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Ring Publishing

Ring

Ringier Axel Springer Poland, a joint venture of Ringier and Axel Springer, offers an advanced platform that requires ample resources for customisation, targeted at European media firms with more complex needs

  • The tool offers some relatively advanced capabilities such as custom content types, workflows, multisite capabilities, digital and video asset management and personalisation
  • This makes Ring Publishing suitable for mid-sized chains in particular and, to a lesser extent, mid-sized independent news organisations
  • A majority of Ring customers are subsidiaries of/affiliated with Axel Springer, e.g. Politico (for mobile app) and Medonet Onet.pl, along with a handful of external customers, such as Polish editions of Newsweek and Forbes.

Likely fit

The platform is a likely fit for organisations that have relatively medium to complex needs and possess the technical resources to leverage the customisation potential in this platform. Some of the advanced capabilities, such as personalisation and its headless back end, will require you to maintain developer resources. Test carefully.

As a corollary, therefore, Ring becomes less suitable for small- and micro-sized publishers who don't have a lot of developer or technical resources.

At a glance

Primary customer fit

Mid-sized chain of news organisations

Secondary fit

Mid-sized independent news organisations

Most active geographies

EMEA

Official support hours

Phone: 24/7

Email: 24/7

Officially supported languages for user interface

EN, PL

Third-party language support available?

Yes

Licence model

Usage-based, the vendor states that you could expect to spend $100K a year

Scope summary

Publishing platform with advanced editorial and site management capabilities but limited revenue generation functionality

Tech base

Not clearly detailed; hosted on AWS

Cloud model

Managed Service (PaaS) in AWS

Headquarters

Poland

Head count

150

What customers report

  • Ring offers a comparably stable tool with a wide breadth of features
  • Vendor is a responsive partner, usually very helpful and proactive
  • Editorial Lists are a handy capability for sorting and ordering stories
  • While the CMS is customisable, it has a limited selection of plug-ins compared to other platforms such as WordPress; this may limit functionality for some licensees and so you'll want to test carefully against your requirements
  • Some of the configuration options (e.g. setting up metadata categories) can get confusing and may require a technical person rather than an editorial manager

Background

  • This platform dates back to 1996 in Poland as 'Onet.pl,' but was then acquired by Ringier Axel Springer Media in 2012. Today, it is part of Ringier Axel Springer Poland, which operates out of five offices in that country.
  • The key offering, Ring Publishing, was initially launched in 2018. It's a cloud-based platform that provides capabilities for a headless content management system (CMS) as well as non-headless website management. Today, the company has 13 customers of the core CMS, of which 9 are news organisations. These are spread across several countries in the US, Europe and Africa.
  • Ring Publishing focuses mainly on two use cases:
    • Newsroom automation
    • News publishing
  • Unlike some other tools in this marketplace, Ring Publishing offers several advanced capabilities such as custom content types, sophisticated workflows, multisite capabilities, video asset management and personalisation. However, it has no print-publishing story at all.
  • The video platform also comes with Flowplayer Video Player for live streaming events and publishing to Facebook and YouTube. The platform also provides text-to-speech functionality that can be handy for creating content for podcasts.
  • The platform bundles 'Aureus Engine', which is a personalisation platform. This allows you to offer recommendations as well as carry out A/B testing for alternate titles, images, leads and other teasers.
  • Ring publishing provides what it calls 'Content Bucket'. This allows your editors to plan content, order them based on search engine optimisation (SEO) topics and then schedule their publishing.
  • In short, this is a comparatively rich offering but consequently requires ample resources to implement and customise, and therefore lies beyond the reach of micro- or smaller publishers. It's also not suited to publishers looking for print and digital CMS from the same vendor.
  • The platform is hosted on AWS public cloud and comes bundled with AWS Cloudfront Content Delivery Network (CDN).
  • The company does not work with any channel partners or integrators, so you would need to rely on Ring's own services arm that gets involved in all implementations.

Package scope (as reported by vendor)

Core platform - i.e., bundled in product (yes/no/beta) Add-On (yes/custom/3rd party)
Content lifecycle: author / classify / edit / approve / publish / re-purpose / archive / dispose
Yes
Basic digital / voice / media asset management
Yes
Support print publishing
No
Simple social media re-publishing
No
3rd Party
Optional modules: forms / polls / social widgets / etc
Yes
3rd Party
Connector library (OOTB connectors, APIs, etc.)
Yes
Bundled CDN (with DDOS protection)
Yes
User registration
Yes
Subscription management and fulfillment - digital
No
3rd Party
Subscription or membership
No
Personalisation
Yes
Ad management - digital
No
3rd Party
Ad management - print
No
Content management
Yes
Research
Yes
Content management
Yes
Video management / OVP
Yes
Audio management / podcasting
Yes
Data journalism and visualisation
Yes
Classifieds
No
Commenting / community features/
No
3rd Party
Newsletter production and management
No
3rd Party
Notifications and alerts
No
3rd Party
A/B testing
Yes
SEO
Yes
Multi-title management with variable inheritance
Yes
Complex layout and subsite / subsection cloning
Yes
AR- / VR- enhanced services
No
Audience segmentation
Yes
Online user / partner forums
Yes
Regular user group meetings
Yes
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