Last year, Stacker launched its new vision as the first content distribution platform built for earned reach. After spending several years at the intersection of publishers needing a free, high-quality newswire and brand journalists seeking an audience for their stories, we were on the precipice of something big. But we needed to invest in our platform to turn that vision into reality.
After a strong year of investing in personalization, ease of distribution, and analytics, we’re ready to take our 2025 product strategy forward with more exciting features to bridge the gap between brand journalism and publishers.
Our platform must continue getting smarter while offering more personalization. Our reporting results have been a practical and valuable initial solution, but we’re ready to move beyond results and toward personalized insights. Many brands we work with struggle to understand how an earned distribution platform fits into their larger marketing strategies. Our goal is to make that translation more seamless and obvious.
In the past several years, we have generated over 1.3 million pickups through our publisher network and are nearing half a billion page views. This data represents millions of personalized insights on the type of stories, headline structure, and time of day a story should be published to maximize audience engagement. Our clients pay close attention to these recommendations and insights, and we will continue to productize these recommendations throughout our platform.
When a brand journalist is ready to work with us, we onboard them to our platform and walk them through submitting their stories for review. Behind the scenes, we’ve been working on major upgrades to our internal workflow and processes to significantly speed up the submission-to-publishing timeline. We are also exploring several integrations with channel partnerships that will enable a brand to choose Stacker as an additional distribution method.
The local publishing landscape continues to be tumultuous, with no signs of getting easier. Publishers come to Stacker to augment their own staffing and to find content that will help them grow and retain new audiences. They get free access to our Newswire, allowing them to reallocate wire service budgets to their newsroom.
We will continue to invest in personalization for publishers as well, making significant improvements to our Story Hub and Story Alerts products, which will continue to learn from publisher preferences and surface those recommendations.
Without a doubt, AI will continue to have an enormous impact on content distribution and audience growth.
As we have always committed, we have no intention of employing generative AI in the writing process. But we have and will continue experimenting with tools that help our editors and partners work smarter. So far:
Over the course of 2025, we’ll continue exploring ways to generate personalized content insights and recommendations to maximize story reach. Some of these considerations will be internal tools for our content strategists and editors, while others will be user-facing.
The media industry is evolving faster than ever, and it seems like the winning playbook gets ripped up every six months. But what remains true is the importance of quality content from trusted sources. With all the work we are undertaking to streamline distribution, add personalized insights, and support publishers seeking to inform their audience, I’m thrilled at the potential to scale this platform to even more brands and publishers.
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