FreeThink - Official FreeWheel Blog

The well-known efficiency metric for motion now becomes the acronym for our newest product:  Revenue & Payments Management (RPM).  Designed to create a world of efficiency of its own, RPM was created to decrease operational costs by managing the complex world of billing and payments across partners, advertisers, and revenue models.

We figured you’d have a few questions about that.

What is RPM?

RPM joins Monetization Rights Management® (MRM) as our second core product.  It provides infrastructure that combines contract and order management with invoicing and payables for professional content.  It has two components:  Advertiser Contract Management and Partner Contract Management.  The Partner Contract Management component is what we just released; the Advertiser Contract Management component will be released mid-year.

So, what does it do, exactly?

It will allow our current and future customers – the largest producers and distributors of TV, movies, music, and sports – to accurately manage the flow of contracts (between agencies, advertisers, artists, partners, vendors), issue invoices that account for those contracts, and make payments across partners and revenue models (advertising, subscriptions, rentals, PPV, purchases). 

In short, it takes all of the relevant contractual inputs (payment terms, campaign terms, requirements, stipulations), combines that with all of the delivery inputs (ad delivery, new subscriptions, videos rented), and gives our customers the accurate numbers they need to then invoice and pay all parties involved.  If RPM does its job right, the word “discrepancy” could incite far less fear in the minds of our customers.

Is that hard to do now?

This is no small task.  RPM is solving for a tangled web of technologies – publicly available and proprietary – that time has only made more painful to manage. 

Our clients face innumerable challenges from the necessary complexity in the contracts involved in growing their professional content businesses.  Agency and advertiser insertion orders come riddled with stipulations.  Content owners and distributors often have contracts with resellers that have different deal terms, payment terms, schedules, and requirements.  They frequently have internal business units with their own sets of rules, payment terms, timing, and price models.  And then there are multiple other parties involved – artists, guilds, anyone else involved in the production and monetization of this content – with different pay-outs by video, sequential pay-outs, the list goes on.  And all of the changes to the video economy that created a need for MRM are exacerbating the pain involved in managing all of this complexity – creating the need for RPM.

Understood, it’s not easy stuff.  What makes FreeWheel the right company to fix it?

Our co-founder and co-CEO Jon Heller, served as CFO at Visible World, and got a first-hand view of the complex world of finance.  Since releasing MRM years ago, we have become acutely aware of how challenging the world of contracts, invoices, and payments is to manage for our customers.  We’ve been designing RPM for over a year with copious input from the same customers who have been requesting we build it all along.  In its simplest form, RPM is technology built to handle massive amounts of data and money flowing in and out – something we think we’ve gotten to be pretty good at.

Makes sense, but FreeWheel has always been about video ads.  Are you shifting focus?

No way!  Our mission today is exactly the same as when we founded the company:  to help the largest media companies make the most money possible from their professional content.  We remain resolutely focused on helping the creators and distributors of TV, movies, music, and sports make money, decrease costs, and build more profitable professional content businesses.  MRM at its core is about generating revenue from advertising, and RPM at its core is about decreasing operational costs.  Together, we are helping our customers manage the economics of their professional content.

It’s a big job, but we’re ready for it.

To learn more about Revenue & Payments Management or any of our solutions, reach out to your account manager, or drop us a line at sales@freewheel.tv.

— The FreeWheel Team