A roster of B2B newsletters created using AI and serving 27 industry verticals claims to have reached one million total subscriptions.
Trending Now gives readers five key stories about their industry aggregated from international news sources daily or weekly, and says it crossed the one million subscriptions mark in June.
Managing director Joe Newton told Press Gazette Trending Now is “aspiring to be similar to, to some extent”, B2B newsletter firms Industry Dive (which does its own reporting and is owned by Informa) and Smart Brief (which curates content from other publishers and is owned by Future).
Trending Now launched in 2022 after parent company Media 10, which runs consumer and B2B events like Grand Designs Live and UK Construction Week as well as several home/design magazines, acquired the necessary AI software.
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Newton said: “In a nutshell… it scours the internet for news and you can train it to aggregate and identify top trending news in specific sectors or industries or on specific topics of interest or anything really.
“So we thought, well, rather than sell licences for brands to have access to use this tool in their own way, why don’t we launch loads of our own newsletters that we own… publications that we own, where they’re all powered by this AI and we can generate our revenue by selling advertising, sponsorship and lead gen with these newsletters?”
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Newton, whose background is in marketing, added that he “was subscribing to dozens and dozens of different marketing newsletters and probably barely ever reading a snippet of any of them. There’s always too many newsletters you sign up to because you feel like you have to, if you’re in that market, or in the industry… so how can we deliver a solution to that problem?”
Construction is Trending Now‘s biggest industry currently, with more than 461,000 subscriptions this sector, followed by design (368,000) and business (78,000) which includes marketing and HR. Healthcare, technology and transport are also covered and cryptocurrency could be next on the cards.
Newton said: “The vision is to just keep building, growing our audiences, launching into new industries, and working with bigger brands and more agencies.
“I think we’re fortunate enough that we’ve got this AI software that saves us time and saves us costs from having to employ editors and journalists and writers in all these industries,” adding that Trending Now has a core team of about ten predominantly in marketing, sales and ops with the tech operated by staff at sister company Caboodle AI.
Newton mentioned that because of the AI tool they are able to “launch these fairly quickly. It’s not like launching a magazine… so it’s an exciting thing we’ve got, we’re quite different to a lot of other newsletter businesses.”
Publishers mostly see the value in the traffic referrals, according to Newton, even though they are not asked in advance for permission for their work to be included. He compared it to aggregators Feedly and Newsnow.
“We’re aggregating news. We have had conversations with some publishers and they like it because we are effectively driving traffic to their site and putting their articles in front of our audiences. I reckon out of the tens of thousands of publishers, we’ve had two sort of go ‘okay, I’m not sure about you guys including us in your newsletter, can you take us off?’ which we can do, so we took them off. They saw a dip in website traffic and wanted to be put back on.”
Human-curated newsletters play a similar aggregation role. The London Minute, a daily round-up for the capital launched by journalist Michael MacLeod in May, says it has already sent more than 8,000 visits to local news websites.
Newton said: “Aggregating news is a thing that anyone can really do with various tools and the way we see it is that we are championing these great stories written by these industry leading writers, editors and journalists and just telling our audience about these great stories, and then driving traffic to the original articles.”
Asked how the AI tool works, Newton explained they manually add in leading news sources for a certain industry “and it would start learning which news to aggregate from those sources”. They can hone it down into a particular sub-category by rejecting any news that doesn’t fit the remit, and approving relevant news.
It chooses what is most relevant that day, or “trending”, based on keywords that are coming up across various sources – in theory, picking up the original version of the story.
“It’s a manual process for, I’d say, a couple of weeks to start with,” Newton said. “And then once the algorithm has learned what’s relevant and what isn’t relevant, it starts aggregating relevant news and then we can put it on autopilot. And so then news is being aggregated in real-time and published” to a newsfeed on the website for that particular vertical – which states “powered by AI” at the top and credits the original publication.
Clicking through to the article from the website newsfeed takes the user first to a page showing the first few paragraphs of the story before a “read more” button will take them through to the original source.
Newton continued: “And then on the days we want to send a newsletter out, we go into the backend of our platform, we create a new newsletter, it auto populates with five of the top stories from that day, we can manually tweak and add in client ads or advertorials or whatever it may be, tweak certain things if it’s pulled in a headline slightly wrong or whatever, and then we send it out to our subscribers all within our central platform.”
Newton described 2022 as Trending Now’s year of “discovery”, 2023 as having a focus on product and data – including improving the user journey, reducing bot traffic and increasing engagement – and 2024 as focusing on developing the sales strategy.
Revenue comes from direct sales for display advertising in the newsletters like banner and MPU ads and advertorials that can sit as the number one article, targeted emails to specific audiences, plus lead generation campaigns via running co-branded webinars with sponsors or brands and promoting downloadable white papers.
They also sell press releases in all the newsletters and websites and are working on adding new revenue streams including programmatic advertising.
“We’ve had a lot of good things happen to us this year. We feel like we’ve got a solid team and our marketing strategy is really strong… the sales strategy is working at the minute as well and we’re having some good conversations with other big brands and big agencies,” Newton said. “So it’s an exciting time for us at the minute… we just need a strategy of growing an audience fairly quickly and generating revenue on it fairly quickly.”
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