Alley is launching a new toolkit called Allegro Audience in public alpha. Allegro Audience is a customer journey, identity, authentication, payments, and data platform. We've been in production with our pilot partner, LAist, for several months now, and we're about to go live with our second partner. We already support payments, gating, dynamic calls to action, segmentation, connections to customer relationship management systems, email providers, and so much more. We’re building the tools publishers need, in the shape that they need them, recognizing that the customer data layer must integrate with existing tools. There’s no black box in Allegro Audience.
We have no outside capital and we’re not owned by anyone but ourselves. Alley is a partnership, fully owned by our partners since we started out in 2010. If we raise any outside funds for Allegro Audience, it would be grant funding through a fiscal sponsor to continue the work of ecosystem development in public media.
We're also committed to an open-source pathway, and we’re building Allegro Audience using open-source tools that can be maintained inexpensively. We believe news organizations deserve more open-source products that address the hardest problems they face. Low-level tools like operating systems, programming languages, and databases have long been open-source, but higher in the stack, open-source software in news products is generally constrained to content management and production tools. Audience tooling has trailed content management in part because as recently as a few years ago, audience systems needed sophisticated technology systems to manage. Computers have caught up, though, so it’s time we do too.
At Alley, we’ve long used WordPress to deliver robust and sophisticated news websites, but then we commonly integrate closed-source SaaS products to enable audience experiences. Publishers have never needed to own their audience relationships more than they do today — why should the most crucial part of the stack be a tenant of a rent-seeking, venture-funded SaaS startup?
With few exceptions, newsrooms rarely compete directly with each other for anything more than marginal attention that comes from a scoop, and even many of those that do have come to recognize that their choice of technology is not in and of itself a competitive advantage. Alley will offer a hosted and fully-supported version of Allegro Audience when we reach the public beta milestone late this year or early next year, and we'll release the open-source project simultaneously. A core observation we have is that key open source ecosystems benefit from participation by publishers and technology partners, and a robust ecosystem of packages and plugins could emerge to fit common technology choices around email service providers, payment gateways, and other systems. We are already seeing this connection in our public media launch partners.
The publishers who own their audience relationships and the tools underneath them are the ones who will still be standing. That's what we're building, and we'd rather build it with you than sell it to you.
If you're interested in exploring what we've built, get in touch with us at AllegroAudience.com. If you want to hear more about it, drop your email below.
