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| Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post and founder and chief executive of Amazon PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES |
Infotech- digital revolution at the Washington Post is starting to pay off beyond the newsroom.
The paper has started to see a growing revenue stream from licensing the digital content management system it developed, called Arc Publishing.
On Wednesday, the Post announced that Argentina’s InfoBae.com, a business news website, will begin using the platform, marking the 11th outside news operation to pay for the technology. That is in addition to eight university papers in the U.S.
For a smaller publisher, the Post can charge around $10,000 a month in licensing fees. For a larger organization, the figure can rise to $150,000 a month, said Shailesh Prakash, the newspaper’s chief information officer.
“This is highly profitable. We are seeing 60% to 80% profitability because it already exists and we don’t have to build specific pieces of software for a particular business,” Mr. Prakash said.
While the Post has started small, he believes the business could eventually generate $100 million a year in revenue.
For years, news outlets have relied on a variety of licensed software packages and web building platforms to run their newsrooms. Many digital news outlets have built their own systems, some with the eye of licensing them to others, but none has really taken off as a dominant platform.
Mr. Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and now owner of the Post, has had a hand in building the publishing platform, which has been forged and tested in its newsroom.
“Everything that we offer to our clients we are building for ourselves,” Mr. Prakash said.
The software is hosted on the Post’s network and the customer pays according to the amount of data used to build pages, manage paywalls, test headlines, and post to outside platforms like Facebook and Twitter, as well as collect and analyze user information.
“We have a taken a page out of Amazon’s playbook. It is completely hosted. We run it, we administer it and we get paid consistently every month,” he said. “The great thing is if a site grows and gets more traffic, we get paid more.”
Revenue from Arc has served as an unexpected benefit of Mr. Bezos’ efforts to revamp the Post since acquiring it in 2013 for $250 million and taking it private. Much of the editorial effort has focused on building a larger audience with an eye toward signing up more digital subscribers.
While the paper has generated solid gains in traffic, it has declined to discuss online subscriptions. Mr. Prakash said the paper’s largest group of subscribers is readers on Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which comes preloaded with the Washington Post app. They are given free access for six months and for $1 a month for the following six months, but he says a good number have continued to pay even though the price kicks up to $3.99 a month after that.
So far, the Post has started small with Arc, launching in newsrooms like the Alaska News Dispatch and Willamette Week. Deals have been signed with bigger operations like Canada’s Globe and Mail, the Tampa Bay Times, Paraguay’s La Nación and the Sante Fe Reporter, where the program is expected to launch later this year.
A preliminary deal has been inked with Tribune Publishing Co.—soon to be known as Tronc Inc.—to explore the possibility of bringing the technology to their newsrooms, which include publications like the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, Mr. Prakash said.
Mr. Prakash says he has pushed to keep the rollout of Arc slow to avoid the possibility of being unable to provide proper support to other newsrooms. The Post has between 10 and 15 engineers at any time working to get Arc up and running in other newsrooms and providing support where it has already launched.
“So far Bezos is happy with it and he supports it. But I want to make sure to keep the clients happy,” he said. “The Post is a pretty cranky newsroom and I figure if I can keep those guys happy, then I think I should be able to keep others happy.”
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