About Envato
Envato was first launched from the garage of founders Collis, Cyan and Vahid Ta’eed in 2006, with the mission of building a place where creatives could sell their products and services at a fair price. Since then, Envato has blossomed into a portfolio of websites built from the ground up with no external funding. Envato is a certified B Corp based in Melbourne, Australia, with their largest portion of users coming from the US.
Envato Tuts+ is an educational hub for designers, developers and digital workers, with over 250 million students. As part of Envato’s creative ecosystem, Envato Tuts+ helps people learn and earn online, with 1000+ video courses and 25,000+ free tutorials covering code, design and illustration, photography, video, music, web design, games development, business and more.
The Challenge
Prior to Publift, the primary revenue stream for Tuts+ was through a monthly subscription model to the website’s video courses and ebooks. They also had a wide range of online “how-to” portfolios that were offered for free. Matthew Cox, the manager for Tuts+, explains they didn’t have the competency in-house to run ads, and “Publift seemed like the right option as we wanted to dip our toe in the water when it came to digital advertising without fully committing by building resources internally.”
“It's been really great to have experts on-hand, making recommendations around how we can improve the ad yield and the performance of ads. We’ve got revenue streams that are beyond just ad yield, so where Publift have been really good is they have understood that it’s not just about creating a website that’s filled with ads, but that ads are a part of a range of revenue streams that all require different amounts of love and attention.”
Matthew Cox, Manager, Envato Tuts+
The Approach
As Tuts+ revenue stream did not centre around advertising, a more cautious approach towards ad optimizations was required. The focus for Envato Tuts+ centered on running display ads without impacting site speed. The team at Publift worked to optimize our Fuse tags to ensure that ads loaded as fast as possible. We experimented with header bidding timeouts and worked with Google to report back to the publisher on website optimizations that would improve the site's speed performance. Implementing Open Bidding helped to drive additional revenue for Tuts+ where header bidding could not be utilized.
“It’s never been about ‘let’s increase ad yield at the cost of other revenue streams’. That expertise has really shone through.”
Matthew Cox, Manager, Envato Tuts+
The Results
- Publift assisted in the complete ad setup for all of Tuts+’s 30,000 free tutorial pages, helping to optimize ad layout to keep the user experience as smooth as possible.
- Publift introduced Tuts+ to a range of technologies and demand platforms to help make the user experience as uninterrupted as possible while maximising revenue from the ads displayed.
- Lazy loading was used to increase site speed and Google’s Exchange Bidding was implemented to increase demand and drive up CPMs and fill rates.
- Envato achieved an 18% increase in net revenue (2019), with viewability increasing by 62%.
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