Rezonence’s FreeWall Offers Publishers an Alternative Monetization Strategy

Is it the answer for publishers searching for solutions?

Rezonence's FreeWall Offers Publishers an Alternative Monetization Strategy

Photo Credit: Rezonence

Diminishing digital advertising revenue. Ad blockers. Ad fraud. Ad blindness. Bots. These are just a few of the challenges facing online publishers today. To overcome these issues, publishers need innovative solutions and trusted partners. Ziff Davis is one publisher searching for answers.

Last month Ziff Davis announced they’d be supplementing their multi-faceted advertising strategy with FreeWall®, a new monetization strategy that straddles paywalls and advertising models, offering publishers a creative alternative. Ziff Davis is one of a dozen or so publishers to adopt FreeWall®, created by Rezonence, a U.K.-based bootstrap start-up.

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Rezonence created a hybrid monetization strategy to bridge the gap between the subscription-paywall model and the advertising model. They call their product FreeWall® – “free” for the ad side of things and “wall” for the subscription/paywall side – and they believe it offers publishers the best of both models.

“FreeWall® is a holistic strategy to help publishers monetize their content,” says Tim Greatrex, founder. “We dubbed it the third monetization strategy.”

Founded by Prashanth Naidu, CEO, Rowly Bourne and Tim Greatrex, Rezonence began as a bootstrap start-up just over two years ago. They started with a staff of three and have grown to a staff of 11. Greatrex said the company is in its early stages, but they are having lots of fun. In the last 12 months, the company has raised £900,000, or $1.3 million at today’s exchange rate. The money was raised from family and friends and one family office that lead the round.

After a period of testing, the company launched FreeWall® commercially to publishers in the fall of 2014. The company has signed a dozen or so publishers, including Trinity Mirror, Bauer Media Group, City A.M. and BBC Top Gear, with their collective readership representing 120 million unique users per month.

What is FreeWall®?

FreeWall® is a monetization strategy that allows publishers to include in-line ads in their online articles, typically “below the fold.” The in-line ads appear two paragraphs into an article, and those ads require the reader to answer a simple multiple-choice question about the ad. After they answer, the reader can finish the article for free. The reader’s experience is two to three seconds long, and it actively engages them in an ad designed to build a brand, increase awareness or drive a specific transaction. Publishers typically serve one FreeWall® ad per reader per month.

“At the heart of the vision is keeping web access open but, to keep the quality of content high, publishers, editors and journalists have to be paid for their work,” said Greatrex. “Too many rubbish ads clutter up the user experience and they don’t pay enough money to the publishers to produce quality content.”

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With FreeWall®, all parties benefit, said Greatrex: readers, advertisers and publishers. Readers get a lighter, cleaner, mostly ad-free experience while also getting free content. Advertisers get proven user engagement with 100% viewability, which helps to combat ad fraud, ad-blockers and ad blindness. Also, brand awareness is heightened because readers are utilizing active recall instead of passive recall.

“The advertiser is getting a very powerful, proven engagement and proven effectiveness,” explained Greatrex.

Publishers benefit by being able to monetize their sites with less intrusive advertising. They can then keep their site free for readers, allowing them to build a larger audience while addressing the digital monetization problem. By serving one ad per month to each unique visitor to a site, the advertiser is effectively supporting a publisher’s operations, said Greatrex. This allows publishers to focus more on providing quality content and less on click-worthy headlines.

“We encourage publishers to open up their best articles to get better engagement,” Greatrex added.

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Publishers also benefit from a much higher average revenue per user (ARPU) through the cost per engagement (CPE) ad model. According to Greatrex, advertisers are paying between 10 and 50 pence per engagement, or between $0.15 and $0.73 U.S. Publishers also learn a lot about their readers from the first party data generated from the answers to the ad questions.

One key difference between the FreeWall® advertising model and a display ad model is that FreeWall® works based on cost per engagement (CPE) instead of cost per thousand impressions (CPM).

How FreeWall® works

FreeWall® is a fully-responsive ad unit that works through a publisher’s existing ad server. When an article is long enough, it pulls the code through to serve up the ad. The ads operate in-line, and through the use of HTML5, the ads automatically resize themselves to fit the site’s existing parameters both on desktop and mobile devices. Publishers do not need to adapt their existing websites to accommodate FreeWall®.

Where the ads appear as well as how they look and the frequency of the ads is fully within the publisher’s control. Rezonence recommends one FreeWall® ad per unique visitor per month, and so far, all of their clients have followed that suggestion. Publishers are free, however, to increase that number to achieve their goals.

Greatrex said FreeWall® is very easy to implement, and they have a tech team that works with publishers to get set-up in a matter of hours. Rezonence works with publishers on a revenue share basis, but it is about keeping the “right value exchange” between readers, advertisers and the publisher, added Greatrex.

So how do publishers sell the concept to advertisers? Rezonence’s vice president of sales Nick King explains:

“Publishers (and their ad teams) know their audience much better than we do, and are using FreeWall® as part of their overall sell strategy to enable a conversation between the users and the advertiser. We are more than happy to facilitate the relationship rather than owning it as at the heart of Rezonence’s business is a desire to help publishers monetize their sites more effectively.”

Is FreeWall® effective?

Rezonence offered the following stats to support its claim that FreeWall® has been successful for its clients thus far:

  • A dozen or so clients with 120 million unique visitors per month
  • In 2015, publishers completed over 2.3 million FreeWall® engagements.
  • Higher click-through rates ranging from 4% to 6%, compared to industry averages of 0.1% to 0.2%

Complementary products and features

FreeWall® is Rezonence’s primary product, but it offers complementary features and products:

  • Anti ad-blocking tool to get publisher sites white-listed
  • FreeWall® can be deployed “in app,” not just browser versions of publications
  • Will be programmatic in the second quarter of 2016
  • Audience segments
  • Photo gallery monetization
  • Video version

Some of these products are still in development, but the ad-blocker tool is already available. It is a slightly tweaked version of FreeWall® which detects ad-blockers on readers’ devices. When a reader using an ad-blocker arrives on a publisher’s site, a notice will appear on the reader’s screen advising they cannot access content unless they turn off their ad-blocker or whitelist the publisher.

“The difference between this and an anti-ad-blocker is that the publisher is having a conversation with a user versus an argument with an ad-blocker,” said Greatrex.

The other products are in testing and development, but Rezonence anticipates releasing them later this year. The first is identifying unique audience segments for publisher, based on data collected from user engagement.

Does FreeWall® replace subscriptions and paywalls?

Greatrex does not see FreeWall® as a substitute for subscriptions or metered paywalls. Instead, FreeWall® complements them, working in the middle, with the publisher designing the solution that works best them. For example, for a metered paywall, a reader could get five articles for free, and a FreeWall® experience for the next five before hitting the paywall.

“FreeWall® can help take readers on the journey toward a subscription,” Greatrex said.

Who’s using FreeWall®?

To date, all of Rezonence’s clients are U.K.-based publishers, but several including Trinity Mirror and Ziff Davis have international audiences. Greatrex said FreeWall® works for magazines as well as big news publishers, however, it can help any B2B or B2C business that creates digital long form content.

Rezonence is also working with niche publications, including some with subscription models and others with hybrid models. These specialty magazines tend to have more engaged audiences, making them an ideal fit for FreeWall®, said Greatrex.

What’s next?

In addition to launching new products, one of the company’s goals for 2016 is doubling the number of publishers using FreeWall®.

“We have quite aggressive plans to grow the business, and we’re being encouraged by publishers and advertisers to scale up,” said Greatrex. “There’s nothing stopping us.”

Insider Take:

Rezonence and FreeWall® have not been around long enough to be a proven entity yet, but we like their innovation, concept and early results. It offers publishers options and, instead of replacing existing advertising and subscription models, Rezonence has designed an alternative that can work in conjunction with those models.

FreeWall® is attractive to all stakeholders too. Readers get a more pleasant, less distracting reading experience, advertisers can overcome barriers to reach readers more effectively, and publishers can monetize their operations without making major changes to their operation, giving them the opportunity to focus more on quality content.

We like the continued innovation as the Rezonence team refines FreeWall® and adds complementary products to meet publishers’ and advertisers’ needs. Another plus is that FreeWall® can be implemented within a matter of hours and without disrupting or replacing existing monetization strategies. This gives curious publishers the opportunity to test FreeWall® without blowing up what they’ve currently got. With a revenue share agreement, there is little, if any, risk involved.

While Rezonence feels that the FreeWall® solution can work for any size publisher, we don’t believe it will work for everyone, particularly for those who seem to be successful with their existing solutions. However, it is a good alternative and complement to advertising and subscription models for those who are not satisfied with the results they’re getting. It gives publishers a low risk alternative to test as they straddle the digital divide.


Dana Neuts is a contributor to Subscription Insider. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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