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NewsCred hooks New York Times, secures $15m funding

Licensing and syndication service NewsCred recently added The New York Times to its list of 2,500 publishing partners and raised $15 million in its second round of funding, the company announced Tuesday.

by WAN-IFRA Staff executivenews@wan-ifra.org | March 20, 2013

“This deal was years in the making,” Founder and CEO Shafqat Islam told Business Insider. “And I think its a big statement that content marketing as a category has really evolved when large and mainstream publishers, and The New York Times is among the largest most reputable ones, are actually looking at software partners like NewsCred to help them figure out that space.”

Founded in 2008, NewsCred uses both algorithms and an editorial staff of 8 to aggregate content for clients including Pepsi and Toyota. While marketers comprise 50 percent of the company’s business, Islam told paidContent that the company’s mission focuses chiefly on publishers, including partners CNNAl-Jazeera and The Guardian. Other news organizations are clients, such as The New York Daily News, which relies on NewsCred-licensed content to fill its South Asian section.

NewsCred sought to partner with The Times for years, and this addition is critical for the organization’s expansion, according to Business Insider.

“Our ultimate ambition is to license and curate the world’s top publications,” Islam told paidContent. NewsCred, which is thriving primarily in the US, hopes to extend its reach to Europe and Japan, which would require making the service multilingual, Business Insider reported.

NewsCred pays partnered publishers for each client’s use of their content. This extra source of revenue “could be a lifeline for struggling news organizations,” Elaine Pofeldt of Forbes writes. Islam said major publications receive six figure annual profits from their NewsCred partnerships, and he hopes to increase that number to more than $1 million this year, Forbes reported.

This move symbolizes a major shift in media use and consumption, Business Insider reports. In fact, NewsCred’s revenues have grown 11-fold in the past year alone, Forbes reported, demonstrating the popularity of NewsCred’s syndication model.

“There used to be a direct line between publisher and reader,” Max Nisen writes. “Now, content is available from a massive variety of sources, and often isn’t accessed by going directly to a provider’s home page, but through social media.”

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