Big news: Last week we delivered our one-millionth pickup this year. That's one million times an editor leveraged the Stacker Newswire to augment their coverage, and one million times a brand contributing content to Stacker saw earned coverage for their work.
This is the first time we've hit this milestone in a calendar year.
Hundreds of brands contribute stories to our platform every month, each of which is reviewed by our editorial team to meet standards. Those that get approved make their way out to thousands of news outlets across the country via RSS feeds, API, and our Story Hub.
One million times this year, an editor in a newsroom somewhere across the US or Canada saw a brand story come through the Stacker Newswire and decided it deserved a spot in front of their readers.
We don't take this for granted. It is absolutely insane to me to fathom the magnitude of placing one million articles in a year. It couldn't happen without such active engagement from both sides of the equation.
While an exciting milestone for Stacker, this is truly a bellwether of a massive trend in media right now. More brands are investing in high-quality content than ever before, with literally thousands of organizations hiring economists, journalists, and editors to cover their industry and produce different forms of features and service journalism.
We've been tracking and sharing those brand editorial roles, and this landmark helps paint the larger picture of what many in this industry are seeing from the inside out: The volume of quality content coming out of organizations you would not traditionally think of as media companies is skyrocketing.
With over 400 brands contributing all sorts of content to the wire each month, it was fun to watch and see what registered as the millionth pickup… The "winner" is a great example of what publishers are looking for. LMNT's "What can you drink while fasting?" answers a very specific question in a way that reads as useful research, and it was penned by Robb Wolf, a former research biochemist and two-time New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author (and co-founder at LMNT).
What does a pickup represent for brands? That depends on who you ask, and it's changed over time.
When we launched Stacker Connect in 2022, our goal was to help brands turn their owned content into earned media by republishing their stories across thousands of publisher sites. Some teams started using Stacker for PR ("we want more organic readership for our content!"), and others used Stacker primarily for SEO ("we want more authoritative backlinks from our content!").
By 2025, we started hearing from customers that AI platforms were mentioning and citing their brand more often after they distributed their content with Stacker. That's why we launched GEO Reporting, which lets customers track how their distributed stories perform across AI platforms and see how distribution contributes to brand visibility.
We've found that the same elements that make content genuinely useful and earn a publisher's trust are the same things that build authority with LLMs.
Above all, our goal is to help brands earn authority and give publishers front-page-ready content at no cost. While the value to distributing brands has continued to evolve, it's all based on the same foundation: distributing great content to news outlets through our proprietary infrastructure and ensuring the newswire is chock-full of a wide variety of great stories.
Here's to the next million 🍻
Noah Greenberg is the CEO of Stacker, the first content distribution platform built for earned reach. He's led the company in redefining how brands and publishers collaborate, with thousands of news outlets using Stacker to enhance coverage. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Noah previously helped scale Graphiq, later acquired by Amazon.
