Do rich text editors positively affect your product’s revenue growth?

You’re probably asking yourself, what does revenue growth have to do with the rich text editor you select for your product. And, on the surface, it’s a seemingly odd connection. But, let’s explore how they’re linked.

An investigation into which rich text editor (RTE) component should be incorporated in your product, is often sparked by an uncomfortable discovery. That realization usually relates to the news that a wider or deeper scope of rich-text editing features is needed for the product.

Given an editor is often intrinsic to your product, here’s your first connection to revenue: advanced RTE features = deeper product use → more revenue.

Let’s continue. Usually, the search begins with Google, continues into StackOverflow, and is possibly expanded on Github – you may even even ask trusted sources for their opinion. You’ll also likely consider the various RTE commercial plans, ensure the component has a suitable license, that it delivers reliable support and SLA’s for your dev team and that it can be hosted as needed – be that cloud-based or self-hosted.

But to be honest, that's an ideal investigative list. Sadly, once the initial feature comparison of the various text editors on the market is complete, most people stop their evaluation. Which is far from ideal for your users, and your market growth.

Why is that?

It’s likely you're building a product to serve others, therefore it shouldn't be a matter of ticking off a shortlist of things you’re looking to include right now. To succeed and grow, you need a text editor that helps drive your product forward – that delivers more to users, and helps your product stand out from the competition.

That’s your second connection point with revenue: best in class RTE = wider product purchases → more revenue.

Not all editors are built on the same underlying principles, and that directly affects which one is the best solution for your product. One of the most important considerations is whether the editor is able to partner with you for long-term revenue growth, and if they have adequate support and community to help – should you need it – when installing, updating or customizing.

True support goes much deeper than tickets, access to a dedicated team or an open forum to answer questions. You need to consider:

• Are they supporting you by investing in their editor?

• Does it support the browser you need?
• Does the editor have first-party (not community) integrations with the framework you need?
• Does it come in the language you need out-of-the-box?

At the time of writing this article, this is where the major rich text editors stand on integrations, customizable UI, languages supported.

How can the editor’s UI impact your product's revenue growth?

Investing in a UI can increase revenue for your product by up to 32%. In fact, some reports even say that for every dollar invested into UI, it increases revenue by $10 – $100, so by choosing an editor that has the most modern UI available, your product could automatically be gaining revenue (via the editors’ investment in UI).

But not all editors provide out-of-the-box UI’s to insert into your product. It’s not an easy (or cheap) thing to create, and you can unnecessarily occupy your developer resources in the creation of a UI that:

• Isn’t accessible
• Isn’t following the latest UI/UX practices
• Isn’t extensively researched and tested – to understand user interactions, expectations and desires
• Isn’t able to seamlessly fade into the background of your product

Even worse:

• Does the editor you’re selecting have a dedicated, robust QA and process that checks each of these interactions with every release of the product?

It’s easy to think a rich text editor UI is simple, but it’s made up of many complex, hard to understand pieces.

In fact, in an average simple RTE, something as innocuous as the ‘Enter’ key performs over 100 different actions depending on where you are and what you’re doing. That doesn’t take into consideration browser compatibility or other dependencies based on what you have built into your product.

What does security have to do with revenue?

Many believe that security sits on the ‘cost’ line – after all it’s being done to protect all work from the cost of cyber attacks. In and of itself, that’s a good enough reason to invest in security, but it also can increase revenue. By creating trust and ensuring the editing experience is being done in a secure environment, revenue can increase through greater loyalty (and usage) of your product.

All that said, let's be honest: security is always on developer’s minds. Of late, the LogJ4 security vulnerability placed a spotlight on the importance of security, particularly with open source components.

So let’s address the elephant in the room:

• How secure is the open source (or commercially available) rich text editor you are using?

However, if you’re working on a professional, enterprise or compliance driven tool, you may not be able to use a true open source component – especially if security is key to your product. In those cases, a fully commercial plan may be the answer.

The final consideration for a rich text editor for your project is the ease of extensibility of the component. While the editor you’ve selected may have the features you need right now, ask yourself… What about long-term?

However, a fully commercialized option may not expose all the API’s you need, and could violate the terms and conditions of your purchase agreement. Likewise, an unsupported open source alternative may not have the long-term API support you need and if the APIs you rely on go out of date, your development team ends up maintaining code that’s part of the core editor – just to keep your extensions running.

Here’s some numbers that can add greater depth to the financial implications of this area. When the build cost of an advanced spell check feature runs to over $681K^{^} and over $41K a year to maintain, it's worth making sure the editor component you’re investing in, plans to continue to support your development work.