In today’s digital landscape, access to high-quality content is crucial for businesses aiming to foster engagement and spark meaningful conversations with their audiences.
Recognizing this need, UpContent, a leader in content curation and intelligence, has announced a new licensing collaboration with The New York Times to provide its users with access to select articles behind the publication’s paywall.
UpContent, used by tens of thousands of professionals worldwide, intelligently curates third-party articles that resonate with specific audiences, meet compliance standards and drive business conversions.
However, a frequent obstacle in content curation is the presence of paywalls, which can limit the impact of otherwise highly relevant articles.
By working with New York Times Licensing, UpContent is removing this barrier, enabling its customers to access and share premium content with their audiences — without the limitations imposed by subscription paywalls.
While this joint effort expands UpContent’s content intelligence capabilities, Scott Rogerson, CEO of UpContent, emphasizes that the collaboration is about more than merely accessing premium content.
“Our mission has always been to help organizations, and the individuals that represent them, use content to showcase expertise, develop thought leadership, and engage audiences in meaningful ways,” said Rogerson. “By working with The New York Times, we can now provide our customers with authoritative, timely content to enhance their content strategies, without the hindrance of a paywall.”
This collaboration represents a broader shift in UpContent’s approach, moving beyond traditional content curation to becoming a full-fledged content intelligence platform.
UpContent not only curates relevant articles but also leverages advanced AI to analyze content performance, recommend the most suitable articles for specific channels, and optimize the distribution of third-party, licensed, and original content alike.
A key driver behind this collaboration is UpContent’s recognition that paywalls were creating friction for its users. Paywalled content, while valuable, was often excluded from content strategies due to concerns about compliance and the reader’s experience.
“For many of our customers, the presence of a paywall prevented them from sharing otherwise valuable content,” said Rogerson. “In industries with strict compliance requirements, the inability to review an entire article was a significant issue.”
Now, with licensed access to articles from The New York Times and other premium publishers, UpContent empowers its users to share these articles, ensuring their audiences benefit from high-quality content.
But it's not just about unlocking access to this content. UpContent is also focused on preserving the integrity of the original work, ensuring that customers aren't simply republishing the articles on their platforms.
"We're also excited about being able to do this in a way that preserves the integrity of the original work by not reprinting the article on the website of our customers or a page that looks like the website of our customers, but instead taking the reader to the article directly and utilizing our current capabilities to overlay an unobtrusive call to action to direct that reader to start a conversation with our customer," Scott explained.
This licensing agreement marks a significant evolution in UpContent’s content intelligence offering. It enables users to access and share a diverse mix of internally authored, third-party, and now licensed content.
UpContent’s content intelligence engine helps personalize and optimize content recommendations, ensuring users share the right articles with the right audiences at the right time.
“We’re not providing the same licensed content to every customer,” said Rogerson. “UpContent automatically assesses which articles are relevant to a specific audience, based on their engagement history and preferences. This level of personalization ensures our customers share content that drives the greatest benefit.”
UpContent’s collaboration with The New York Times is part of its larger mission to help businesses achieve their goals by delivering the most impactful content, whether created in-house, curated from third-party sources, or licensed from premium publishers.
“Our goal is to provide our customers with the content that will drive the greatest engagement and business outcomes,” Rogerson concluded. “We are taking a major step toward fulfilling that mission.”
If you’d like to learn more about how UpContent works and if it could be a content solution for your team, you can watch a free 5-minute demo or schedule a free strategy session with one of our Content Curation Experts.
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