Newswires should be a revenue driver. Not a cost center.
For years, the traditional model of newswires was this: you pay us, and we give you content.
That worked during the lush days of daily print newspapers and three martini lunches but in today’s media environment, the competition for eyeballs is fierce, the interpretation of “Fair Use” is broad, and publishers are watching every single penny carefully.
To build and sustain a well-functioning paid newswire is a herculean task.
Legacy wire services like AP and Reuters have seen the writing on the wall and have - for years - been working on building out new commercial business lines to subsidize the declining content licensing revenue.
Stacker has been free from its inception.
When Stacker launched eight years ago, it was built on the premise that no publisher should have to pay for content. We believed that newsrooms should continue to invest in their own people, technology, and journalism, and that eliminating the content licensing line item would allow that reinvestment.
We developed a business model that sources revenue from brands seeking distribution, which subsidizes our ability to distribute the wire freely to anyone who wants it.
And we’re not the only ones. We stand beside many other innovative organizations that have found ways to be sustainable without charging publishers.
Similar to Stacker:
Must be an easy business to build, right?
Wrong.
Free isn’t enough.
Even well-written and compelling content isn’t enough.
The content needs to perform.
Audience Engagement Editors are being tasked with driving highly engaged, highly retained readers that are more likely to subscribe to the publisher. In fact, in many organizations, the Audience Engagement function is moving out of the newsroom and into the Revenue department.
As Amalie Nash wrote for the International News Media Association (INMA):
“Audience teams, especially initially, were often thought of as a service desk: They’re the ones who optimise a story with links, add a search-friendly headline and chatter, and distribute that story across social channels and the homepage.
But the audience team is at the core of any successful newsroom. They understand readers and trends, they have expertise on data, they’re key to the organisation’s off-platform strategy, and so much more. Without an effective audience team, it’s hard to know what your readers want and how to reach them.”
So how do we know whether it performs?
As always, first-party data is key to monitoring impact.
Among newswires, Stacker is at the bleeding edge of measuring the reach and impact of its own stories. Each story distributed on the wire contains a pixel that flows back into our proprietary analytics platform.
The platform allows our content strategy and partner management teams to identify exactly what types of stories are trending, which categories perform best at which time of year, and which content areas might be oversaturated across the network.
There is no “spray and pray” or questions about whether stories resonate with publishers and their readers. Using a mixture of AI and human intelligence, we’re able to keep a pulse on the entire industry and adjust the content strategy and makeup of the newswire accordingly.
But it also requires analysis from the publishers themselves. While Stacker can monitor the performance of its own stories, publishers must also benchmark against their own content. Which is why we encourage publishers to hold us accountable and measure our stories against their own stories and the stories from other wire services.
The evergreen and “buzzy” nature of Stacker stories tend to yield strong results.
According to a recent internal case study, Lee Enterprises identified that 30% of its loyal readers regularly read Stacker… that's more than double other third-party content providers.
One network of political news sites soft-gates Stacker articles (requires an email to read the stories) and regularly sees ~10 new subscribers to articles, helping them achieve their top-of-funnel goals.
Time and again, we hear how the Newswire is helping publishers on their shift from advertising revenue toward loyal reader revenue. But the definition of “publishers” is continuing to expand. From Oliver Darcy building Status on beehiiv to traditional newsrooms partnering with TikTok influencers, it’s never been a more exciting time to support publishers. But the old models must change, and we’re here for it.
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