WaPo to expand its Arc publishing platform as a subscriptions tool sold to others, then as an ad network, aiming to own infrastructure in a similar play as AWS
It is increasingly the tech stack of choice for major news publishers. But now Arc wants to be the backbone of your digital advertising and subscriptions, too. Tweets: @niemanlab , @lpolgreen , and @jbenton See also Mediagazer Tweets: @niemanlab : By Q1 2019, @washingtonpost's Arc will power over 400 websites and serve over 10 billion page views per month. Beyond the U.S., it currently serves top-three news and information sites in Argentina, France, Canada, New Zealand and Spain. http://www.niemanlab.org/... Lydia Polgreen / @lpolgreen : Just as Amazon Web Services levies a tax on almost the entire internet, WaPo's Arc publishing platform seeks to levy a tax on much of publishing, advertising and subscriptions. http://www.niemanlab.org/... Joshua Benton / @jbenton : Great @kdoctor piece on the growing @washingtonpost ambitions for its Arc publishing platform — it's a CMS, it's a tech stack, it's an ad network, it's a paywall... http://www.niemanlab.org/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
WaPo has been walking this path since it first floated licensing its CMS to other newsrooms in late 2014 (licensing revenue hopes), then productized the tools into Arc in 2017 (how the Post built Arc). What changes now is scope: Arc stops being a publishing system and becomes a business stack — subscriptions and advertising sold alongside the CMS, explicitly modeled on how AWS taxes the rest of the economy.
The ambition is already measurable: by Q1 2019 Arc is slated to power over 400 sites and 10 billion monthly page views across the U.S., Argentina, France, Canada, New Zealand and Spain, on a trajectory that later took it past ~600 sites and its first non-media customer in BP.
First-order effects
- Publishers running Arc get a one-vendor path from CMS to paywall to ad serving, displacing standalone subscription-management and ad-tech vendors at every site that signs.
- Every new Arc customer hands WaPo visibility into another publisher's audience and revenue data — the raw material an ad network needs that a pure CMS never touches.
Second-order effects
- Rival CMS vendors must either bolt on subscription and ad products or cede the full-stack deal, while ad-tech and paywall providers face a competitor that bundles their function 'free' inside the platform contract.
- An ad network spanning hundreds of news sites aggregates inventory small publishers could never sell alone, shifting pricing power toward WaPo as the intermediary rather than the individual titles.
Third-order effects
- If the AWS analogy holds, news publishing splits into content producers and infrastructure owners, with the latter collecting a toll on the former — a structure WaPo itself later tested by exploring a spinoff or sale of Arc XP once it reached 2,000+ licensed companies but still ran unprofitable at scale.
- The endgame risk for customers is dependency: a publisher whose subscriptions, ads, and CMS all run through a competitor's platform has effectively rented its business model.
The trend: Major news organizations are converting internal tech stacks into external platforms, moving the industry's profit pool from content toward whoever owns the publishing infrastructure layer.