inPowered’s Content Discovery Tools Are Now Free — But Advertisers Still Have To Pay

inPowered, a company that helps businesses find and promote positive press coverage of their products, opened the doors to parts of its platform today.

Specifically, inPowered said its “content discovery and amplification” platform is now free to anyone. Users can search for any term and find relevant articles, sorted by the content that’s most-read and seeing the most social engagement. They can also share those stories to social networks directly from inPowered, and track the results using the company’s analytics tools, also for free.

To be clear, inPowered is still hoping businesses will pay to promote that content through advertising. Nilforoush said this model makes sense because marketers can look at the content and the data without having to pay anything, making them more confident when it comes to paying to boost the articles that are already seeing the most readership and engagement. He also argued that inPowered more value for advertisers since it estimates how many people read the entire article, rather than just clicking on the headline.

Asked how inPowered can actually measure “reads”, co-founder and CEO Peyman Nilforoush said it’s an algorithm based on social media data combined with the patterns inPowered saw when it worked directly with publishers. (The company sold off that part of its business last year.)

Nilforoush argued that this could open up inPowered to a bunch of new uses, which is one reason why inPowered site has also been revamped today, making it seem a little more consumer friendly.

“Anyone can use it to find out whether information is coming from a credible source,” he said.