Can news publishers take on the tech giants at their own game?

The cleverest new business strategy to emerge because of the internet must be Amazon’s cloud model.

Google’s AdSense probably ranks up there. It’s brilliant, too. Everyone engaged in a relationship with Google benefited in one way or another as their ecosystem expanded, advertisers and publishers alike.

But Amazon’s Web Services seem to go from strength to strength in a way that media networks must surely envy. They built an incredible technology environment that makes Amazon.com possible, which is no small feat. Then they exposed their internal infrastructure for pay-as-you-go style fees on a self-serve basis to startups and eventually large enterprise customers.

Companies have sold or leased their assets including real estate and financial assets to other companies for years, but Amazon found a way to capitalise on a unique asset. By selling spare capacity, their customers have subsidised Amazon’s investment in technology infrastructure that in turn benefits from future development.

It’s nearly a virtuous circle.

I’m reminded of this while learning more about the Washington Post’s intentions to sell their content management tools to other publishers. The platform is called Arc.

Matthew Monahan is senior product manager responsible for Arc at the Washington Post. He said, “At first we were just building solutions to problems we had with existing systems. Then these things started to come together and we developed this vision that this could be a true platform. We gave it away for free to university newspapers like the Columbia Spectator to test our idea and begin getting feedback from users.”

Not surprisingly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns the Washington Post.

Arc or elements of it started at WaPo well before Bezos got there. In fact, tech teams within media orgs have tried to spin out their publishing tools since CMS became an acronym. But having the backing of the most successful person to pursue the model will be a real advantage for them.

Every business can do this kind of thing – providing internal capabilities to others. Media is certainly full of capability, and they would be wise to profit from it. The trick is working out which things make sense to sell and how to position them.

Media’s long history with content syndication is proof it’s possible. Getting ongoing fees from other publishers for content you’ve already used and paid for is a good idea. That is, if you can get money for it. Good luck with that.

More recently, media organisations have set up internal marketing agencies. Custom publishing is a sensible idea because content is something the organisation knows how to do. Might as well profit as a content mercenary if you can. But selling editorial independence or the appearance thereof kills media brands. It can be a huge distraction if handled poorly.

There are more internet-native ways to achieve the kinds of results Amazon and Google earned with their respective strategies.

Of course, content management is basically commoditised technology now. There are many technology companies focused on it, and media companies may not have all the operational resources required to be competitive. Monahan said: “We’re going to walk before we run. With every agreement we evaluate our capability to deliver on the SLA. We have to be able to support it, so I have to be careful not to oversell it.”

But media companies have advantages that pure software companies don’t.

First, any media organisation with a good tech team has been customising publishing tools hand in hand with content creators for a long time. They’ve worked out real needs directly with the people using the tools.

Monahan said Arc’s Pagebuilder tool was built so that developers at the Washington Post could iterate quickly along with editors and their changing needs on the newsdesk and create templates and configurable tools to use again.

That process of making useful things for editors on a daily basis is unique to media organisations.

Second, media organisations have real content in their publishing systems. That content could be shared with other customers and vice versa. Content sharing doesn’t come easily to publishers, but it could be used as a piece of the puzzle in a way that software companies can’t offer.

Third, media organisations have readers and advertisers. A lot of them. Pooling access to them could enable some interesting new partnerships and make them more competitive against the many forces challenging the wider media industry.

Again, publishers often feel very proprietary about these things and struggle to create federated networks of either audience or advertisers, much less both. Or if they do succeed in agreeing to connect their resources, they often fail to actually support the network and invest in it.

Instead, publishers give inventory to ad networks and other third parties who then create those audience and advertising pools, profiting from them and sharing only a slice of the value back to the publisher.

Publishers could negotiate more effectively when big changes happen in the market if they had means for steering their many resources collectively. They need to look outside their office walls and form networks that benefit everyone who participates.

And therein lies the problem. Publishers tend to look inward and miss out on the internet’s greatest strengths. They fail to create the kind of bi-directional relationships with partners that Amazon, Google and other Silicon Valley platforms have mastered over the years.

BuzzFeed’s outward-looking mentality offers many lessons for the rest of the media market.

At the SXSW event in Austin, Texas, last month BuzzFeed chief marketing officer Frank Cooper talked about an advertising product they plan to offer as a service. Swarm will help marketers create better buzz across the many social platforms people use today.

Similarly, Vox Media offers a product to advertisers called Chorus that optimises content created for a campaign and amplifies it on social platforms. They plan to push that strategy further by offering their content platform as part of the relationship with their customers.

The tools these companies are offering give them a lot of leverage for future revenue. They don’t need to sell the software. Instead, it helps them do larger-sized advertising deals.

Platform business strategies may not come easily to a company with broadcast traditions, but once you get through the many walls that exist between organisation there’s a lot of potential in the networks that can arise.

“The friction in setting up deals with publishing partners is what keeps people from experimenting with these new models,” said Monahan. “You might be able to find a way to offer something really valuable to readers with a partner or group of partners, but you’d have to convince developers to join up and set up a joint venture. But if everyone is on the same platform it becomes a lot easier. You could build products that allow people to negotiate those deals electronically.”

Media companies should focus more on creating Minimum Viable Platforms or collaborating with others that are doing it already. They ask “How high?” when Facebook and Google want them to jump. If they would stop viewing the world as a zero-sum game and work together more they might find they can create ecosystems that are even more amazing than their tech predecessors.

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