Introduction
Media companies are increasingly finding additional and impactful revenue by providing creative services to advertisers instead of only selling their audiences through banner ads.
RebelMouse provides media clients with product options that are intended to give as much revenue depth as possible while also providing deep value to advertisers. Below is an outline of opportunities that media companies partnered with RebelMouse can leverage and make a part of their sales processes and packages.
The key offerings provided (ordered by value potential):
- Sponsored Articles
- Build beautiful articles that are clearly branded as sponsored content.
- Connect these to Google's DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) — or any other ad server — to sell companion ads and integrate tracking pixels.
- Custom Sponsor Landing Pages
- Build a custom brand page that aggregates all content that is created and curated for the brand you're working with.
- Include custom social widgets, calls to action, and other brand assets easily on these pages.
- Ad Creative: Content-First Ads
- RebelMouse can help wrap the most popular content created and curated for a brand into Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)-friendly ad units that the brand can traffic large campaigns on.
- Brands are finding that dynamic content performs much better than static creative, and putting your content first, packaged into a high-performance ad, solves a larger problem for advertisers.
- As a media company, this gives you a solution beyond the limits of your own traffic and audience, because the ad creative can be trafficked by an advertiser into a big campaign off your site as well.
- Brand Content Hub
- Media companies can take a stream of content sorted to match by topic, and then use it to power a brand hub that can live off of your site.
- This can be used to launch new campaigns with a dynamic microsite that is populated with content and runs contests, such as what Nicorette did for their "A Better Way to Quit" campaign:
- This format can also be used to power a full-brand content hub while simultaneously being the news provider and agency that powers a mission, such as what United Airlines does with https://hub.united.com.
- United Airlines' Journey Contest is another great example that drove incredible engagement:
- PAPER Magazine's "Break the Internet Awards" is yet another example of a successful campaign. Our passion to fuel engagement with every click is why we built out the ability to create professional-looking quizzes and surveys that are easy to use and monetize. PAPER Magazine leveraged this feature last year and snagged impressive engagement.
Sponsored Articles
Sponsored articles can easily be set up in RebelMouse using our Layout & Design tool. The goal is to leave your editorial and creative teams with a layout they can choose when drafting content that moves a standard post into a sponsored format.
RebelMouse-Powered Examples
- Big Think: What It Takes to Get Vaccines From the Lab to the Field
- Motherly: 5 Essentials to Make Your Next Trip Outdoors With 2 Kids Stress-Free
Sponsored posts can be configured in infinite scroll layouts to appear as the second post on all article pages so that you can deliver significant traffic to the post organically. These posts can also be promoted as sponsored content in newsletters and on your home page, like so:
Here's an example of our Layout & Design tool's setup for sponsored content:
How to Do It
- Design the article while thinking about key elements
- Make the sponsorship clear to readers
- Integrate the right brand exposure for the advertiser
- Create a new layout in the Posts page of our Layout & Design tool
- Modify the lead article, sidebar, and/or any other shared elements to include the custom items that will be displayed in this layout
- Create an author profile for each brand you're partnering with
- This is useful to organize the content that's created for them, and to ensure you use the right avatars for each brand in the right places
How to Price It
- Media companies normally combine a mix of creative services fees and/or a high CPM for the impressions associated with views. Media companies can command CPMs as high as $20+ for articles that are created to match your editorial tone and resonate with your audience. Finding your own CPM is of course a relationship and sales process, but getting at least a $5 CPM is on the low end of the industry norm for this type of creative work.
- Most media companies bundle this with a lower, yet still premium CPM on a bunch of other ad impressions — which can be to their content, their CTAs, etc. This allows you to gain more depth in the campaign.
Estimated Hours for RebelMouse to Perform the Work
- Design: 10 hours
- Development: 15 hours
- Result: A layout that can be used for any campaign or brand that is integrated with your ad stack.
Super Premium Articles
RebelMouse's platform can be used to create jaw-dropping designs that are on par with the level of work that The New York Times' T Brand Studio does. You can use custom styling, particle styling, and advanced usage of our design tools to do this yourself.
RebelMouse's team can also do this work for you on a per article basis.
RebelMouse-Powered Examples
- NYLON: Aja Naomi King Is the GOAT
- NYLON: In Lena We Trust
Estimated Hours for RebelMouse to Perform the Work
- Design: 20 hours
- Development: 20 hours
- Result: A gorgeous article like the examples above which is a result of your editorial collaboration with our design and development team.
How to Price It
- Media companies normally combine a mix of creative services fees and/or a high CPM for the impressions associated with views. Companies like The New York Times can command CPMs as high as $70+ for gorgeous articles created as they find ways to give real traffic to it. Finding your own CPM is of course a relationship and sales process, but getting at least a $10 CPM is on the low end of the industry norm for this type of creative work.
- Most media companies bundle this with a lower, yet still premium CPM on a bunch of other ad impressions — which can be to their content, their CTAs, etc. This allows you to gain more depth in the campaign.
Brand Pages on Your Site
Putting together a custom landing page that's dynamic and contains a brand's assets, including all the content you've created or curated for them, can help make a brand sell premium. You can offer to integrate their social widgets and content, and you can pull together content dynamically based on tags, authors, or sections.
Examples
Estimated Hours for RebelMouse to Perform the Work
- Design: 10 hours
- Development: 15 hours
- Result: A dynamic brand page with key content.
How to Price It
- This usually helps close the deal, brings a higher rate of renewal, and keeps your CPMs high as a premium deal.
- Do not expect a lot of traffic to flow to this page and to sell CPM based on it, because this is really more for the brand's CMO and team to see all the work you're doing. It's nearly impossible to get significant traffic to these types of pages.
Power a Brand Hub or Microsite
Brands are increasingly growing more frustrated with their own blogs. The content their teams create on social is better than the blogs they're often forced to publish. They love the look and feel of your site, and in their dreams they could have something like it for themselves.
RebelMouse can enable you to clone and customize your own site, and then help you link it to a stream of content to populate it. This stream can be a mix of the content you create, as well as the content you create for a brand along with their social content. You can also help curate and moderate a contest with community submissions when the opportunity arises.
RebelMouse powers the technology, and you facilitate the sale to the brand. We work together on the services order to implement the project once you have a strong opportunity that's ready to go.
Marketers who understand content marketing know that they have to learn to act like a media company when it comes to how they create and distribute their content. The same goes for how they use content to create loyalty and drive conversion.
You can replace a brand's blog, or create the new media site of their dreams, and help them follow in the footsteps of powerhouses like Red Bull and other big players who have proven that this strategy can provide massive returns if implemented by a team that does it right.
This is the biggest, most premium sale you can make, because it consists of annual license fees that the brands pay, as well as a continuous content effort that takes all parties beyond the scope of each initial campaign.
Examples
Estimates
The SaaS fees for our platform can be white labeled and upsold through you, or you can have RebelMouse work through your targeted brand's procurement process to put a contract in place.
RebelMouse can provide services in either executing the design, or providing support and guidance in setting up the new site. Our team is also happy to help advise you on sales decks and proposals that compare your targeted brand to industry averages.
If any of these opportunities sound like they could help you grow additional, meaningful revenue, contact us today and let's get started.
How to Price It
- This is a very creative and innovative sale which allows you to potentially have an annually recurring license with a brand by reselling our platform and services to them, either white labelled or through introductions, depending on how you can maximize revenue and efficiency best.
Ad Creative: Content-First Ads
Any RebelMouse section or home page can be styled to be used as an iFrame that can be trafficked as an ad. Marketers are realizing their static assets don't really perform nearly as well as a stream of content that goes viral. By taking the most popular posts from a collection of created and curated posts, and giving a brand a dynamic, always-updating ad unit that is content first, can make a meaningful difference for a marketer.
How to Do It
- Create a new landing page as a mini brand hub on your site.
- Style the page in a new layout that you can invoke that's designed as a mobile full-screen view. This ad can be run as a full-screen interstitial or like Taboola units.
- Grab the embed code from the section.
- Give that code to your marketer as the ad creative they will traffic.
How to Price It
- Media agencies typically charge a percentage of the campaign. Or to simplify, they might charge a small CPM fee. If they're running a massive campaign that they plan to give 500 million impressions to, you can charge a $0.20–0.50 CPM and make significant additional revenue.
Estimated Hours for RebelMouse to Perform the Work
- Design: 10 hours
- Development: 20 hours
- Traffic Overage Fees: This needs a discussion to optimize the configuration for super-high traffic campaigns.
- Result: A dynamic, content-first ad unit with the most popular content.
