Open source VS proprietary CMS. A brief chat with Ryan Dohrn & Piotr Marek before Niche Media Conference 2023

I am a Publisher. Is this for me?

If you are an online publisher and you identify with one of the following issues:

• have Wordpress site, but your developer vanished and you’re all alone,
• wake up in the middle of the night because of outdated or broken plugins,
• feared of being hacked,

this webinar is for you.

Ryan and Piotr are talking about:

• The differences between open source CMS and proprietary CMS
• Is the migration from Wordpress to CMS 4media problem-free?
• Is there dedicated human support in case of any problems?
• SEO & Core Web Vitals
• CMS 4media quick demo site presentation
• What customers are saying about CMS 4media?
• Being hacked
• How to prepare for the end of 3rd party cookies?
• Ads4media - get advertising delivered (sponsored content)
• Design, look and layout of the site in CMS 4media

Watch it here or click on the video title to open in YouTube or read the transcription below.

Transcription:

Ryan Dohrn: Hey friends! It is really, really great  to be connected today with Peter Marek from 4media.

Piotr Marek: Hi, guys.

RD: And I met Peter through the Niche Media Conference and was really intrigued by all of the technology that his company 4media has in play for publishers, specifically designed for publishers. 

And so I thought it might be kind of interesting with all the technology questions that are in the air right now, Peter. I thought it might be good to introduce you to the publishers that I work with, share with them a little bit about what you're doing from your CMS, your content management system for the websites. 

And so I thought one of the first questions that I would ask you is I'm very often approached by publishers that are nervous because they have a WordPress website, they spend a bunch of money with the developer, then like the developer vanishes.

Or most recently there was 20 or 30,000 websites affected by a bad and outdated plugin for WordPress and it took down  20 - 30,000 of websites. So my clients got a little bit nervous.

So I wonder if maybe we could kind of start there. If you would kind of talk about sort of the difference between WordPress, which is an open source software that hackers have very easy access to. And then if a publisher, as opposed to that would use a CMS like yours to build their website, that's a little more locked down and proprietary. Not a little more.  Completely locked down, proprietary. Can you talk about the differences between someone using an open source and someone using a proprietary system like yours. That might be a good place to start.

PM: Yeah, thank you for this question, Ryan.

Actually, WordPress is the most common open source system. We are migrating the data to our CMS. One of the reasons is the safety.

I had a client, it was local election day and his website was hacked and he needed like instant help from our side. So we were able to build a website for him within one day and put it live, so he will not lose the traffic and ads he sold and so on.

So this is also the reason why we created our own code. It is not an open source code, however, it is based on a technology that is used on the market. It's called bootstrap. This is the technology that was created by Twitter when it comes to front end.

When it comes to back end of the system, it's called Symphony, the framework. That allows us to build the website very fluently and to adjust them to the requirements of the technology.

And the safety is also the reason why we are using Amazon cloud when it comes to our hosting solution. They have lots of safety measures built-in, like bot attacks, DDoS attacks and so on. Everything is safe because of the Amazon cloud.

Plus we are having administration of the cloud and of our system 24/7. So whenever anything happens then there's always someone, a live person to take care of the safety of the system.

And the other thing is that our system is all in built-in system. I mean we have this claim 'no plugins, just fun'. You don't have to make the plugin for the obituaries, business directory, you have the advertisement ad server built-in. 

You can connect it also to, of course, external sources via HTML and so on. 

So yeah, the safety is key for us.

RD: So somebody was even like today they said: hey Peter, we are not happy with our WordPress website or even I have some customers that say we can't even access the site. Our developer has vanished. As long as they have some level of access to the website in one way, shape or form migrating from WordPress over to the 4media CMS is pretty seamless?

PM: Yeah, of course.  We have a team of IT developers that are taking care of the whole process. We download the database of the existing site and then upload it to our CMS.

And what we are paying attention to is that we keep the structure of the links the same, the site that we are migrating because we don't want to affect the SEO position of the site, which is very important.

The publishers are building their position in online world like for years. They don't want to lose it because of the bad migration. So we are really paying attention to do it correctly.

And the other thing around, if the publisher wants to resign from our services, then we prepare database for him and he can upload it to any WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, open source solution. 

But just to mention one thing, my company has existed for almost  8 years now and we've had 5 resignations. 

RD: That's pretty good statistics if you only lose five people in eight years!

PM: And only one went to the competition, the other four were closing the business.

RD: That's like 3 customers in 8 years. That's a pretty darn good, you know, retention.

PM: We don't have long term contracts, you know, the publishers can resign from our services within one month notice. That makes us work hard and to do the good job so they are pleased with the results.

RD: When somebody has problems with their website, if they move over to your content management system, to your CMS... With WordPress, you don't really have anybody to call, you kind of have to hire a developer. 

But with your system, which I'd love you to show us here in a second, if they have a problem, there's an individual human that they can either call or they can email. 

So there is dedicated support if they're having problems, correct?

PM: Yes, that's right.

Well, you can hear that I'm not native American, I'm Polish. But we are having a native American on board, who is taking care of our clients in the United States, they are working on Eastern time hours.

Plus the administration of the servers are 24/7, and the websites are monitored, so whenever anything happens, we see it usually before the publisher even notices that there's something wrong with his site.

The support is very important for us, so the publisher gets dedicated customer representative and we don't have... Well, the people are staying with my company for years. So this is not that they are changing a lot. They are becoming friends with the publishers.

And it's not like that we just get the onboarding fee and we vanish. No, we are here to help the publisher, to improve the site,  if he needs to make any changes there are no extra fees for this. It's included in the price of the monthly subscription.

RD: Yeah, you mentioned SEO. 

Because one of the things that has happened in the past with my customers, Peter, is they've switched over to a CMS. 

Whether they're switching to WordPress or from WordPress to someone like you, and they lose all their core web vitals, get all out of whack because the links don't stay the same, pages are reading different, and Google penalizes them for months.

Tell me a little bit about... Because a lot of publishers don't know Google's core web vitals and how important it is that you have those in play. Because if your core web vitals on your website are not in perfect alignment, Google will not, if you're using their ads, they won't serve as many ads. You won't be found as well on the websites. So a lot of folks don't know about the core web vitals from Google.

Can you talk a little bit more about that and how important it is? Because a lot of them, even on their current WordPress website, their Google core web vitals are out of alignment. Can you talk a little bit about that?

PM: Sure. 

Core web vitals. This is something that Google implemented in 2021 to enhance the stability of the environment online. And they are checking the quality of the code, how fast the website is uploading, so that people don't have to wait one or two minutes to see the main page.

And is there any shift in the layout? 

If you don't mind, I will just share the screen to show you something we built for one of our clients in Florida.

Actually each publisher can check their own core web vitals if they go to PageSpeed.web.dev. This is the service that Google provides.

This is one of our clients in Florida. I'll just take the random article and paste it into the core web vitals to analyze it.

RD: Oh, wow, I didn't realize you could do that. So it's the Google page speed insights? Okay, good. That's something good to know for all the publishers that are out there.

PM: So, it's very important to check. When we are talking to the publishers, they are not aware about how important it is, because the results you're going to see in a minute over here, they are important for two things. One is SEO.

So if their website is visible into... How it is visible into the search and the other one is how much they earn from the programmatic or Google Ads. The better results, the bigger the revenues for the publisher. 

And the difference can be huge. It can double the profits for the publisher.

So you can see that performance on mobile is 44, which is very good. 30 plus is great. BBC website is 38, so we are having 44.

RD: Oh, really? The BBC website, this is higher performing than that? Yeah. So a perfect score will be 49 on performance, right?

PM: The perfect is 100, but it's impossible to achieve it.

RD: Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay.

PM: On desktop is 78.

But you can see also the best practices and SEO. Those two factors, they are on a very high level. We are really paying attention to this ranking. It enhances the SEO, it boosts the traffic and the profits for the publishers. So a very important thing to do.

And we also teach publishers how to publish because they are sometimes making some mistakes, like putting too big pictures or too big banners. And what is also great in our system is that if you put too big a picture, for example, into the article, then we will downsize it and then we will change the format of it. 

The most popular is JPEG, but what we are using over here is the WebP format for the pictures. It's automatically changed. The publisher doesn't have to do anything with it.

So that core web vitals are okay right now.

RD: Yeah, no, that makes sense. That's really good to know. I didn't even know that that was something people should be looking at.

Hey, while you're sharing your screen, we should probably talk about what the back end looks like a little bit. Because I know that a lot of editors  are going to want to know, hey, what does the tool look like when I'm uploading articles and things like that. 

So can you show us what it looks like to log in and what it would look like to add an article? I assume that it is going to look like any other ability for somebody to upload articles.

But you know, that ease of use is something important, you know? 

PM: If you don't mind, I will not log into the client's website. I will go to our demo.

You just simply log in and there's an admin dashboard. What's important in our system is that you can limit the access to the dashboard, to the back end.

You can create the group of the users and for example, limit it only to the journalists or the people interested in business directory.

You can always give the access to the external entities, for example the bloggers, and they could edit only their own entries. 

When it comes to editing, to adding the article, it is something very easy. Just add a new article. And this is it. 

What's important. I will show it on an existing article. Just not to waste the time of uploading the picture and lead is that we have a built-in the SEO plugin. This is our solution. It helps you to enhance how the article is visible in the Google engine. It tells you if it's good or bad, gives you the preview. Also how the Google is going to see it.

Because our system is connected with Google Indexing API, that means that we tell Google: “Hey Google, we have a new article. Why don't you index it in your Google search?”. Very important for two services of Google: Google News and Google Discover. 

So for example, I'm the publisher as well, and on my site we are having about 300,000 page views from the Google Discover.

RD: I also noticed that people are able to then manage their banner ads through the system. There's no plugin required.

If they were a newspaper or something, they could do obituaries. No plugin required.

You're adding things that publishers need because this CMS is designed for publishers.

So it seems to me like it makes  a lot of sense, because it's just going to be very intuitive, because it was designed for a publisher and designed for an editor.

So what are some of your customers saying to you? They've switched from WordPress over to you. What are some of the positive things that they're saying about ease of use and updating and things like that? 

What are they telling you they like about the CMS?

PM: Support. It's a really important factor but the other thing is the easiness of use.

Just to show you one more thing. What's easy for publishers to create changes into the CMS. 

We have a full page builder included, so they can easily create a new section and decide how it's going to look like, whether it's going to be like for the full screen divided in half, two halfs, one third, and if it's going to have video materials or it's going to have a new advertisement placement.

RD: Wow. There's none of this taking and having to put in code from Google Ad Manager? I mean, if they want to use Google Ad Manager, they can. But you already have a banner ad delivery system built-in, correct?

PM: Correct. And what's also important that you can multiply the sections and you can, for example, multiply the ad banners. So if you, for example, have a new client and you want to add a new placement, you don't need to code anything. You just copy paste and you decide where to put it. It's just drag and drop.

RD: So somebody I'm noticing there, right now you've got a larger left column and then a smaller right column. But if somebody wanted four columns on the page they simply go and choose four columns. That's it?

PM: That's it. 

RD: They don't have to call developer, anything.

PM: No.

RD: Wow, this is so straightforward.

We just made some changes to one of our publication sites and literally to do that, we had to hire a developer to do it. 

And I'm not anti developers, don't get me wrong all the developers out there. I'm just noticing, we're noticing the limitations within WordPress.

And all it takes is you get hacked one, get hacked one time! 

Like a customer of mine in Arizona, 14 some newspapers, all of them went down. The moment that happens to you is... The you don't want that to happen. That's the thing that's kind of important.

PM: I can tell you one story from our end. 

Our websites were attacked by ISIS, the Islamic State in 2017, because we have clients in London, we have clients in Holland as well. And literally the ISIS attacked us, but we managed to restrain and nothing happened for the publishers.

RD: That's great. That's outstanding. Well, that's a real threat. And if you're able to sustain that real threat…

One of the other kind of threats, if you will, that's coming up is third party cookies that we use to control ad delivery from a programmatic perspective. Google is saying and others are saying that will be end of third party cookies. Should come at some point in 2024. 

So, how are you preparing for that to help publishers, how are you preparing for that?

PM: Well, in my opinion, the publisher, especially  if they are having more than one site, they should start making what I call 'the walled gardens' of the data. So this is one of the reasons we implemented in our CMS data management platform, Piano.

This is the same platform that BBC uses, I think Washington Post also. This is like the top solution for the publishers. 

So how it works? It allows publisher to create the segments of data. Let me show you.  

On the first notice, it looks like Google Analytics, but then you can go to DMP, data management platform.

RD: It's very well thought out. I mean, clearly publishers have said to you, these are the things that we need and you're delivering it back to them, which is fantastic.

PM: And you can create a traffic segment based, for example, on the International Advertising Bureau specification. 

So, for example, I want to create a group, people who are interested in automotive industry. So I have 2007 users that are interested in it. And then, this group is connected to our advertisement system. 

So, for example, the publisher can go to their own market, local market, and tell to the Ford dealer or Tesla dealer: hey, we have 200,000 users interested in automotive.Maybe you want to deliver the ad only to them? And they can charge way more than the general targeting. 

So this is very crucial for us, especially, that we are working with almost 200 publishers on our CMS right now. So that gives us the economy of scale.

And then what we do, we provide also additional  profit for publishers, also on the programmatic market,  but direct sales. What's important, they have access to this system also on the local level, on their level, so they can use it on their websites and we can do the scale and sell all the group to the bigger guys. 

RD: That's great. And then you have, as a part of your CMS, you have the Ads4media. So the company is 4media. You have Ads4media, which allows publishers, even if they don't use your CMS, to sign up. 

And you've got global brands, whether it's household products, automotive, whatever it is, you've got global brands that are buying, want to place ads on websites. And then publishers, even if they don't use your CMS, they can sign up for Ads4media and get advertising delivered that they choose. 

So it really is integrated if they use your CMS.But even if they don't use your CMS, Ads4media will work for them. Correct?

PM: Correct.

Well, when we spoke last time, we had about 1000 publishers registered. Right now it's 2300. So within two and a half months we almost doubled, more than doubled the size of the platform.

We are mostly selling the branded content, sponsored content.

RD: Okay, so not banner advertising, mostly sponsored content. Okay.

PM: Through that platform it's mostly sponsored content.

But just to give you the numbers, we are approaching the end of March when we are recording it, and in March is almost 3000 articles, sponsored articles that we sold through the platform.

So the scale is huge. And what is also important is the profit outside the normal market of the publisher, their regular market. So it's extra money for them.

RD: That's great. 

From a design perspective, maybe one of the last things I'll ask you, from a design perspective, a lot of publishers are looking for a very beautiful, pretty website.

How much control do they have over the CSS, over style sheets? If they have a designer that really wants to make it look very special, do they have a lot of control over that? 

Do you help them with that? How does that look when they want to build their site?

PM: Thanks to the builder I showed before, they have full control. They can decide how big the picture is, where the text is - under, over, to the right, to the left, how many pictures are in the widgets so of course my team helps to set up everything.

But if you're a CSS geek, you can do it yourself. And we love the clients that are playing with our software because the more you know about it, the more you appreciate the work we did with the back end. 

It's great that you don't need any technical knowledge to manage the site. My support team - there are no IT developers, they have various backgrounds. 

They just love the system and they know how to operate it. Of course, I have a team of developers that are coding everything and so on, but the publisher doesn't need to know how to code a single line of the code. 

RD: That makes sense.

Well, I think it's important for folks to...  If they're in a situation now where they're looking to either redesign the website, whatever, CMS that they have. So whether it's Joomla, Drupal, WordPress, whatever, as long as you can get a download of their database, then you're able to import it in.

Have you found that the migrations have been pretty smooth in terms of getting the pictures across correctly, the text across correctly? Have you found problems or has it been pretty smooth?

PM: It depends how old the WordPress system is, how many plugins the publisher has.

So usually it takes us about a week to migrate the site, so it's not a long process. But there were clients that we did in one day and the other ones that we did in one month because they were so messed up with the database and we had to separate everything into the columns, so it took more time.

What I always ask is: please give us an access to your database, then we can give you the estimation how long it is going to take and how much or is it going to cost you anything or how much? Because it depends.

With simple migration, we try not to charge the publisher because we know how it is on the market and it's, for us, always a long term relation with the publisher. 

RD: Yeah, it makes sense.

Well, I think you know it, but a lot of other people don't know besides ad sales training and running the Niche Media Conference.

I have been a part of over 3000 website builds since 1997 in my previous life and I haven't seen quite a CMS quite like this. This is quite good. And I think publishers need to pay attention because unfortunately there's a lot of bad people out there that are doing things to try to harm media websites specifically.

And so having a locked down system like this that still has tremendous flexibility  without having to hire a developer is something that's important to all of them. 

PM: Just one more thing if I can add. 

Even if it's a locked down system, you can connect it easily with other systems. So if you need an external newsletter  or if you need programmatic advertisement, it's very easy to connect it.

So yeah, just wanted to add it at the end.

RD: Yeah, no, that's awesome. 

So this is Peter Marek. I forgot to say you are the CEO and founder of 4media. I forgot to say this, just in case people think you're some sales guy (laugh). 

PM: I'm a publisher too, so the first CMS we created for ourselves.

RD: Yeah. That's great.

Well, it's by publishers for publishers, which is something very important when you're building software. If you're a publisher yourself, you'll know what is needed in the back end.

So 4media.com is the website, and then people can go there and sign up for a demo, and then your folks will call them  and walk them through it. Correct?

PM: Yeah.It's free for the publishers, the presentation and so on, and we give access to demo so they can play with it after the presentation. 

RD: That's excellent. Well, wonderful. All right. Well, Peter, we thank you so much for being here as we introduce kind of our Tech Talks, and we'll have more of these Tech Talks at the Niche Media Conference, and then we'll look forward to doing more Tech Talks in the future.

So I look forward to seeing you in New Orleans at the Niche Media Conference.

PM: Thank you, Ryan, for having me today.

RD: You bet.

PM: Have a good day.

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