NewsCred Raises $25 Million to Fill a Content-Marketing War Chest. (What's Content Marketing Again?)
Advertisers have spent the last few years toiling away in the social media fields, and now have long lists of followers on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to show for their efforts.
Context & Ripple Effects
NewsCred's $25 million raise lands in an arc that began at least two years earlier, when Outbrain pulled in $35 million for its content-discovery platform in December 2011 — evidence that investors had already been underwriting the shift from interruptive ads toward content that earns attention. The pickup here is unusually broad: TechCrunch, PandoDaily, Gigaom, PE Hub and Tech City News all carried the story on the day.
The timing matters because of what the surrounding week shows about the platforms advertisers depend on. Facebook closed at a record high on January 22 and confirmed it is testing its own ad network for third-party mobile apps — meaning the same companies where advertisers 'toiled away' building follower lists are now selling them ads again. Against that backdrop, brands funding their own editorial capability through vendors like NewsCred reads as a hedge against renting reach from networks that control the pricing.
First-order effects
- NewsCred gets a war chest to scale its content-marketing operation, and advertisers holding large Twitter and Facebook follower lists gain a funded vendor to produce and manage the branded content those audiences expect.
- Facebook, which just confirmed its own ad-network test days earlier, now competes with content-marketing platforms for the same brand budgets rather than simply hosting the audience those brands built.
Second-order effects
- Publishers become the supply side: as brands like NewsCred's clients commission licensed and original editorial, outlets gain a sponsored-content revenue line that does not depend on declining display rates.
- Rival content-discovery and distribution players such as Outbrain face pressure to move upmarket from recommendation widgets into full-service brand publishing, or cede the higher-value strategy-and-production layer to newly capitalized competitors.
Third-order effects
- If venture capital keeps flowing into this layer, marketing splits structurally between rented reach (platform ad networks like Facebook's) and owned editorial infrastructure, with agencies squeezed as brands contract directly with content-software vendors.
- The follower-lists-as-asset framing sets up the next battleground over measurement: once brands treat audiences they accumulated on Twitter and Facebook as portable property, disputes over who owns that data and access become inevitable.
The trend: Brand-advertising budgets are migrating from rented social-media audiences toward owned content operations, with venture capital funding a new vendor layer between advertisers and the platforms.