Top 10 News Aggregator Sites

Working on a news site has given me some education into where and how to get your news out there. From my experience, it seems most people aren’t necessarily tied to a news provider, e.g. BBC News, but are happy to consume news from a wide range of sources – as long as it’s all grouped together by the what they are looking for (e.g. relevant). I suppose the prime example is Google News, where when you search for something, e.g. ‘gold’, you’ll get the ‘In the news’ section on search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as the option to click on the ‘News’ tab, as shown below:

'Gold' Google News

Before you ‘apply’ to be included in the sites listed below, I’d recommend you ensure your website is optimised for pushing your news out. A few things in particular I’ve found useful are a sitemap (should really be a given), a news sitemap, a ‘meet the team’ page / section and an RSS feed. Additionally, article structured data could prove useful (especially in the long term) – and AMP has now become a big bonus for mobile news traffic and the news carousel:

'Gold' AMP Carousel

1. Google News

As mentioned above, Google News is one of the best, if not the best, new aggregation sites. Pulling in from numerous ‘trusted’ sources, Google is by far the biggest search engine globally generating the most amount of searches (worth following them on Twitter to see ‘most popular searches’, etc.). In addition to their tweets, you can see some of these in near real-time with Google Trends. In order to apply for Google News, your website must be verified in Google Search Console and adhere to the webmaster / quality guidelines.

2. Bing News

Bing News used to be a nightmare to find out information about – it took me months to finally get a website to be included. Why? There was no actual way of applying for Bing News (well, at least that I knew of), just a lot of rumours / email addresses online. What’s changed? The launch of Bing News PubHub. Again, similar to Google, there’s webmaster / quality guidelines that need to be adhered to and your website must be verified with Bing Webmaster Tools.

3. News360

With apps for iOS, Android and Windows letting you personalise what news you see and allowing you to save articles for offline reading, News360 is becoming increasingly popular. Best of all, it’s relatively easy to get started, as opposed to the longer approval processes (albeit much quicker than they were) from the likes of Google and Bing.

4. Flipboard

Flipboard is a great way to get your content out there, especially as it comes preloaded on some devices (e.g. Android). Again, like News360, it’s relatively easy to setup and constitutes of creating a ‘magazine’ and ‘flipping’ articles into it – usually at the touch of a button via Google Chrome’s browser extension.

5. NewsNow

NewsNow is a pure play news aggregator – with not much emphasis on design and layout, but aggregating quality news from around the world. There is a relatively strict application process, which includes complying with their guidelines (fairly standard with most aggregators, as above) and it can take up to 90 days to hear back from them and be approved. However, from my experience, it seems to generate a lot of quality traffic. SimilarWeb reports NewsNow had c30.6m visits in the last six months, ranking it the 89th most popular site in the UK (at the time of writing).

6. Pocket

‘Save for later’ is their motto, as it allows users to save articles for offline reading, which is great when you think about it. It’s easy to setup and just need to get your site verified by either putting a tag on your site or going through the manual process. Even if it’s not suitable for your news, I’d probably recommend it for your own personal consumption anyway.

7. SmartNews

SmartNews is similar to Flipboard in terms of user experience for the end user – but definitely not similar for publishers. Unlike Flipboard where you ‘flip’ articles into your ‘magazine’, ‘the content that appears in SmartNews is identified by an algorithm based on what’s trending across the web and on social media’. In their own words when dealing with them, ‘for a channel to work in SmartNews, our algorithm needs a certain volume of stories – usually a minimum of 15 to 20 a day’. So, it’s all algorithm based – reliant on you writing a X number of articles a day and the articles gaining traction across the web and social media.

8. Feedly

Again, similar to Flipboard in concept, Feedly has been widely praised for its design and apps; which include iOS, Android and Kindle. Additionally, very straightforward to setup, assuming you have a feed, just sign up and add the feed.

9. Apple News

Released as part of iOS9, Apple News was preinstalled on Apple iPhones and iPads – many of you may already use it – or at least have it installed on your phones. As such, you can imagine the potential reach of Apple News. To apply to have your publication listed is relatively straightforward but requires you to either have a feed of your articles – or to push articles via the Apple News API, although you can now create articles individually, albeit very time consuming.

10. Google Newsstand

I started with Google, so I’ll finish with Google. Google have a tool called Google Newsstand Producer, which as the name suggests, allows you to create magazine-like publications. Google Newsstand has a huge reach due to the app being preinstalled on many Android devices. As you’ve probably worked out by now, it’s pretty much Google’s equivalent of Apple News. Nonetheless, like the others, it’s relatively straightforward to setup.

Hopefully this list of news aggregators will help you get your news out to the widest possible audience and you can start to monetise your website on the back of this. As always, if you’d like to talk about this post (or any others), just drop me a line via the contact form, email or phone.