How Stacker distributes sponsored content to thousands of publishers

The startup devised a unique business model for its newswire service.

Most people are familiar with newswires like the Associated Press and Reuters, but a much newer upstart called Stacker has devised a new business model for syndicating content. Rather than charging for access to its articles, it instead gives away its data journalism to any publisher that wants it. It then charges brands a fee to create and distribute sponsored content across the thousands of media outlets that subscribe to its service.

In a recent interview, co-founder Noah Greenberg explained how Stacker works with publishers, its process for creating sponsored content, and why he has no interest in driving an audience to Stacker’s owned and operated website:

I think we've seen that there's a huge trend of brands realizing that they need to build a lot more brand authority and credibility in their space. And a great way to do that is to put out really interesting research in their space. And depending on the organization and their business model and what type of customer they're going after. Sometimes that's just, we need to build really strong brand recognition. So we work with Lyft. Lyft recognizes that everyone has two apps in their phone to call a ride with. And if you've recently read an article that morning in your hometown paper about commuting trends from Lyft data, you're a little bit more likely to pull out the Lyft app. We also work with organizations that help operate marketplaces for life insurance. It's just a really big, highly considered decision. And they know that if you've never heard of their organization or you don't trust them, you're probably not going to look to them to pick a life insurance policy. And so organizations like that, it's less about being top of mind and more about really building trust and authority in your space.

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Transcript

Hey, Noah, thanks for joining us.

Good to see you, Simon.

So we've had you on the podcast before, and we're not going to completely rehash all the stuff that went into making your company. We want to talk about your sponsored content operations. But just to give people a little bit of an overview of what Stacker is, when was it initially founded?

We founded Stacker in 2017.

And it's you and another co-founder, or how many co-founders?

Myself and three co-founders. We'd all worked together at another startup prior to Stacker and bootstrapped the company in 2017.

And what's kind of the elevator pitch for what Stacker does?

Stacker has built the first earned syndication platform for brand content. So essentially we've realized that a lot of brands are hiring journalists and producing some really incredible research and service journalism. And at the same time, news outlets all across the country have a really big appetite for quality third-party content they can run on their sites.

Those news outlets don't want to sift through thousands of PR pitches. And so we essentially run a platform where brands can submit great journalism. We vet and curate the best pieces, compile that into a newswire, and then license and syndicate that newswire for free to over 3,000 news outlets across the country.

And maybe your business has changed somewhat. Are you also producing non-sponsored content or is it 100% sponsored content at this point?

So content that goes into the wire comes from three sources. One of which again is we're sourcing from third parties that are producing great content. That content is not sponsored content. It's content produced by – whether it be Experian or the Marshall Project.

About 20% of the organizations that submit into the Newswire are actually nonprofit newsrooms. And then we work with a lot of newsrooms or a lot of organizations that have gone out and hired journalists. It is being made freely available to those end publishers. So when we work with news outlets at McClatchy or Hearst or Lee Enterprises, they're getting a free source of content kind of as a new way of helping them access all of this content out there. So we're sourcing from over 100 different organizations. We also have an in-house team of 15 data journalists that is producing about 50 to 60 stories every month, many of which are underwritten by brands, and then a lot of which are also just produced to make the newswire as robust as possible.

And for the partners that are just feeding you content that you're then putting into the wire, what's their incentive for working through you? Is it just because you have the distribution network to get them in front of a larger audience or something like that?

Yeah, it's that we break down a lot of barriers. So when I think of the distribution network, really what we've built up over the past seven years is first just the relationships with publishers. We've gone out and signed licensing and syndication partnerships with over 150 different publishing groups.

On top of that, we've integrated RSS feeds directly into those publisher CMSs. So if I'm an editor at the Miami Herald, I log in and right next to my AP and my Reuters wire content, there's a bunch of content provided through the Stacker wire. So we're just removing a lot of friction for those editors to actually access content from these third parties. And then finally, it is... that we're really acting as the standard bearer for quality. So if I am a PR person at Rocket Loans, reaching out cold to a news outlet, there's just a lot of back and forth, obviously, over the methodology that went into that piece, etc. And the news outlets that we syndicate to really do see us as the filter for quality. Every piece that comes through the wire goes through our editorial board to make sure that it meets a set of agreed upon editorial standards. And so we're really just removing a lot of that friction between those two parties.

And then you said you have 15 data journalists. So they create just 50 to 60 pieces of content per month. Some of that content is underwritten by a brand, and we'll talk about what that means. But then some of the content is just them doing data-based journalism, pulling in from data sources and creating stories around them.

Yeah, at the end of the day, we need to make sure that our newswire being made available to publishers is a fully comprehensive newswire. So we can't one month have a bunch of organizations submitting real estate content and have a really robust real estate section, and then six months later, there's no real estate content going in. So whether we're covering politics, whether we're covering the Olympics, current events, our newsroom is constantly thinking about what are really interesting data angles that we can tell just to make sure that our newswire is a must-have for any newsroom out there.

And so for a non-sponsored piece of content that you created, what's a good example of something you're really proud of? 

I mean, if you head over to stacker.com, I don't really think about a differentiation between is it sponsored or is it not ultimately because our newsroom is just thinking about what really interesting stories can we tell in whatever niche or whatever topic.

What's a piece of data journalism that you would think of? When you're talking to people at a party or something like that, to give them an example, what's something?

So, I mean, we've done really awesome work just looking at everything from kind of underserved areas in terms of healthcare coverage, pulling from CDC data. We've done really amazing work looking at real estate statistics and where people are moving to. So we're rarely thinking about how do we break the news, but more thinking about how do we kind of add context to the conversation, really more around kitchen table topics.

So contextually, you're kind of like a 538, but instead of building your brand on an owned and operated website, you are a distributed network newswire, basically, right? Would that be kind of a good way to explain it?

The thesis when we started seven years ago was from seeing how organizations like FiveThirtyEight, the Upshot, Vox's Explainers were doing really interesting data journalism that helped put the world into context. A lot of that journalism, though, was being presented in a very kind of long read chart, very data heavy format. And we really thought, how can we present this in a bit more of an easy to digest format, but still presenting a lot of that similar data journalism?

And the value proposition of you versus a newswire like Reuters or AP is that you're completely free to... Any publisher can use your content and they don't have to pay you at all, right?

Yeah, so our relationship with... news outlets that want to license and syndicate our wire is completely non-economic ,so you're right they're not paying for the wire. They get hundreds of pieces for free. A lot of the content is less current events focused and a bit more  focused on evergreen lifestyle pieces, data journalism, and service journalism pieces But to your point earlier around what differentiates this from sponsored content is those end publishers are also not being compensated or incentivized to take the wire beyond their own business models.

So they're getting free content that they can monetize through, obviously, ads. A lot of our local news outlets that are leaning heavier into subscriptions are using these as a way to kind of break down the pay meter of how many stories a reader reads before they are asked to subscribe, but it's a free source of content for them.

Yeah, so to kind of translate what you're saying is because they're not getting paid by the sponsor that's paying you, they don't have to run it as sponsored content since they've presumably done their own editorial vetting to say this is high quality enough to run on our news site so it might get more organic distribution than the average sponsored content because it's not like in some siloed sponsored content section, it's just running alongside news stories because they're not actually getting paid for the content, their form of payment is they're getting all this content for free.

Yeah, I think what we've seen is when you sponsor a post on a publisher, they're finding ways to send some traffic to it. But a lot of the time, because they have some sort of guarantee that it will get this many readers on our site, they're going out and buying traffic to it through Taboola or Outbrain or just finding like, how do we meet that minimum threshold we promised? Conversely, when a publisher takes a story through the Stacker newswire that a brand has produced, they're publishing that story because they want to share it with their readers.

And the only way that – beyond sharing valuable content with their audience that they're making money off that is by promoting it. And so we're seeing that when a lot of publishers take these stories, they're promoting them in their newsletter. They're using them on social media to bring traffic into their site. They're publishing them, whether it be on their homepage or in related sections to drive more views and clicks out of their existing readership to circulate to new articles. So it is being run on their site as an article as opposed to a sponsored post.

So it's kind of like a symbiotic relationship in the sense that you get distribution of your sponsored content, which produces value for your advertising clients. They get free content that they can use in their audience building that they can run programmatic ads against or whatever.

Yeah, we really see our... kind of responsibility and our opportunity as optimizing the impact of all of this content that is being created. So there's obviously a huge trend of brands going out and hiring really talented journalists and producing content, whether it be from their own proprietary data or just hiring experts to put out service journalism, research-based content in their space. And we really see our opportunity as how can we make it so that content gets a lot more readers because most people are not going to the blogs of these organizations where they're posting the content. So helping it find more reach and readership, but also extending the impact of that content for these end local news outlets that are looking for more content they can augment their own coverage. So this content is being created and we're really thinking about how we make sure that it impacts as many people as possible.

And even though all this content you're creating is published to your website, you are not really focused on building an audience or driving traffic to your website because, The main value is the distributed network.

Yeah. When we founded Stacker, something that was really important to the founders is we want to focus on what we can be best in the world at, and building a consumer facing destination website did not seem like that thing.

And so stacker.com and where you can find our articles is really more of a way for reporters and editors to see the type of content that Stacker puts out. We do see a couple million visits, readers coming to that site, but that is not really where we're focused on strategically in terms of our O and O.

Yeah. Okay, cool. So you said you have 15 data journalists. How big is your entire staff?

We're about 50 people full-time.

50 people. How do you acquire clients? Do you have your own sales team?

Yeah, we do. We have a sales team that's going out working with organizations that are either already housing in-house teams and looking for distribution or taking some inbound from organizations that want to play in the content and data journalism space but don't have that team. And then that sales team operates independently from a separate partnerships group that is focused on publisher development and creating relationships with news outlets to help them syndicate our newswire.

Yeah. And the sponsors, like the value to them is that this is thought leadership content, like their data is getting cited or their expertise is being shared. in these articles so that when they appear across all these articles across these news sites, they're basically helping to build their brand as an authority on whatever that topic is.

Exactly. I think we've seen that there's a huge trend of brands realizing that they need to build a lot more brand authority and credibility in their space. And a great way to do that is to put out really interesting research in their space. And depending on the organization and their business model and what type of customer they're going after. Sometimes that's just, we need to build really strong brand recognition. So we work with Lyft. Lyft recognizes that everyone has two apps in their phone to call a ride with. And if you've recently read an article that morning in your hometown paper about commuting trends from Lyft data, you're a little bit more likely to pull out the Lyft app. We also work with organizations that help operate marketplaces for life insurance. It's just a really big, highly considered decision. And they know that if you've never heard of their organization or you don't trust them, you're probably not going to look to them to pick a life insurance policy. And so organizations like that, it's less about being top of mind and more about really building trust and authority in your space.

And also those articles will often include hyperlinks that drive people deeper into their websites and stuff like that.

Yes. I'd say the play is less... You know, when every now and then a brand will come to us and say, we want to distribute content so we can get a bunch of people back to our site and they'll convert – this is not a performance marketing play. We often tell brands that are looking at content syndication as a performance marketing play, you know, that's not the way to look at this and we recommend they don't work with us, because as you can imagine, when all of these news outlets are taking content, they're not looking to take content that  has a bunch of links that are meant to drive conversions. They want real editorial for their sites.

Do you have any requirements in terms of service that if a site syndicates your content, they have to include the hyperlinks?

Yeah, so we allow a publisher, when they take a story, to edit the title, they can kind of lightly edit the story itself to – if they're in a certain city and they want to add something into the introduction that contextualizes it within whatever's going on in their city. But our agreement with publishers is they're keeping the byline, and then they are keeping the citation and canonical pointing back to the original version on the originator site.

So when you're pitching a client, what are the things you're emphasizing to win that business over other publishers that might be doing sponsored content or other kinds of advertising, why they should put their budget with you versus those other sources?

Yeah. So it's interesting. We usually are not pitching against... buying a sponsorship or buying sponsored content because when people buy sponsored content or think about that strategy they're really trying to get out a message that's either very self promotional or very targeted and we cannot syndicate that type of content. If you want to talk about your company values or some new cutting edge technology that your company's come out with, that's not content that we can syndicate on the stack or newswire because that's not journalism. That is self promotional content that should be distributed as sponsored content. I think really what we're typically kind of pitching against are other sources of distributing and amplifying content, whether that be press releases, whether that be those services like a Taboola or an Outbrain, or just really working with more traditional PR agencies or hiring a full-time PR person to get that research out there, right? 

And so how do we think about the Stacker Newswire and distributing for earned syndication versus some of those other options? I think one of which is predictability. So we syndicate to thousands of news outlets. We can pretty reliably drive dozens, sometimes hundreds of placements for a given story that's syndicated on the wire.

The second is we provide a lot of data, both qualitative and quantitative, back to the newsrooms producing content in terms of what publishers are looking for. And so with some of that consultation, we're able to help them really kind of guide some of their content strategy to make sure that they are producing content that's going to get picked up by hundreds of news outlets and read by tens of thousands of readers. So it's a bit of the predictability, the consultativeness that we're providing them to actually optimize their content strategy. And then finally, just kind of the turnkey nature of it, where we're able to take the content that their team is already producing, whether or not they're working with Stacker, and get them just a lot more juice from that in distribution, versus obviously when you're working with sponsored content, you're creating a new post specifically for that reason.

Yeah. So do you usually charge like a set fee or is there anything performance-based?

No. So performance-based gets pretty tricky in terms of jeopardizing our integrity with the publishers that we syndicate to. So we charge a flat rate for every story submitted to the wire because again, it's really important that when we go to publishers, we say, look, we're getting paid this flat rate. You take the story if you want it. You don't take the story if you don't want it. When we sign partnerships with publishers that take our wire. Again, the agreement is you could take every single story we give you, or you could take none of them. We only want you to take the content that you want.

And so we don't have any of those performance payment tiers, because that really kind of jeopardizes the entire process.

So once the contract is signed, what's the kind of process for the story creation in terms of actually coming up with ideas and figuring out what kind of content that you can create that works towards the client's goals?

This is when a client is coming and looking to work with our studio.

19:28

Yeah. The contract is signed. We're going to produce four articles for you or whatever it is. What's kind of the creative process for determining, okay, what kind of actual data do we have access to? Like, what kind of story do we want to tell and stuff like that?

Yeah, so when an organization comes and wants to work with our studio to produce content, they're coming in, we're doing an intake to understand,within your niche, are there any topics you're specifically trying to build credibility on? So maybe the company's all in personal finance, but they say, we really want to kind of lean more into tax season that's coming up and the fact that we're in this space. Our team, we have a team that's very well versed in all the public data that's out there, all of the different types of sources we can use. We're coming back with a list of potential story ideas we're really excited about telling from which that organization is saying, oh, those four ideas look really interesting. Our team is then going and producing that content.

Well, how often are you using the client's own internal data that they have access to? Because some clients just have some amazing data that can be used to tell a story versus using outside sources.

Yep. So there's definitely instances where clients will bring data to the table when they want to work with our studio, and we'll take that and help tell stories out of it. I think what we found, though, is increasingly a lot of these organizations that have their own data also are hiring their own content teams. A lot of the times we're just taking that content in full from those organizations. So we work with Experian. Experian has a ton of really interesting data they're sitting on. They have a chief economist and several journalists that are producing original research from that data. But there have been instances where organizations have come to us and said, we have data, but we don't have any reporters. Can you guys help tell stories from that?

So would you say the majority of your clients are using outside data, not internal data in the reporting that you're doing?

I'd say today it's probably about 50-50. When our studio produces content, it's usually pulling from public data. When we work with organizations to take content they're producing, we're seeing an increasing amount of that content using proprietary data that they have.

So a historically common PR strategy for brands is they hire a PR firm and the PR firm's like, okay, in order to get buzz, we're going to do like a poll or a survey or something like that about some topic. And then we're going to send out a press release with the survey results and have any reporter who wants to report on those survey results to interview your executives. And we're basically going to take this data that we created but with the survey or polling firm and use that as like leverage to get you some some earned media. Do you do that at all where you work with like Survey Monkey or Google Consumer Surveys or some kind of pollster? 

We don't, we've definitely seen third party teams do that. We tend to work more with public data instead of creating our own polling and surveys. I think to your point of that historically, the method has been to come up with those results and put out a press release and hope reporters write about it. I think that really represents the biggest shift that we've seen in how this space works, whereas 10 years ago you would put out a press release it would have some bullets with your findings, you'd submit on PR Newswire and hope that a few reporters said, oh I'll write a story about that today. I think what we're finding is that is much less successful because a lot of reporters just – there's fewer people in each newsroom. They need to focus on the local news. They need to focus on whatever their niche is. What we found is really that's transitioned into is instead of putting out a press release with a few bullets of findings, we’ll just write the story itself.

No, that's what I meant though. Instead of doing the press release, you would gather – use SurveyMonkey or Google, one of these polling firms – gather that data and then turn it into a story. 

Our newsroom plays much less in proprietary polling and survey data and much more in what public data exists out there, whether it’s from government data sets, NGOs, etc..

You work with them on a set number of stories, you publish the stories. Do you do anything to  nudge publishers, or is it just going into the raw newswire feed? Are you doing anything to feature it within the feed to make it slightly more likely that a publisher will pick it up? Like anything on that front?

So we do a lot of personalization. We bring hundreds of stories into the newswire every month, different reporters and different producers care about different things, whether that be their beat, whether that be their location. We've seen some local news outlets just lean more into lifestyle kind of softer content versus more data-driven content. And so we do a lot of personalization where we're tagging every story by beat. So if you only want finance and money stories, we're surfacing those to you. If you only want stories that have to do with things in Ohio, we're surfacing those to you.

And then also tagging with things like current events, like this is Olympics coverage, this is tax season coverage. And so there's less, hey, let's make sure everyone publishes this story, putting our finger on the scale, and more thinking about if we're putting out hundreds of stories a month, reporters can't see and kind of choose from hundreds of stories unless they really want to spend all day looking at our wire and what's coming out. And so we're just doing a lot more personalization to make sure that content that they're most likely to be interested in is getting in front of them.

Is there anybody on your staff whose job it is to just to have personal relationships with editors and send them a link whenever there's a Stacker story that might be relevant to them, either sponsored or otherwise?

5

Yeah. So we have a publisher development team that manages relationships with publishers. They are working sometimes on a weekly basis, sometimes on monthly check-ins, really understanding this is the type of content you're looking for and making sure that content we think they'd be interested in is getting seen.

So what kind of reporting do you provide to clients? Because obviously, once an article's been syndicated on a website, you don't have access to that site's analytics dashboard and stuff like that. So I'm guessing in a lot of cases, you don't know how many actual impressions or views or shares that an individual piece of content got.

Yeah, so we do append a pixel to each story that gets syndicated on the newswire. And through that, we can understand, obviously, where the article showed up, as well as a kind of directional approximation of how many readers it had. The reason it's approximated or directional is because you can imagine that if we're syndicating a story to hundreds of publishers with a lot of different legacy CMSs, some of those CMSs keep the pixel, a lot of them strip it out. And so we can have some directional reader data to understand kind of benchmarks and how certain stories are performing versus other stories.

So what we're able to provide back to the contributing party is here's all of the places that picked up your story, and then here's how your story performed against the benchmark from a reader perspective. Which, again, helps us kind of educate all of those parties as to this is the type of content readers are looking for.

So to translate what you're saying is you're embedding a tiny image that the average consumer can't even see. And that image is pulled from your server so that every time a page loads on a publisher's website...

It pings our server.

It pings your server.

And there's no... There's no personally identifiable data. It's literally just this image pinged on this URL. So as you can imagine, publishers obviously don't want us tracking any of their reader data. So it's literally just helping us understand this story was read.

So you can get a base. I mean, obviously, some CMS might strip that pixel out, but you can still get a pretty decent number of at least impressions that ran against that story. 

Yep.

And then for any hyperlinks, I know that you said that the goal isn't to drive clicks, but are you creating custom tags on the client's website so they can specifically track how many people clicked on links in those articles?

We're typically not. Some of our clients do put a UTM tag because they want to understand how much traffic is coming back. Again, that's usually not the strategy. But yes, sometimes they're doing that. That's not something we include because again, that story is coming from the publisher or from the contributor. So we're not including those tags on our end.

And then in terms of the reporting, is there a dashboard clients can log into or is it that you're just physically emailing them PDFs or whatever of the reports?

Yeah, we've got a great dashboard that you can log into, see kind of, okay, out of the 30 stories that I've syndicated this year, how many readers have I driven? How many different news outlets? We do a really awesome heat map that kind of shows you where in the country your coverage is being picked up. And then similarly drilling into a lot of that data on the individual story level.

Okay, cool. Well, do you have anything on the product roadmap to enhance sponsorships? Obviously, Taboola has its native widgets and stuff like that. I'm noticing more startups make it easier to just embed HTML files that have recommended content and stuff like that. Are you doing anything like that, or is it still just a pure newswire play?

We're not we're really committed to how do we kind of lean more into the fact that there's a lot of this great content out there and we want to make it as easy as possible for any news outlet across the country to both access the wire, but again increasingly just get access and find and navigate to the content that's going to most help them. So on our product roadmap for what publishers are getting that license the newswire is a lot more personalization in, we know you publish these stories, we think you might be interested in the fact that these stories came out. We want to let people kind of dig into topics.