{"id":578106,"date":"2010-05-25T16:00:06","date_gmt":"2010-05-25T20:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=122294"},"modified":"2010-05-25T16:00:06","modified_gmt":"2010-05-25T20:00:06","slug":"what-we-can-learn-from-the-guardian%e2%80%99s-new-open-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/578106","title":{"rendered":"What We Can Learn From the Guardian\u2019s New Open Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The Guardian isn\u2019t the kind of tech-savvy enterprise one would normally look to for guidance on digital issues or Internet-related topics. For one thing, it\u2019s not a startup \u2014 it\u2019s a 190-year-old newspaper. And it\u2019s not based in Palo Alto, Calif., but in London, England. The newspaper company, however, is doing something fairly revolutionary by simply changing the way it thinks about value creation and where that comes from in an online world.<\/p>\n

The vehicle for this change is its “Open Platform,” which launched last week<\/a> and involves an open application programming interface (API) that developers can use to integrate Guardian content into services and applications. The newspaper company has been running a beta version of the platform for a little over a year now, but took the experimental label off the project on Thursday and announced that it’s \u201copen for business.\u201d By that The Guardian means it’s looking for partners that want to use its content in return for licensing fees or to enter into a revenue-sharing agreement of some kind related to advertising.<\/p>\n

To take just one example, The Guardian writes a lot of stories about soccer, but since it’s a mass-market newspaper, it can\u2019t really target advertising to specific readers very well. In other words, says Guardian developer Chris Thorpe, the newspaper fails to appeal to an Arsenal fan like himself because it can\u2019t identify and target him effectively, and as a result, runs standard, low-cost banner ads. By providing the same content to a website designed for Arsenal fans, however, those stories can be surrounded by much more effectively targeted ads, and thus be monetized at a much higher rate \u2014 a rate of which the newspaper then gets a cut.<\/p>\n