Mashery allowed us to pursue our goals of targeting a richer audience for our advertisers. We talk about APIs enabling The Art of the Impossible, delivering products that weren't possible before, targeting niche users and audiences, but also driving product evolution to sustain and grow a subscription business.
Myles Lagolago-Craig, Head of Platforms, Digital
News Corp Australia Headlines Ad Revenue with Mashery APIs
Reduced costs, increased subscribers and advertiser revenue
Challenge
"It's no secret that Media is facing a massive disruption, and that's really set up quite a compelling context for change, especially as consumers and advertisers migrate to the digital channel," says Myles Lagolago-Craig, head of digital platforms. "Our key goals are to increase advertiser revenue, increase our subscriber base, and reduce our costs digitally across all of our channels.
"We had a monolithic platform that was constrained in capacity, volume, and ability to quickly change. It really was only resourced by one team, for which resources were really hard to find and retain. We had to do large monthly releases of two-, three-, sometimes six-month release cycles. So, it was really hard for the business to quickly respond to e-market dynamics.
Solution
"We knew we had to get into the API game, which is complex and nuanced. We looked at a few vendors that we thought could deliver speed to market, a good price point, and the people who would enable our success. We found all that with TIBCO Cloud™ Mashery®.
Benefits
Reduced Cost, Fast Time to Market, Increased Consumption
"As part of the codeless developer environment, APIs have allowed us to get a developer up and running in five minutes—and that's powered a lot of regular internal and external hack days. It has allowed us to realize the full potential of the assets exposed by APIs. Apple News is a great example. We publish thousands of content articles to the Apple News Network every week without any incremental cost because of our API platform.
"Leveraging APIs has allowed us to reduce our time to market, from sometimes months, to now multiple releases a day. We've also eliminated outages for major releases, so we have no disruption for internal and external consumers.
"Over the last three years, we've increased daily API calls from just over 2 million to just over 9 million. This is a function of success as the business has API-enabled all of its key products and platforms.
Lowered Barriers to Experimentation, Just Right Targeting
"Mashery APIs allowed us to reduce the barrier of market experimentation and focus on commercialization of our digital businesses. It's helped us chase the value to where consumers are moving. That could be from our own products—news.com.au, theaustralian.com.au—to off-network, things like Apple News, Google AMP, and Facebook Messenger bots.
"Mashery allowed us to pursue our goals of targeting a richer audience for our advertisers. We talk about APIs enabling The Art of the Impossible, delivering products that weren't possible before, targeting niche users and audiences, but also driving product evolution to sustain and grow a subscription business.
"We wanted to increase our ability to engage or retain consumers and even grow the audience. APIs have let us do that.
Future
"What's next for News Corp is continual experimentation around market changes, looking for where the next customer value is—and potentially an API for unlocking News Corp's global assets."