Introduction

The meteoric rise of AI models and their requirements for substantial underlying training data has further increased media companies’ focus on the value of their proprietary data. This year has seen an increase in media and social media companies taking steps to monetise their data, highlighted by Twitter and Reddit introducing charges for their API feeds. This trend has also translated into the news industry, with a growing number of publishers launching their own API feeds.

While some of these publications’ data feeds are newer to market, news data is not. News vendors have historically been popular for their ability to provide significant amounts of data from a large range of sources in a timely manner. Before understanding the potential impact of publishers directly monetising their data, it’s important to understand the current landscape.

THE NEWS LANDSCAPE

The current news landscape incorporates various vendors providing services. In this report, we look in-depth at data providers in each of these areas:

• News aggregators
• Sentiment providers
• Premium news feeds
• Publishers

These offerings have all seen varying levels of traction with institutional investors, with some using similar underlying sources but deriving different outputs.

CONCLUSION

• More publishers are beginning to release proprietary machine-readable news feeds.
• News aggregators can provide significantly more news, which is likely more suitable for tracking a select basket of stocks and niche industry-specific publications.
• Going directly to the publishers can enable first-mover advantages through metadata identifying scoops that can have market-moving impacts.