The Atex Blog

 

Atex is the largest supplier to the newspaper industry. We are the publisher’s friend and yet too often we are treated as “just another system vendor”. The industry will win by collaboration and realising that companies like Atex are the enablers of change. Atex is at the forefront of the digital transformation taking place within newspapers and media companies around the world.

 

From a business perspective, Kaango is premised on the notion that without relative market scale, no marketplace can effectively compete in today’s classifieds environment. Yet we also believe that simply aggregating ads and presenting them as commodities is a poor strategy because it results in a disjointed user experience as customers attempt to engage with individual ads from multiple websites. Worse, the practice relinquishes the newspaper’s control over transactions and ultimate user experience to an unknown third party.

 

Kaango addresses both scale and user experience with its unified syndicated approach to classifieds. Kaango’s affiliates bring scale to the network while the software environment allows customers to interact with any ad in the network right on the affiliate’s own website. The high quality experience is predictable and delivered under the newspaper’s brand even if the ads being viewed originated from a different publication.

 

Kaango has enrolled more than 300 newspapers and broadcast media into its network and we plan to add at least 130 more in 2010. We also see a great opportunity in expanding the Kaango Network in key regions around the world, enabling publishers to share inventory, build communities and grow vertical markets for classifieds.

The Kaango Platform will continue to be developed aggressively and the integration into their existing systems will be seamless. The Kaango philosophy fits exactly with Atex own philosophy. Atex will be looking at other cross-industry initiatives, such as Ad Serving, ensuring that our customers keep the revenues from their content, rather than giving it away to their competitors.

 

In an effort to maximize the reliability of our platform as it scales, the Kaango infrastructure now runs in the Amazon Cloud. This effort, completed in 2009, delivers maximum speed, maximum redundancy and maximum reliability for all our Kaango customers. 

 

Some of the key benefits of our fully-hosted Kaango environment include the following:

• New servers can be brought online in less than 15 minutes (vs. several days).

• We can guarantee that server environments are identical, thereby eliminating release anomalies that result from differences between testing and live environments.

• By separating processor and database-intensive functions, we can significantly improve speed (e.g. search and imports are on different servers).

• In the event of a database server failure, we have a hot spare in the cloud that can be turned on in minutes (vs. hours).

• The cost savings of hosting in a virtual environment allows us to operate more servers, which results in better speed and more redundancy.

 

In addition to hardware changes, we will prepare the code for international deployment and deliver greater stability overall. This process will result in incremental changes that will make our code base more reliable and more easily extensible and serviceable. 

 

Finally, in terms of economic stability, it is important for all our customers to know that Kaango is backed by Atex and its other key shareholders Hearst Corporation and MediaNews Group, who remain committed to the success of the Kaango network. The 70+ newspapers of both companies use Kaango in live production today.

Kaango is an industry-wide initiative that benefits all of our publishers and helps them to better understand and profile potential customers, as well as utilising proven consumer techniques to win back ad revenues.

 

We will carry on with these initiatives by offering better ways to monetise content. We are currently sharing our vision with a number of selected customers around the world, and the feedback so far is that we are proposing the “Holy Grail” which is giving back to publishers the power to maximise the value of content through innovative software.

 

It is clear to us that we must help our customers make their print operations a lot more efficient, to generate greater revenues with fewer resources, and on the digital front, to provide them with the tools to maximise the value that they get from their content.

 

Atex is also committed to enabling publishers increase the value offered to their customers by being able to “transact” rather than just “Selling Advertising or Content.” With the Kaango acquisition, Atex now has an established ad network, as well as a very effective consumer tool that fits our philosophy perfectly of helping our Customers to develop and grow their businesses.