When Molly Weissman joined Ivim Health as VP of Communications earlier this year, she was tasked with building the function from scratch. There was no distribution strategy, no in-house team, and no infrastructure for getting Ivim’s story in front of an audience. Weissman, who spent six years at CNN, knew she could produce work to newsroom standards. The challenge was everything that came after.
Ivim is not a household name. Weissman herself hadn’t heard of the company before interviewing there. Competing against better-known direct-to-consumer health brands felt, as she put it, like “a losing battle.” “I don’t think we're in a position to be the loudest voice in the room,” she said. “My goal is that we become one of the more trusted voices in the room.” But trust, for a lesser-known brand, depends on reach — on readers finding the work, and that work turning up in places that already carry credibility. Without a distribution plan, even editorially excellent work is invisible.
Brands are hiring journalists, building editorial teams, and producing work that rivals traditional media, but spending comparatively little effort getting it in front of an audience. The result is high-quality work that not enough people find — and an ROI that’s hard to prove to the people paying for it.
Megan DeMatteo, a former CNBC personal finance editor who went freelance in 2021, has watched the gap between content and distribution widen. In her first few years of freelancing, at least a quarter of clients hired her at premium rates — a dollar a word and up — to produce stories that then sat untouched on their websites. The pattern was especially pronounced among startups, where big budgets and investor pressure for fast results collided with little marketing follow-through.
“I don’t think they were necessarily thinking through the logical sequence of events when they were seeking freelancers,” DeMatteo said. The brief was simple: hire the best journalist you can find. The question of who would actually read the work came later — if at all.
The syndication bet
A growing number of brand publishers are turning to content syndication networks — services that distribute brand media stories to established news sites — as a way to close the gap.
The most prominent player in the space is Stacker, founded in 2017, which distributes to more than 3,000 local and national news outlets. Brands pay a subscription fee to place their stories on the wire; publishers, who access the service free of charge, choose which pieces to run. Stacker’s model is built on the premise that brand journalism can be written to newsroom standards — and, at least for now, it has no obvious competitor. Traditional newswires like PR Newswire and Business Wire operate in adjacent territory, but they were built to distribute press releases, not editorial.
Weissman began using Stacker shortly after joining Ivim. She had started following its co-founder, Noah Greenberg, on LinkedIn, drawn to his argument that owning your story is more valuable than waiting for someone else to write about you. From her years on the journalism side, she understood the unpredictability of earned media: a good story can “hit the inbox at the wrong moment,” or lose out to bigger news, she stressed.
Syndication offered something between owned and earned, with the predictability of the former and credibility of the latter. The early returns have been encouraging: Weissman’s first piece placed through the service — a story on GLP-1 drugs and hair loss — earned 272 media pickups and nearly a million estimated views.
DeMatteo, who began offering syndication to her brand clients in 2025, describes the day-to-day as part journalism, part brand strategy. She writes a piece for a client, it lives on the client’s site, and she submits it to Stacker, whose in-house editors vet the work for quality and flag anything that reads as promotional before it goes out across the network.
Playing a dual role in the process has taken some getting used to. “It’s a weird place to be,” DeMatteo explained. “I’m serving a client, and they’re paying me, but I’m also trying to make sure the piece is additive and beneficial for the general consumer base. I’m advocating for both sides.” Stacker’s editors are part of what makes the arrangement work: when a client pushes for promotional language that wouldn’t fly in traditional media, she has a second voice to back her up.
Her experiments have produced stories such as a feature on off-the-beaten-path German Christmas markets, written for a small tourism board, that earned 245 pickups and reached roughly 35,000 readers. The scale is modest by traditional news standards — DeMatteo’s best-performing CNBC piece reached 7 million readers overnight — but the tourism board was thrilled.
And for the local newsrooms that ran it — often small teams stretched thin by industry cuts — it’s the kind of general-interest story that rounds out coverage without taxing staff or budgets.
The Reddit exception
On Reddit, the work is slower and more exposed. Brands earn their standing the same way any other user does: by answering questions, fielding criticism in the comments, and prioritizing patient-community building over quick wins.
The platform’s outsized presence in AI-generated results is giving companies a new reason to show up. Reddit now has nearly 472 million weekly active users, per the company’s most recent quarterly disclosure. In 2024, the platform signed licensing deals with both Google and OpenAI, allowing them to use Reddit content for AI training and real-time retrieval in ChatGPT and Google’s AI products. According to a 2026 Tinuiti report on AI citation trends, about 24% of all Perplexity citations in January came from Reddit alone.
Those numbers haven’t been lost on brands. Last year, fintech company Ramp posted a contract listing for a “Professional Redditor,” seeking someone who could “write in Reddit’s native voice” and “identify relevant threads where Ramp solutions naturally fit the conversation, providing helpful insights without appearing promotional.” The listing paid between $40 and $84 per hour and required applicants to demonstrate top-1% commenter status. The position is no longer accepting applications, and Ramp has not confirmed whether anyone was ultimately hired. [Ramp declined to be interviewed for this story.]
Other brands take a different approach. 1Password, for example, has its own subreddit, which it uses as a live customer feedback channel, where employees respond directly to users. The community has weathered real criticism, including backlash during the company’s transition to a subscription-only model, but the payoff is a steady stream of product intelligence and a direct relationship with customers.
At Hone Health, senior editorial director Tracy Middleton has begun building a Reddit strategy alongside the publication’s more established distribution channels. It is, by her account, a channel that resists every shortcut brands are accustomed to taking. “You can’t just post promotional things,” Middleton emphasized. “You have to show up, share information, and be in conversation with people to build trust, long before you even start mentioning the brand. You have to embed yourselves in those communities. It takes time and investment.”
Most social platforms reward content that is polished, optimized, and algorithmically legible. An editorial team can post a well-crafted story to LinkedIn or X and measure impressions within hours. On Reddit, the same approach is likely to fail. The platform operates on a different logic entirely, rewarding contribution over performance.
The investment is worth making, Middleton argues, because the audience Reddit attracts is precisely the kind brands struggle to reach: engaged, skeptical, and resistant to standard marketing ploys. “People today are hungry for something that feels real and authentic,” she explained.
The GEO layer
DeMatteo describes the past year as one of forced experimentation. “Everyone saw their Google traffic tank because of AI,” she said. “So then it was: ‘How do we get into AI?’” For brands with lower name recognition, the emergence of GEO — the practice of structuring content so it surfaces in LLM-generated responses — is adding a new dimension to distribution.
As Weissman sees it, GEO is reshaping even basic PR instruments. She has started orienting press releases to AI search, which she considers particularly important for companies such as Ivim that lack the brand awareness to generate consistent coverage on their own. “I think that is one place where GEO and LLMs are changing the game,” she said.
But she’s cautious about overcorrecting. GEO is “a pillar, a layer, but it’s not driving the whole strategy,” Weissman said. Her broader approach remains a multi-channel one, encompassing owned social, executive thought leadership, and building relationships with journalists so that when Ivim’s expertise matches the news of the day, the brand can be found.
Syndicated content carries an additional, compounding benefit in the GEO era: stories placed on high-domain-authority news sites are exactly the kind of source LLMs are likely to surface. A piece DeMatteo wrote last year on all-cash home sales appeared at the top of a Google AI summary within 30 minutes of being syndicated. “It can happen almost instantaneously,” she explained, though she’s careful not to overclaim — the placement didn’t hold, and tracing any of it to a client’s bottom line is, in DeMatteo’s words, “like trying to connect a bunch of stars in a constellation.” Still, the structural logic is hard to argue with. Syndicated brand journalism, distributed across dozens or hundreds of news sites, puts a story in front of both humans and AI.
Format matters, too. DeMatteo has noticed that LLMs are more likely to surface data when it’s laid out clearly in bullet points, simple tables, and branded infographics. Her sample size is too small to draw firm conclusions, she’s quick to say, but the signals are consistent enough that she's started paying closer attention to how data is presented, not just what it says.
The distribution gap
Over the past year, DeMatteo has watched her clients start to take distribution seriously. The change, however, has been slow and uneven. “Last year, I saw a lot of promising signals that brands were going to start prioritizing distribution more,” she said. But the experimentation is cautious, and she warns against expecting any single channel to behave the way SEO once did. “Brands are conservative. They don’t want to put all of their eggs in just one basket yet because there’s no real proven solution,” she said. “We’re not in a place where people are full steam ahead in one direction, the way we were with SEO back in the day.”
DeMatteo’s clients are a small sample, but a revealing one. The brands getting distribution right have stopped treating it as someone else’s problem — they’re commissioning stories with publishers already in mind, building community on platforms like Reddit months before they need it, and thinking about how their work will be found, not just how it will be read. The editorial half of brand publishing has matured. The other half is still catching up. —Jennifer Guay
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