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National Geographic and Men?s Health use Marfeel for a mobile-first reading experience


The company, started five years ago, provides in-browser solutions for publishers looking to put forward a cleaner presentation for their mobile sites. The proprietary platform allows publishers to catch up with other sectors on a variety of metrics, and the results have been so promising that even big-name brands such as Time, Inc., the National Review and National Geographic have migrated to the platform. 

?We started Marfeel five years ago,? said Juan Margenat, chief operating officer at Marfeel. ?We?re basically a tech platform that helps publishers, especially with their mobile traffic. 

?What we do is take their mobile UX and turn it upside down, and provide them a much better, much lighter, much faster mobile version,? he said. ?The average mobile site loads in five seconds, more or less. 

?Ours loads in 0.7 seconds. We have a great swiping experience that allows us to move from page to page seamlessly. All the metrics go through the roof. Pageviews, engagement time go through the roof, and bounce rate drops.?

Optimization and monetization
Marfeel also helps the publishers with their monetization efforts, using dynamic price floor allocation to increase client revenues ?between 20 to 300 percent.?

?Apart from all of the tech aspects that we bring in, design is also important,? Mr Margenat said. ?We also have what we call ?adaptive design,? meaning that the experience will be different based on where the user came from. 

?If the user came through Twitter, we?ll adapt our sharing bar and outline Twitter specifically, because that user is more likely to share on Twitter.?

And aside from all of the obvious publisher-side benefits, the platform also claims to present a bevy of benefits to help the consumer, as well.

?The most obvious one is loading times,? Mr. Margenat said. ?There?s this analysis by Google that found out that if a site takes longer than three seconds to load, 50 percent of users go away. 

?Also, we?re very protective in terms of ad impressions: some sites are very aggressive in terms of impressions, but we?re not. That benefits the user; we?re going to take good care of you.?

Propriety platform for publishers
The platform is mostly browser based, with a majority of its services being hosted on mobile-optimized browsers. 

And, despite all of these revved-up features, the evident question is still a matter of sector: why publishing?

?Publishers had a tough time moving from paper to digital, and now again from digital from mobile,? Mr. Margenat said. ?Both myself and my father enjoy reading a lot, and we enjoy technology a lot.

?Five years ago, when we started, mobile sites were very, very bad. And we thought, ?we can do better than this,?? he said. ?It?s a difficult sector to be, but that?s also where all the opportunities are.

?In Spanish, mar means ocean. With Marfeel, we?re setting our sights to create something as big as that.?