Complete Story
09/26/2018
Ken Doctor: Assessing the landscape in cloud-based publishing systems
In the blink of a digital era, The Washington Post’s Arc publishing platform has sprinted from an experiment to a full-on strategic business.
Arc is now used by more than 30 clients operating more than 100 sites on four continents. It’s not the industry standard, but it’s not too early to call it an industry standard. But its ambitions are still nowhere near met. Now the Post is moving Arc into a new phase, talking of a connective effect that could impact the face of the business formerly known as “newspapering.”
Arc wants to be more than a technology stack — it wants to be a network.
“Arc is reaching a critical mass of most of the advertising markets in the United States, the major markets,” Shailesh Prakash, chief product and information officer for the Post, told me recently, listing off cities where it has customers — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas, Washington.
How do publishers traditionally make money? Two ways: from advertisers and from readers. Arc has plans to be a player in both for news sites around the country and around the world.
First, ads: The Post will begin testing an ad network based around Arc clients in 2019. “We’ve got this technology we call Zeus, which basically does a more effective header bidding. Does things like autoplay for video, refreshing of ads. And I think our sales team is fairly good on the programmatic side to figure out how to get more, to squeeze money.”
Can the Post convince publishers in all these different markets to let the Post power some of their advertising?Prakash thinks so. “It’s good for us because The Washington Post now has a wider network to sell to, and it’s good for them because we think we can raise their CPMs. Certainly, we raise our own CPMs over here with our technology. So can we do that for others?”
