together.