• by Sara Guaglione , February 26, 2018

Bonnier Corp. is partnering with The Washington Post to move onto its Arc Publishing platform.

Arc will power the digital properties and technology for Bonnier’s more than 30 magazine brands, which include Popular Science, Saveur and Field & Stream, among others.

Bonnier will no longer need an in-house team to support its internally built custom CMS. Arc Publishing will now oversee those responsibilities. The idea is that this frees up Bonnier’s product and engineering teams to focus on audience growth and engagement, and its editorial teams can focus solely on its journalism.

“It became evident early in the demo process that the Arc platform was well designed from a capabilities point of view,” stated David Ritchie, Bonnier's COO. He added Arc “incorporates a host of functionality that we currently must purchase from third-party vendors.

"With Arc, we will be in a position to simplify our tech stack, while also benefiting from the continued development of tools by the Arc engineering team. That’s a powerful combination.”

The Arc platform can also help publishers produce and manage advertising and marketing efforts, including native ads and branded content, monetization, syndication to distributed platforms and provides tools for analytics and optimization.

Arc now has a new, “highly-configurable” subscription platform that brands, broadcasters and magazines can use to optimize their digital presence, Scot Gillespie, The Washington Post’s Chief Technology Officer, noted, as well as custom-tailored planning, curation tools for visual brands and “the capability to organize content and templates across multiple sites.”

The Washington Post lives on Arc, too. The platform was built by engineers and designers at the newspaper.

Arc Publishing has been around in some form since 2014, but last March Tronc signed on to the platform, marking its first deal with a big U.S. publisher.

Arc’s revenue doubled year-over-year in 2017, and the goal is to double it again in 2018, according to a Fast Company report.

WaPo's Chief Information Officer Shailesh Prakash has previously said the company believes Arc could eventually become a $100 million business. Licensing the platform could be an alternative revenue stream for WaPo, though in a brief sent to employees last month, publisher Fred Ryan stated the paper had tripled its digital subscriptions since 2016, and the newspaper now has more than 1 million paid digital subscribers.