CMS Vendors
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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