The New Content Network

The rise of the content economy, or why Wipster has changed its business model

Over the last five years we’ve seen a dramatic shift in how content is produced and distributed. Creative tools have become intuitive, allowing a new layer of professionals to get involved with production. When it comes to distribution, multitudes of companies are creating new-wave publishing, from internal CMSs for enterprises, to marketing automation and social media publishing.

Wipster came from one creative being sick of the friction-filled review process. At the time multiple apps were mashed together in a fragmented mess, and timecodes and emails were out of sync.

When Wipster was created in 2013, nothing quite like it existed. We were plugging a gap, but even that gap was changing from month to month.

At first, our obvious audience was people who made traditional video – TV commercials, short-form content and corporate videos – but very quickly video had morphed into the internet content powerhouse it is today. Everything is video. And it was clear the industry was changing too. Marketing teams who had never touched video were starting up global internal content departments, new apps like 90Seconds.tv and Upwork.com were finding new ways to create content, and freelancers, creative houses and marketing teams worked together to deliver video to a thousand different social media streams. Supporting imagery, podcasts, landing pages, webinars and more followed. Content became an economy – trading, buying, selling, co-creating. Video producers became content producers, video teams became media teams.

And all of this new change and creation lead to another spaghetti junction. With so many types of teams working together and creating so many different pieces of content at such a fast pace, collaborating was beginning to fall out of sync. People were thinking ‘How do we work with our teams? Who needs to have sign-off? Should that team be involved at all?’ All of this was getting in the way of creating superb content and it was absolutely getting in the way of review-and-approval.

We saw this shift and wanted to help all of these different facets and teams work together on one shared platform. With our recent launch of unlimited teams, on any Wipster account you can add anyone you ever need to work with, all in one dashboard. This gives you a view into content creation you've never had before. You get a notification engine so powerful that you can know when a freelancer has uploaded version 3 of video 4 of campaign 2, and then you can see if the brand owner has approved it. All in real time – even on your phone.

You can add every agency you work with, every freelancer, every client, every outsourced resource and every one of your internal teams – all in one simple interface that shows all the creativity in your company. You can track every proof, every review, every comment, and every approval – then you can publish that work out into the world and move on to your next project.

Wipster is a real-time content dashboard for everyone you ever work with, and it increases efficiency so much our customers on average save 75% of their time per review. A review that once took 20 minutes will now take five. We reduce the approval periods by 65% – from an average of seven days to three, start to finish. All this extra time means you have more time to get back to doing what you love – making content and sharing it with your audience. We truly believe that better review and collaboration means better content – which means your team gets better results.

Case study

One of our customers makes 30 videos internally, and another 20 externally each month. Each of these assets has on average seven versions, and needs to be shared with eight people. Fifty assets x seven versions = 350 presentations to eight people. That’s 2,800 reviews each month. Without Wipster each review can take up to 20 minutes which quickly adds up to 56,000 minutes a month, or 933 hours. Wipster slashes each review down to five minutes, but to be generous we’ll call it ten. This company goes from spending 933 hours on review to 466. Take an average salary of $80,000 ($40 per hour), and you get savings of $18,640 per month. And you can access all this for up to $1,250 per month.

On top of our Wipster collaborative dashboard you can also:

• Create unlimited networked teams and add in all freelancers and outsourced teams
• Get a real-time view into all the creativity in your business
• Present proofs and iterations with the team for real-time pinpoint feedback
• Use our integrations with Adobe, Slack, Dropbox, Box, Drive and Vimeo
• Get 2x more creative work completed on the same budget

Marketing has changed dramatically over the last five years – the rapid sharing of bespoke business content throughout dozens of networks is how we bring potential customers on our journey. This is relevant not only to marketing departments, but to any vendors creating for these companies. Everything has an ROI, everything has a conversion rate, everything is needed yesterday. If your company is not embracing engagement marketing and investing in content, you will be beaten by your competitor who does. Content is the long game and you need to start now (if you haven’t already) to build your base. Start taking your potential customers on a journey which will ultimately lead to a more successful business. It will take a creativity, perseverance – and a ton of collaboration.

If you want to dip your toe into Wipster, start on $25 per month and set up your networks, share five work-in-progress assets with your network (with unlimited versions), and start to get a feel for this new way of rapidly creating content.