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Do you remember the first time you heard of “The Cloud”? (And I feel compelled to use air quotes to remind us how novel it seemed back then.)
Perhaps you remember the initial scepticism some felt towards it, hard to believe now with cloud tools somehow at the heart of every technological leap of the last 15 years.
It was in 2006 that Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the first of its key services to the public - S3 (Simple Storage Service), and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) - helping kickstart an era-defining shift by industries and enterprises of all sizes.
Before then, the prevalent thinking in media was to build and host everything on-premises, ideally in the same building as the editorial operation.
We saw rack-packed server rooms with noisy air-conditioners spring up next to editorial floors, sealed away behind keypads and doors with their blinking lights eerily perceptible behind smoked glass, all with a voracious appetite for memory and disks, cool air and electricity.
It seemed we had all accidentally become technology and development companies with all the burdens around security, maintenance, training, recruitment, and hardware acquisition that entailed, while juggling with things like timelines, storage, bandwidth, capacity, flexibility, and costs. Always the costs!
No wonder the media industry embraced cloud advances so quickly. In a world where sector disruption was around every corner, publishing and media could instantly appreciate the scale, reliability, capability, and crucially the cost flexibility cloud tools and architecture offered.
I recently had the pleasure of talking with senior personnel from a leading cloud provider about what makes publishing so different from most other industries: the dynamism and ripeness for change, the vibrancy of its people, the closeness to the consumer that demands such rapid responsiveness and breeds constant innovation.
They were enthralled. Is any industry more perfectly served by the cloud and its principles?
But they were genuinely perplexed that it is still quite common for publishers to acquire a system as vital as their CMS in generic form and laboriously set about rebuilding it with a large developer team. Or, even more surprisingly, to build it from scratch.
They asked:
It all got us discussing: is the CMS the last ‘grand old’ platform that still falls into this historical approach of building, not buying ?
One of my audience summed it up neatly in the 'Acquisition Onboarding Paradox': if you use the same method to acquire new technology as you did the last time around, the chances are you will get the same thing, just shinier.
The intrinsic problems don’t go away, you just change where you are in the cycle. As she said: “It all sounds very ‘90s.” Quite.
As a result, somehow even in the 2020s, building your own CMS is still seen as the cost of entry for many publishers. Take a starter, generic CMS, and commence this tortuous journey of bespoking and pouring money into making it suit your particular publishing business. Or go cheap and put up with the shortcomings.
Until you have done it a few times, even specifying a CMS is extremely hard: an incorrect decision at the paper planning stage can hobble an entire build for years. Building a headless CMS utilising the MACH principles which underpin modern technology architectures is even harder. Doing it for a publishing business is harder still – after all, it’s not just controlling all the content, it also needs to perform as an office and workspace for teams of harassed journalists and developers who are facing a constantly evolving business landscape.
It’s no wonder then the WordPress and Drupals of the world are such common start points. “If we’re going to have to staff up or pay to rebuild rebuild the whole thing anyway, we might as well start with one that’s free!” is a common belief.
"Free.”
Skilled CMS developers are very much not free, even less so if they have publishing and media business expertise.
And what other costs is the business signing up to? Years of implementation and maintenance commitments, lost opportunities as it struggles to adapt quick enough to the needs of the business, and content that is poorly structured or simply broken?
We commissioned some research a short while ago which found that of 102 WordPress sites run by publishers, many household names, nearly three-quarters, 72.5%, had detectable and known security vulnerabilities. Less than 32% were even on the latest version.
We repeated the exercise a few months later following a high-profile WordPress, leaving more than a full month for our scanned sites to make updates, and the results were only marginally better - 57.28% still showed well-documented issues, and still under 50% were by now on the latest version. At best this suggests that those who updated between scans are doing so just once a year, not after every version is released.
As a side note, it was clear that a number of the publisher sites previously on WordPress had moved off it between scans.
From these reports, some patterns start to emerge: organisations that stay up to date were either on generic vanilla version, so would be bereft of publisher-specific capabilities, or were large organisations with sizable internal tech teams which we would argue could be deployed to better effect.
The WordPress/Drupal approach to building a CMS is not just inefficient and stealth-pricey, worst of all it strangles speed and innovation in an industry when it needs it most. The real battle publishers are fighting is to adapt quickly to a rapidly changing content consumption landscape and keep innovating for their audiences.
Commercial teams craft campaigns around fast-moving events: how can we tell them it might take months or more to build the new products they are crying out for?
Ultimately what people in media and publishing are dying to know is, where’s their share of the speed and savings new tech has given to everyone else?
Publishers have always been product companies.
Publishers use tech, which they stretch and demand more from as their products and audiences grow. But what they sell and succeed with is their content, their ideas, and the products that their customers want more of.
So the question is: are you a publishing company, or a CMS company?
The realisation is growing that publishers and media companies don’t have to be CMS companies any more. Or CRM, or paywall companies for that matter. Like those differing business needs, content management problems are solved problems and there are SaaS solutions to choose from.
Just as cloud hosting and tools have become standard, these configurable, flexible SaaS CMSs are becoming the norm. And the companies behind them thrive by delivering the dream of the service and tools a team of in-house experts in publishing would ask for, at a fraction of the total cost of ownership.
Then the questions you ask can be of a far higher level. How can I launch new sites in a week? How do I double my output of content? How do I cut my costs by half?
Your writers and engineers will thank you for it. And so will your readers and customers, and together they all get to reap the benefits the cloud has been bringing to everyone else for years.
It might be a bitter pill for some to swallow, but business success and soaring readerships tell their own stories.
Ultimately your content is what underpins your revenue, not how many days and dollars you poured into a one-off CMS or paywall solution.
If the likes of Netflix and Apple don’t feel the need to build their own data centres, then I'm comfortable believing publishers don’t need to be CMS companies.
Choosing the right fit will still require investigation and a good understanding of your objectives, but I truly believe that the effect for publishers can be as dynamic and energising as cloud computing has been for them, and everyone else.
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No matter where you are on your CMS journey, we're here to help. Want more info or to see Glide Publishing Platform in action? We got you.
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