A New, Personalized Portal That Gives Your Storytelling a Spark: Introducing Stacker Portal 3.0

Today marks the beginning of a new era in earned media. With the release of Stacker Portal 3.0, we’re delivering the most powerful earned distribution platform on the market.

This launch strengthens the bridge we’ve built between thousands of publishers who already trust Stacker’s newswire for brand content that informs, rather than promotes.

But this 3.0 goes one step further: it provides brands with personalized recommendations on which stories will generate the best results for them—helping content and editorial teams draw a clearer line between their work and its resulting impact.

This launch answers the call of brands that want to see the ROI of the content they’ve worked hard on and know that they’re not just sending it out into the ether. Our updated analytics and AI-powered recommendations extend the legs of brands’ owned content across demographics and geographies, hitting new audiences with better stories through earned media, and leading to more pickups in AI search results.

In dozens of conversations with customers over the last six months, we heard the same thing:

"Tell me what stories to write that publishers truly want to publish.”

Or, more plainly,

“What should we publish next?”

Hundreds of brands working with Stacker knew they were creating cream-of-the-crop content. They had to in order to ensure their articles continually passed muster with our editorial team. They’ve always had the support of the Stacker team to guide them towards what was resonating with publishers, but there had to be a better way to incorporate these recommendations directly into the platform. How could we bottle the editorial and strategic insights of our team, leverage the data behind the millions of stories we’ve distributed, and put it directly in the portal?

Those questions became our foundational north star for the next phase of the Stacker Portal, and we were determined to help light the way for brands that want to create great content that’s relevant and matters to publishers and their readers.

Introducing Content Insights

Sparks — a brand new area in Stacker Portal 3.0 — provides personalized sparks of inspiration for each brand, offering clear direction for stories that are likely to catch fire in the near future.

Each brand’s Sparks section will differ because these recommendations are informed by the performance of each brand’s own content. These aren’t blanket ideas that brands should talk about this week. Rather, Content Insights are AI-powered and customized to match each brand’s goals, behavior, and publishing history.

Four weekly recommendations will help increase story pickups and pageviews, improve authority, and identify the stories to prioritize to get more eyes on your content.

How Stacker’s Content Insights Work

Since Stacker was launched, our proprietary analytics platform has tracked 2 million story pickups and over half a billion pageviews across the media ecosystem.

With the Stacker Portal 3.0, our scalable platform learns from the troves of historical data from hundreds of brands to help make smart decisions about their content strategy and deliver the type of stories that news outlets truly want to publish.

Our AI Approach

Content Insights provides brands with more clarity about which stories to prioritize and helps brainstorm angles that will cut through, ensuring their hard work actually moves the needle—something that every marketing team has faced from leadership.

We did not consider introducing these AI-assisted features lightly.

Our team of content strategists, data scientists, and product managers have ensured our algorithm produces curated, personalized recommendations with a high level of precision and utility. Sparks went through an extensive testing and AI Eval process and will be continually monitored and fine-tuned, with regular reviews by our Data Science team and ongoing feedback from you, the brands we serve.

"The AI-suggested stories are helping us think of different ways we could package or angle stories to increase our odds of getting more pickups."

- Tracy Middleton, Senior Editorial Director, Hone Health

Improved User Experience, Operations & Reporting

For this update, we spent considerable time refining the overall user experience to make the Stacker Portal an easy tool that brands want to use every day.

Now, when users log in, they will immediately see a dashboard that serves as mission control for the Stacker platform. They’ll see topline results, billing updates, a tracker for the number of stories they have left to publish, a recap of their best-performing stories, and much more.

The Content Insights page will also include other contextual information that will help brands make smarter publishing decisions more quickly. The new sections include Leaderboards, Recent Trends across the entire network, and a Planning area with upcoming events and timely news hooks displayed in a calendar.

But Leaderboards and other measurement benchmarks are only as good as the story they tell.

So, we reimagined the client Reporting section for more meaning, rebuilding it from the ground up to provide more than just numbers on a page. Our new UI also makes it easier to see and understand topline metrics on how brand stories are performing.

We also gave benchmarking a new look, providing brands with more context on how their story performed compared to others in its category and the entire network. This also enables brands to quickly and easily answer questions from their CMOs about how their stories performed relative to the news cycle.

The story submission process, onboarding experience, and help center have also been reimagined to accelerate your workflow, not slow it down.

Oh, and if you love dark mode? Yeah, we added that too.

We’re thankful to the brands that gave us the sparks of feedback to make the Stacker Portal 3.0 a frictionless content partner for better stories across media, and to our technical team that brought our vibe coding experiments to life — exceeding our expectations.

As always, we are excited for your thoughts.

Your feedback will keep making the Portal the best experience it can be. With AI doing the heavy lifting, brands no longer need to be mindreaders. And with our new reporting platform, content teams will have the right tools to back up their story ideas with data and predict what stories are worth telling, and when.

Ken heads up the distribution and product teams at Stacker. He previously led product teams at The Associated Press and The Nielsen Company.

Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva