This is an impossible question to answer with much certainty. That said, we believe that links from a publishing network are likely to carry slightly less individual weight than the same number of links from individual publishers. However, since our goal is to drive value through scale, and many publishers own multiple sites and syndicate to all of them, getting batches of links is unavoidable, making this a deliberate feature of our strategy.
If publishing networks were a bigger proportion of our distribution efforts, this might be a concern. However, given the size of our network (~3.3k domains) and different types and formats of our content, we're able to drive significant variability in pickups.