The Origin of the Term

– The first time I’d heard the term pubOS, Ben Luban had just used it to elegantly describe the space I had been clumsily calling “the cloud-based media technology stack”. PubOS is shorthand for “publisher operating system.” Simply put, this is the set of cloud-based media technology services on which traditional, emerging, and brand publishers can build their product, be it Web, mobile, or tablet.

The boundaries for the pubOS are blurry but what it does encompass is services for authoring, licensing, developer tools, editor tools, analytics, insights, feature delivery, design, team management, UGC management, and more.

There are some easily-defined, key attributes of the pubOS however. These services are:

  • cloud-based
  • available from multiple vendors
  • interoperable

And this is not your traditional CMS construct, where you’re locked in to one vendor for all of your tools. The pubOS gives the publisher:

  • choice
  • agility
  • lower total cost of ownership
  • and speed of innovation

The Media Tech Stack Today Like the Ad Tech Stack a Decade Ago

A useful analogy is the movement of ad technology to cloud-based services over the past decade. At my first company, Firefly Network, in the 90s, we wrote our own ad server, collected our own user data, designed our own real-time targeting, sold our own ads, and on occasion even did creative for advertiser clients.

Since that time all the various functions have moved to a dizzying variety of interoperable cloud-based services — a rich ecosystem that allows publishers (and here, “publisher” can refer to the traditional variety, marketers or developers) to be more agile and responsive. A dozen years ago a publisher needed a dozen people to get an ad operation off the ground; today a publisher needs only herself (so easy a caveman can do it!).

So now a publisher can invest in what they do best – building a proposition for advertisers, audiences or consumers – and outsource the rest.

Media Tech is where Ad Tech was a decade ago. Most publishers have their own cobbled-together publisher platform built from chicken wire, duct tape, chewing gum, and hope.  And they are painfully aware that they lack the agility they enjoy with their ad technology stack.

Soon the media technology stack will resemble the flexible, nimble, efficient cloud-based ad technology stack. We are starting to see a number of companies being funded to build a variety of cloud-based publisher services. And publishers are starting to consume them in increasing numbers.

Publishing is Becoming iIncreasingly Complex

Why are publishers moving to cloud-based media tech services now? Why didn’t this transition start five years ago? Or ten, when the ad tech move started?

Because in ‘01 and even ‘06, publishing was relatively simple, consisting mainly of text and photography delivered to the browser. Apart from direct traffic, Google search was the only channel that you worried about.

Today it’s a different story. Publishing is increasingly complex:

  • Media types are multiplying. Not just text and photography but video, Twitter, interactive, maps, and a staggering variety of data.
  • The volume and rate of media publishing is on the rise. There is more media than ever for publishers to create, navigate, and publish in order to give their audience a complete experience, and that rate is only increasing.
  • There are more devices and form factors. Just when publishers thought we got the cross-browser thing sorted out and could handle building for Firefox and Internet Explorer… Today, publishers have to think about not just multiple Web browsers, but ballooning monitors, mobile devices of various sizes, and tablets, each with its own subset of apps and browsers.
  • There are more channels. It’s not just Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
  • The front end is more application and less print. A few years ago most online publications were still print content slapped onto a screen. Now they’re slowly gaining features, interactivity, and functionality. They’re more like applications and less like paper.

All of a sudden publishers have a lot more to grapple with, and their in-house IT capacity is starting to strain.

As the media technology stack becomes more complex, publishers will have to pick their battles and decide where to invest their time and money. Many publishers I speak to lament the fact that their IT spend is outpacing their “core” spend – their expertise in content, in how to engage an audience.  At some point – and some publishers would say that time has already come – this imbalance between IT and core spend will be unsustainable and publishers will need to rationalize their spending and investment.

As Jeff Jarvis says: “Do what you do best and outsource the rest.”

CMS Lock-in Yields to Choice

Many of the publishers I work with are perpetually upgrading their expensive CMS systems or constantly feel trapped by the dictates of an internal IT department that hamstrings agility, and are always feeling as if they’re lagging the state of the art by a few years. The tight integration of services that a CMS offers – authoring tools, serving and hosting, media management, team management, operational workflow – are at once their strong point and Achilles heel. Since all these aspects of a CMS are very tightly coupled, it’s nearly impossible to upgrade any single part of the CMS in isolation.

In a pubOS world, publishers will be able to choose all the various parts of their publishing system from multiple providers. The CMS won’t go away, but its place in the ecosystem will evolve just like ad servers have.

Moving to the Cloud

Cloud-based services have a variety of properties that make them attractive to publishers:

  • Lower total cost of ownership
  • Pay-as-you-go. No need to invest thousands or millions of dollar and years to get started.
  • Democractic. Being multi-tenant, pubOS services are available to publishers of all sizes. Any capabilities available to the New York Times will also be available to the smallest blogger.
  • Elastic. The service grows with you and scales to meet your needs.
  • Speed of innovation. pubOS services are continuously upgraded. And as you have your choice of vendors, you can choose a more appropriate vendor for any part of your system at any time.

Some services are already in the cloud. For example, web analytics for the most part are off-the-shelf services that ride on top of your CMS, and you have choice of several vendors to pick from. For the rest however, we must wait.

All Your Media Must Be on the Same Playing Field

The critical element of making all parts of a publisher’s media technology stack inter-operate is uniform access to all available media assets. All of a publisher’s media assets, be they owned, delivered from a sister company, or from a syndication partner must be available through all of the publisher’s media services. Otherwise it makes the ideal of being able to choose your own plug-and-play pubOS services far more challenging.

“Uniform access to all available media assets” has three key implications:

  • All assets have consistent meta-data and formats.
  • All assets are available through the same API. For example, your dev team can’t be expected to use one API to access your own articles, a second to access articles from the Associated Press, and a third to access articles from Reuters.
  • All assets have the same capabilities. If you can “ask” your Getty photo collection to only show black and white images but can’t do the same with your Reuters photos, it makes building the application you want to build much trickier if not impossible. And you’ll end up developing to the lower common denominator.

What the pubOS Isn’t, and What’s Adjacent to It

In the present writer’s definition, pubOS doesn’t include Ad Tech although they do overlap insofar as the optimization of content and advertising is related. The pubOS is of great importance to the Ad Tech space, as ad networks increasingly look to offer value-added services to their clients for differentiation and to capture more page real estate on publisher sites.

The pubOS doesn’t include lower-on-the-stack infrastructure like CDNs. It is however adjacent as CDNs look to move up the stack to not just host content but help publishers make it operational (e.g., “API-ize” content assets, sell more content, and offer off-the-shelf features for your site from the cloud).

The pubOS doesn’t include syndicated content but it does include the services to decrease friction to license and utilize syndicated content. The pubOS helps increase the utility of the syndicator’s media assets, making it easier for a larger pool of traditional, emerging, and brand publishers to use more of those assets and in more ways.  The syndicators, like the CDNs, are also looking to move up the stack – and for them the pubOS is a particularly important space.

It’s Going to be a Fun Ride

It’s remarkable how much of the AdOS exists, allowing publishers to outsource 95% of what they had to do themselves just a dozen years ago. On the pubOS side we’re still at five, maybe 10 percent, tops – so there’s much more to come.