Meet the behind-the-scenes technologies powering The Washington Post’s digital revolution

The Post’s mobile app, developed by Team Rainbow and mentioned by Burkett in the video, is the most obvious consumer-facing product. Here are two behind-the-scenes technologies developed in-house by the Post engineers worth knowing about.

Bandito

Bandito, launched in February 2016, is a content testing technology that tests article headlines on The Washington Post’s website in a multitude of ways: real time, across platforms, in different geolocations, against different audiences, all to determine the most engaging headline for readers at that moment in time. Then, Bandito serves that headline more frequently. It frees Post employees from having to manually change headlines and as Burkett says, lets people share content more easily, thus introducing the Post to new audiences — and for them to keep reading. “It’s great to talk about uniques,” he says, but sticking to key engagement metrics is more important.

Prism

The Post’s audience is very engaged, so “clobbering them over the head with advertisements” is not the way the newspaper operates on mobile, says Burkett. Prism is the Post’s own ad server, launched in 2013. The mandate for advertising on the mobile app was simple: no latency and “big and beautiful” imagery. To accomplish this, Prism was developed as an integration into the CMS, not as a separate entity, like many ad servers. Ads load at the same time as content, resulting in an uninterrupted user experience.