Updated June 12, 2025
If you’re a local or regional publisher, a Nextdoor News Account is a smart, low-effort way to expand your publication’s visibility and drive more traffic to your website.
Nextdoor is a popular neighborhood-based social platform where people connect with others nearby. It emphasizes community discussions, safety alerts, and hyperlocal updates. With over 46 million weekly active users (many of whom are affluent and well-educated) Nextdoor offers an attractive audience for publishers.
In February 2025, Nextdoor launched specialized News Accounts for the United States and Canada allowing local publishers to share stories directly with verified residents in specific geographic areas.
NOTE: Nextdoor plans to roll out News Accounts to other countries where it operates over time. I will update this post as that information become available.
What it looks like
When you set up a Nextdoor News Account, your publication gets a profile featuring your logo, publication name, short description, and a link to your website. Readers can follow your publication or send you direct messages.
Your article feed appears below your profile and is automatically shown in the feeds of local users in your coverage area.
When a reader clicks on a story, it opens a dedicated screen with the article’s headline, excerpt, featured image, reactions, comments, and a prominent “Read article” button that links directly to your website.
You’ll also notice that the first comment on most stories is an AI-generated “conversation starter” created by Nextdoor. These prompts encourage engagement, increasing visibility and click-throughs. According to Nextdoor, they’ve doubled engagement and led to more positive comments and traffic to publisher websites.
What are the results?
Nextdoor News has quickly become a top referral source for many publishers, driving thousands of visits each month.
Publishers get access to a built-in analytics dashboard showing clicks, followers, comments, reactions, and total impressions. Even the impressions alone help build brand recognition in your region.
Nextdoor also recently added UTM tracking, allowing you to track News Account traffic directly in Google Analytics 4.
How to set up a Nextdoor News Account
Getting started is straightforward, and the Nextdoor publisher support team is responsive and helpful.
- Make sure your publication meets the eligibility criteria for a Nextdoor News Account.
- Prepare an RSS feed from your website for use with Nextdoor:
- Your feed must include featured images. WordPress doesn’t include them by default, so use a plugin like RSS Control.
- Exclude sponsored content, which violates Nextdoor’s guidelines. The RSS Control plugin can help with this as well.
- Nextdoor recommends including the full text of your article in the RSS feed. This enables them to better identify the topic of the email, location and tags to better display your content to the right people. Also, without full text in the feed, Nextdoor has to rely on scraping your site to index the content and that can cause posts to not appear in your feed. Please note … Nextdoor never displays full article content nor claims any rights to the full content. They only display the headline, article summary and featured image to their users.
- Prepare a circular profile icon that is at least 256×256 pixels.
- Go to https://nextdoor.com/news_account and click “Create your free News Account”.
- Register a Nextdoor account to administer your News Account. Use an email associated with your publication’s domain or your parent company’s domain.
- Fill out the “Request a News Page” form and submit it.
- Save your reference ID from the confirmation email—it will help if you need support before approval.
- For question use the Nextdoor News Account help form or email publishersupport@nextdoor.com.
Nextdoor is doing it right
Nextdoor is doing what many platforms aren’t.
First, it drives traffic back to the publisher’s website, allowing you to monetize with ads, grow your email list, and support paid subscriptions. This is a sharp contrast to platforms like SmartNews and NewsBreak, which ingest and reformat your full content, stripping out your ads and calls-to-action.
Second, while platforms like Facebook, X, and LinkedIn suppress posts with external links to keep users on their platform, Nextdoor actually prioritizes publisher content that links out to publisher websites. They see quality local content as a strategic asset that increases use of the Nextdoor platform.
Third, while Google News and Apple News tightly restrict publisher participation (relying solely on algorithms or invitation-only models), Nextdoor actively encourages qualified publishers to join and manage their own presence.
Fourth, Nextdoor does not claim ownership of your content. It only uses the assets you provide to promote your stories on the platform. By contrast, SmartNews and NewsBreak require publishers to grant broad rights to modify, reproduce, distribute and even sublicense your content.
Finally, Nextdoor has created a Publisher Council, a product feedback group of top local publishers, associations, and advisors. I serve on this council and have been impressed by Nextdoor’s transparency and commitment to incorporating publisher feedback into product improvements.
Bottom line
There’s virtually no downside to launching a Nextdoor News Account. If you’re a qualified local publisher, I strongly encourage you to sign up, start reaching more local readers, and driving more traffic to your website.
