The challenge

Copesa is one of the largest media holding companies in Chilé, and with a readership of 26 million, their flagship publication, La Tercera is one of the most influential publications in the market.

Burdened by an aging Wordpress-based website on a self-hosted infrastructure, La Tercera experienced subpar digital performance, reliability and SEO. Complicated workarounds and constant upkeep resulted in elongated content development timelines. As a result, Copesa sought a replacement solution that would not only improve site performance but could also streamline the editorial process and unlock growth opportunities.

The impact of an end-to-end solution

Modernizing the content development experience

In August 2019, Copesa made the decision to migrate La Tercera’s site to Arc XP’s SaaS-based digital experience platform built on AWS. Containing an agile content management system with built-in digital asset management and automated workflows, Arc XP Content eliminated La Tercera’s previous web of workarounds and provided its newsroom everything needed to create, manage, and easily deliver content at scale.

The Arc XP Experience Platform, with React-based development, performance optimization and utilization of Akamai’s CDN, La Tercera could not deliver the page load speeds their visitors expected along with personalized and consistent content distributed seamlessly across all devices and channels.

La Tercera’s migration from Wordpress to Arc XP was completed in just 150 days from the project kicked-off and only weeks before COVID-19 forced an almost immediate transition to remote working. Because Arc XP is cloud-based and fully integrated, La Tercera’s newsroom had the remote working capabilities they needed to make the transition to fully decentralized operations without interruption.

As a result of this smooth transition, Copesa was able to continue executing La Tercera’s business strategy which included migrating its digital subscriptions to Arc XP Subscriptions.

Opening the path to digital subscription growth

First introduced in 2019 to reduce their dependency on ad revenue, La Tercera’s digital subscription growth was ham-stringed by the limitations of its former paywall partner. Adjusting paywall rules required developer engagement to edit the hardcoded information, hindering both La Tercera’s ability to adapt their metering approach in reaction to news cycles and create and test paywall strategies that could be used as an overall conversation driver.

La Tercera’s subscription migration to Arc XP began in June 2020 with the implementation of Arc XP Subscriptions Identity and Paywall modules to manage the registration and login process and paywall settings respectively.

Through Identity, La Tercera now had a single source of truth for reader credential management across its digital properties, including legacy mobile applications and third-party websites. The flexibility of Arc XP’s paywall module allowed La Tercera to optimize registration and paywall porosity in the context of the COVID-19 sanitary emergency, balancing not only ad and subscription revenue but also public service commitments to its readers.

Armed with the ability to finely target content to different paywall audiences and directly create and iterate offers and paywall rules with complete integration into Arc XP’s content and digital experience engines, La Tercera was now equipped to achieve their business goals while delivering a complete content and commerce experience.

“We were looking for a partner that could help us accelerate Copesa’s already successful strategic shift to digital, and we found in Arc XP not just a solution, but also a partner, with a team we can count on supporting and challenging us,” said Sebastian Rivas, former General Editor of Audiences for La Tercera and Grupo Copesa. “Arc XP not only had the best fitting product offering from the tools we evaluated, but it also helped us reduce operational and hosting costs for La Tercera, while achieving record-shattering numbers for both traffic and digital subscriptions.”

The freedom to move at the speed of business

The impact Arc XP’s DXP delivered for Copesa was both immediate and wide-ranging. When the cutover to Arc XP was made, Copesa saw an immediate 75 percent improvement to La Tercera’s page load speed. Within their first 30 days, site traffic had increased 52 percent while the number of unique users doubled.

The impact of migrating to Arc XP didn’t stop there. In their first three months on Arc XP’s platform, La Tercera:

• Grew users 66 percent year-over-year
• Increased new users 70 percent YoY and
• Increased number of sessions 62 percent YoY

Growth for La Tercera’s digital subscriptions was equally impressive. Again in just three months on Arc XP’s platform — and before migrating to Arc XP Subscriptions — La Tercera saw a 58 percent YoY growth in new subscribers. Growth after migrating to Arc XP Subscriptions, exploded to a 200 percent YoY increase in new subscribers in just the first month.

With the ability to remove their previous workarounds and automate workflows, La Tercera reduced their editorial timelines by 30 percent. And, although La Tercera’s previous Wordpress-based site was hosted on AWS, in migrating to Arc XP, Copesa’s hosting expenses dropped by 40 percent, further impacting the reduced total cost of ownership they experienced with Arc XP. Culminating La Tercera’s first year on Arc XP, Copesa achieved their 2020 traffic, advertisement, and subscription goals a full quarter earlier than expected.

“Our numbers have been outstanding both in traffic and subscriptions growth since we launched on Arc XP. but the thing that is a game changer is how we can now focus more on new products and less on the pain of bringing them to life,” said Rivas. “We just had a referendum in Chilé and we made a special homepage. The transition was seamless, with just a click, and after the election we went back to our normal design as fast as beofre. Arc XP has given us a freedom that we didn’t have before.”