chart

Make charts and data visualizations like these ones? Read on to see how you can publish them on Priceonomics.

***

A few years back, we published our “Content Marketing Handbook”, the Priceonomics guide for writing about information and making it spread. 

The guide is bit on the long side, but it’s essential advice for companies is concise—write about information, make it good, have a plan for making it spread. Companies looking to partake in “content marketing” should write competently about information that they have proprietary access to and also be just as focused on distribution to make the content spread.

In the three years, very little has changed on the distribution side of making content spread. 

The primary channels for content spreading are essentially the same – press outlets, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News and the like. For a moment, it felt like Medium was going to be a way for companies and creators to create a direct relationship with their audience, but that company went a different way as a subscription media business.

So, content distribution is in a period of stasis, with few channels for companies to get their content in front of people beyond pitching reports, praying it ends up on Reddit, or it goes viral on Facebook (something that almost never happens any more and a tactic we never recommended).

So today we’re launching something new for people and companies that write about data, the Priceonomics Content Platform. With some conditions, you can publish the data-driven reports on Priceonomics and if the content is great, it will likely spread. We’ve been trying this feature with great customers like SeatGeek, CarMax and Craft and it has worked as expected.

If you make great data-driven content and publish it on Priceonomics, people find it and good things happen. Interested in giving it a try and publishing your data on Priceonomics? Send us a message here.

***

How it works

As part of this platform, companies and individuals that produce data-driven reports can publish them on Priceonomics. It’s okay if you’ve already published them on your blog and we can set your site as the original “canonical” source so that it isn’t looked on as duplicate content by search engines.

There are a few big conditions to publish. 

First, the content has to be data-driven. It can be a whiz bang data visualization or just some charts and graphs publishing novel information, but if the piece isn’t built around the chart or visualization, then it’s not a good fit.

Second, it has to be data that you are not biased about. 

Put differently, it can’t be an advertisement for how great your are. For example, if you’re a real estate marketplace, you can’t publish with us about how low your fees are compared to competitors (which isn’t to say you shouldn’t write about that, just not here) because you’re inherently biased about that (whether it’s true or not). You can however, show zip codes where real estate prices are increasing the fastest. That’s newsworthy information that’s appropriate for this platform.

Lastly, the content should be good. “Good” encompasses a lot of things of course, but mostly it should be original in some way, either in the form of visualization or in the novelty of the data set. The writing should be focused on clarity. Companies using our platform are not given access to the CMS, but instead they submit the article through our editorial process and we adapt and publish it if appropriate.

For now, companies that want to publish on the Priceonomics Content Platform are required to subscribe to our editorial service that helps you pick ideas, gives you feedback on your analysis and writing, and helps you make great work. Later, the platform may be opened up more widely based on initial trials.

What’s the Upside?

What this platform aims to solve is the problem of publishing data-driven content that no one sees.

If you re-publish your analysis on Priceonomics, it’ll probably get a few thousand views and can make sure that interested parties (be they customers, journalists, or prospective employees) find the content. If your content is truly great, it will likely spread a lot further than that.

How does that content spread? People come to Priceonomics to find data-driven articles based on proprietary data from companies. A lot of our readers are journalists looking for story ideas or people who like to submit interesting work to places like Hacker News or Reddit. If your work is newsworthy and well executed, it will likely spread. If it’s not, it won’t. 

Interested in giving it a try and publishing your data on Priceonomics? Send us a message here.

And of course, if you’re a company that needs help turning their data into interesting stories, please see our Data Studio.