Upworthy Establishes Partnerships for Content with Social Impact

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Contents
1 The Allies
2 The monetary benefit of content alliances
upworthy-propublicaPreviously, in this blog, we talked about the lessons Upworthy taught us in terms of growth and engagement of its community. Today, we can say that it teaches us two more lessons: first, for its strategic decision to ally itself with media and content-generating organizations and complement its great distribution nurses email list capacity and massive reach, and second, for using that power through content alliances to generate social impact.

When Upworthy received an additional $8 million investment just 18 months after launch, they wrote a blog post thanking their readers and making a promise to them. The new funding, they wrote, “will help us diversify into new editorial areas. There are a lot of very ‘Upworthy’ subject areas that we can’t wait to dig deeper into.” They also said they were going to build their business to continue to grow and get to a scale where they can truly make a lasting impact.

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The allies
Earlier this week, Upworthy announced the first steps toward achieving those goals. Upworthy is entering into content partnerships with Human Rights Watch , Climate Nexus , and ProPublica . The organizations were selected based on the issue areas that the Upworthy community cares about most based on a survey of data: climate change and clean energy , income inequality and poverty , and human rights .

Many media companies assume the worst about their communities — just because they've seen that celebrity scandals generate more web traffic than foreign revolutions, they think that's what their audiences really want to see. We couldn't disagree more, and we think the millions of you in the Upworthy community help prove it every day.

Human Rights Watch and Climate Nexus are both advocacy groups with powerful media arms, so their partnership with Upworthy, which has always made it clear that it does not do journalism, makes a lot of sense. But ProPublica , which in many ways considers itself a traditional newsroom that does investigative journalism in the public interest, is a different story. In addition to Upworthy’s audience and social reach , the partnership also includes collaboration on storytelling and presentation , whether in video, audio, or even full-text articles.

The monetary benefit of content alliances
Of course, these kinds of content partnerships have a potential monetary benefit for Upworthy. According to Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley , “Upworthy’s core competency is bringing mass attention to really important issues , and we’re building our revenue plan around those skills (rather than just screwing banner ads onto the site). To that end, we’ve been testing ways to work with nonprofits, brands, and other media companies to help bring attention to big issues by sharing meaningful media.”