Clay

Spend your time growing your audience and your business, not fighting with your CMS. From articles to marketing pages, Clay’s simple, fun, and dependable content-creation platform enables you to do just that.

Clay is being developed by teams at New York Magazine that are intimately familiar with the challenges that modern publishers face supporting multiple distribution and monetization strategies. It empowers teams to carry out their content strategy, freeing you up to focus on your next big thing.

A publishing platform for content of any kind, such as articles, home pages, marketing pages, e-commerce, and more.

A new, friendly way to create, organize, and deliver your work online, whether you are a writer, editor, designer, product manger, or developer.

Flexible enough to run one site, or dozens, mold it to what you need rather than adjust your workflow to fit the tool.

Fast and fully responsive to work in a mobile-first world.

Supports publishing everywhere so your content is available anywhere, from the web to newsletters and third-party platforms, like Apple News and Google AMP.

Integrates multiple monetization strategies, whether your business depends on advertising, sponsored content, or direct consumer revenue, Clay has you covered.

Too many publishers have to adapt to their CMS. The technology, workflow, and features are set in stone, forcing you to find work-arounds to meet your business needs. With Clay, the technology works for you, empowering you to focus on developing innovative products that are not constrained by other platforms.

Developed off of an open-source framework, Clay is a component-based platform that is completely modular, allowing you to create, upgrade, or replace any existing piece in the system. It supports any type of content from home pages to articles to more structured data and lets you easily publish to anywhere. Clay has an extensive plug-in library that covers everything from the front-end to the back-end database. You control your data and your experience.

Additionally, by using Clay, you will be able to take advantage of the development work by other members of the consortium of sites that work on Clay!

Speed Clay was designed and built mobile-first, making it preformant on all devices. Clay also allows for speed of development, allowing us to quickly test our hypothesis, reducing risk.

Flexibility Clay is entirely modular, making it easy to create, upgrade, or replace individual pieces, from the front end to the back. Editors and producers can mix and match components to create new templates on the fly, while developers can take advantage of its extensive plug-in library to swap and upgrade everything down to the database.

Empowerment Clay’s content-centric approach allows editors full control of the sites, through an efficient and clean user experience. This enables the product-development team to focus on building high-value, innovative products.

Monetization Clay integrates diverse revenue-driving experiences into one workflow, enabling us to not only meet the specific design and content needs of our advertisers but also supports direct consumer-revenue models, from membership to paywalls.

We at New York Media were tired of dealing with legacy platforms that could not easily adapt to the modern publishing needs. We realized that in order to be successful in the modern media landscape, we needed to create a platform that enabled rapid development and integration of new ideas. A platform that would put our content strategy completely in editorial hands. A platform that used technology that we were actually excited about.

In development since early 2015, Clay — named after our founder Clay Felker — has allowed New York Media to scale our award-winning network of sites, along with some key partners who help to contribute to improving the platform.

To learn more about Clay, read our launch announcement, some thoughts from our partners at Slate, Golf and Radio.com or what they are saying in the press at Digiday and Fast Company.