Vox Media stops using Chorus, proprietary CMS, for its own websites

> Why it matters: CMS licensing was once seen as a lucrative opportunity for publishers looking to grow revenue beyond ad dollars. But WordPress' continued dominance in the space has made it harder to compete

I used to work for such a company. The problem is that you can go to a proprietary CMS vendor for a new website and get a really good, high tech product (that's also not written in PHP), but if you want to maintain your own site, you'll have to employ a team of software engineers trained in this proprietary product, or you'll have to pay the original vendor $150/hr for developer hours for new features. There are very few contractors who know these proprietary CMSs. Most know PHP/WordPress

Lots of publishers have their own proprietary CMS, like the Washington Post which developed Arc (https://www.arcxp.com/), or the New York Times (whose CMS I don't know the name of). They can afford to keep engineers on staff, but smaller publishers can't, and would rather pay less for contractors who know WordPress or Adobe Experience Manager to add new features to their sites. Some have even moved to 100% managed solutions like webflow, which I think is a really cool product

> CMS licensing was once seen as a lucrative opportunity for publishers looking to grow revenue beyond ad dollars.

> It stopped licensing Chorus to external publishers last year

Gee, I wonder why proprietary CMS systems struggle to find lots of customers? If the company that owns the CMS gets bored and moves on or goes out of business you suddenly need to migrate all of your websites to a new system and teach all of your employees a new workflow. That leaves a lot of time where you aren't "focus[ing] on [your] "core" business"

Vox Media will use WordPress VIP instead.

I'm really excited to have Vox and Verge and New York Magazine and Eater and The Cut and Polygon and and and... on WordPress! Big win for open source.