• by Sara Guaglione , May 30, 2019

The Washington Post is making Zeus, its programmatic platform, available to publishers, with a suite of tools and services.

The Zeus Platform will be available to any publisher on any content management system, according to a guest blog post from Jarrod Dicker, the newspaper's vice president of commercial technology and development.

Previously, only the 175 publishers using The Post’s in-house digital publishing platform, Arc Publishing, were able to use Zeus, according to Adweek.

Zeus was created a few years ago to improve advertising performance and delivery “in order to maximize UX [user experience] without sacrificing revenue," Dicker wrote in the blog post.

Since Zeus was enabled, The Post’s advertising latency has decreased by 80%, he noted. Overall click-through rates have increased by 40%.

The programmatic team within Arc Publishing will offer “Zeus as a Service.” The Post’s programmatic sales and engineering staff will be able to help publisher partners "optimize their stack on top of Zeus and push forward any new integrations (internal or external) that drive more revenue,” Dicker wrote. Zeus gives publishers the option to chose what they want to focus on, such as maximizing revenue or viewability.

Zeus is part of a suite of the Arc Publishing monetization tools that will be released throughout the year. 

The tools all have “a focus on performance, privacy and optimal experiences,” Dicker wrote.

Over the next few quarters, The Post will release the Zeus Management System, reporting tools, contextual and sentiment-based targeting and the opportunity to run the company’s in-house research, experimentation and development, or RED, platforms across the network.

“This puts the power back where it belongs — with publishers,” Dicker wrote.

The Post recently added subscription tools to Arc Publishing aimed at helping publishers generate consumer revenue. Arc Subscriptions lets publishers manage paywalls, capture reader information, handle billing, provide customer service and build offer pages, the company stated. Machine learning will be added to the subscription services platform to help identify readers most likely to subscribe.

Arc Publishing may grow into a $100 million business.

Shailesh Prakash, head of product and information technology at the company, said Arc has expanded its clientele beyond The Post to include almost every major advertising market in the United States.

Its technology powers the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News and The Philadelphia Inquirer.