Earlier this month Bezos’ newsie, The Washington Post, quietly announced the rebranding of its SaaS publishing platform Arc Publishing (now Arc XP).
Originally given out for free to college newspapers, the homegrown publishing suite is no longer an internal tool by The Washington Post.
Today, it’s a full-fledged SaaS business:
- Used on 1.5k sites serving 1.5B+ visitors
- Subscription service used by 50m+ registered and paying subscribers
- 250 employees with 150 planned to hire in the next 2 years
Arc XP is even scooping up non-publisher customers, providing websites and ecommerce solutions for British Petroleum and even the Golden State Warriors.
AKA everything is going to Bezos’ plan…
After purchasing the paper in 2013, Bezos vowed to reshuffle the deck. Changes included shifting the paper’s focus to national coverage, moving toward digital-first subscriptions, and investing in its publishing tech.
According to a recent article about outgoing executive editor Martin Baron, the disruption is just beginning:
- Newsroom head count has doubled since 2013 with 26 global bureaus
- Up to 100m monthly impressions, on par with The New York Times
- Print circulation is less than half that of 2013
The next trick?
In his letter announcing his departure from Amazon, Bezos named The Washington Post as an area of future focus.
And it also shouldn’t surprise anyone — The Post’s Arc XP runs almost entirely on AWS, using 100 AWS tools and services.
So you have the world’s richest man + the world’s largest and most capable cloud provider + restored publishing powerhouse.
The NYT is def shaking in its crossword puzzle section right now.
