Vox Media Stops Using Chorus
Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn (Hacker News):
CMS licensing was once seen as a lucrative opportunity for publishers looking to grow revenue beyond ad dollars. But WordPress’ continued dominance in the space has made it harder to compete.
[…]
Vox Media will move its own websites off of Chorus and into WordPress VIP, the enterprise arm of the 20-year-old CMS company.
The migration is part of a broader strategic partnership that will allow Vox Media to extend the reach of Concert and Coral, while focusing on its core revenue streams, like advertising and subscriptions.
[…]
“If you’re not a tech company, it’s really hard to do this,” Brown told Axios. “It’s really hard to service it. It’s really hard to maintain it.”
I was not aware of WordPress VIP, but apparently it’s used by Meta, Salesforce, CNN, and News Corp. Plans start at $25,000/year, a bargain compared with maintaining an internal development team after going down from six external clients to zero.
Last year, Vox stopped licensing Chorus to third parties, but some sites are still using the platform, including the Ringer and the Chicago Sun-Times. Incredibly, Vox Media also operates two other proprietary CMSes: Clay and Pinnacle. In a press release from September, Vox said it planned to move everything to a new “publishing platform” called Duet, which Axios says will continue to be used on the front-end.
Previously:
