NewsBreak is the most popular content / news aggregator app in the United States. It actually beats out Google News in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store.
The company launched in the U.S. in 2015 as a subsidiary of Yidian, a Chinese news aggregation app. They recruit local U.S. publishers and content creators to syndicate their content and then distribute that content via its website and iOS / Android apps.
NewsBreak’s publisher program touts the ability to reach over 50 million active monthly readers, with full attribution, analytics, and a revenue share of advertising that is delivered around your content.
But before publishers race to sign up, they MUST read the fine print.
An unlimited content license
When you join NewsBreak’s publisher program, you must agree to their Publisher Terms of Service which contains an extremely broad content license:
You hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, fully paid, and sublicensable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, publicly perform and display your Content, store, tag, transmit, disassemble, publish, translate, and create derivative works from the Content, including, without limitation, texts, photographs, images, videos, media, and other works in the Content and any portion thereof, for any purpose in connection with NewsBreak’s services and business, including but not limited to, the right to (1) make the Content available on the Publisher Services, (2) abridge, summarize, or format the Content, (3) advertise around the Content, (4) provide, promote, and improve the Publisher Services or our products and other services, (5) make the Content available to other companies, organizations, or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, repost, promotion, or publication of the Content or business on other media and services, (6) archive the Content, and (7) license the Content to advertisers for incorporation into advertisements.
These terms are ominous and one-sided. They give NewsBreak a license to do virtually anything they want with your content, including:
- Sublicense your content to any company without notifying you or further compensating you. This includes potentially licensing all of your content to AI tools like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and more.
- Modify, adapt, and create derivative works from your content, with no legal obligation to notify you or compensate you further for this use.
The license includes not only your text, but photos, images, videos and everything else associated with your content.
What publisher, content creator, or media company in their right mind would grant another company this kind of control and rights over their content?
Ads and audience development are removed
In the past, NewsBreak would often display publisher content by linking to an article on the publisher’s website and overlaying one of their own ads, reader comments, and other elements. It functioned like Google News and Google Discover which link directly to publisher websites.
However, this has changed and they are “moving away from sending referral traffic to third parties.” They now use the same model as SmartNews.
NewsBreak hosts publisher content in their own app and in their own proprietary format that strips out publisher ads, email / subscription calls-to-action, and content recirculation promotion.
If you participate in their publisher program, you must give them an RSS feed that conforms to their specifications.
This feed gives them all of your content, but without anything that would normally be included in the article template on your own website. This is great for NewsBreak, but not for publishers.
It can hurt publisher SEO
When publishers join the NewsBreak publisher program, NewsBreak can then publish any story in its entirety on their own website. Google is able to index this content which can then siphon traffic away the original website.
Take this story from CalMatters. It was syndicated to NewsBreak which then republished the story in its entirety on their own website. As you can see in the screenshot below, the NewsBreak version is now showing up in a Google search, diverting traffic that would have gone directly to CalMatters.
So what should publishers do?
First, I highly recommend that every publisher install the NewsBreak app and get familiar with it. Content aggregator apps are here to stay and it’s a new business dynamic that publishers must adapt to.
Next, check your website analytics. You may be getting traffic from NewsBreak already without the need to participate in their publisher program. NewsBreak often scans local publisher websites and displays those articles in their app.
When this happens, you are NOT giving NewsBreak an unlimited license and they’re not republishing your content using their proprietary template. Instead, they display your actual website within their app.
This means you get legitimate website traffic, monetize your content directly through your own advertising, and your audience development calls-to-action (email / subscription) stay intact.
To see if your site is getting traffic organically from NewsBreak, go to Google Analytics, then navigate to Life cycle > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. Switch the view from “Session primary channel group” to “Session source / medium” and do a search for newsbreakapp.
As you can see in the screenshot below, this publisher has received nearly 35,000 sessions in the past 12 months from NewsBreak, without participating in their publisher program.
Finally, decide if the rewards of joining NewsBreak’s publisher program outweigh the risks. Is the small revenue share worth giving them such wide-ranging rights to your content?
For most publishers the answer is likely no.
