Should publishers build a common tech platform together?
From a business standpoint, publishers aren’t competing with each other so much as they are with the big technology platforms — Google, Facebook, Apple, and so on. Yet publishers expend huge amounts of energy optimizing competitively against one another.
I believe that publishers will attempt to collaboratively build interoperable technology products in order to survive.
Over the past several years, many publishing companies have tried to differentiate themselves by building their own technology platforms. Smaller publishers have also been forced to focus more on technology just to keep pace with a quickly evolving industry, but they’re usually priced out by the competition.
In this environment, consumers have benefited from generally improved user experiences: better mobile experiences, faster page load times, and improved ad targeting. But the many other necessary areas where publishers have invested in technology — content management systems, asset and workflow management, various kinds of data and knowledge management optimizations, and so on — aren’t readily apparent to the user and have not yet substantially improved the bottom lines of these companies.
Therefore publishers — especially legacy print companies — are facing some hard truths...
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