My first exposure to publisher syndication networks was three years ago when I landed my first placement on USA Today; a great placement for someone new to media relations. After the initial excitement of seeing the stories I told come to life wore off, it was back to being the same as before. I continued to pitch content to other publishers. However, as I was building my list, I encountered the same USA Today story—by the same author—published on multiple sites with unique domains. How could this be possible?
USA Today is owned by Gannett, which owns more than 100 daily newspapers and nearly 1,000 weekly newspapers. While this article is not syndicated to all of Gannet's properties, it does appear in about 20 independent online newspapers.
USA Today wasn’t the only one to be affected in this way. Other paraguay mobile database publishers acted as hubs or influencers, publishing articles that were either automatically syndicated (as in USA Today’s case) or “cherry-picked” by other journalists looking for reputable stories to feature in their beats.
So, which publishers are the biggest influencers in content distribution?
After three years of marketing content to nearly every online publisher in the U.S., I had a solid intuition about which domains had the greatest syndication potential for our clients’ content. But my team wanted to know more.
Kristin Tynsk, co-founder of Fractl, studied the link network of the 400 most visited US publishers online. She then used Gephi, a powerful network visualization tool, to make sense of this massive link network. Essentially, the visualization below shows the relationships between each unique publisher.