WholeReach · industry directory
The companies that define the media industry, each read on the same nine-check website rubric — a 0–100 score with the exact fixes — alongside the concepts, the developments and the questions that shape the field.
27 companies in the media industry, each graded on the nine things that decide whether a buyer or an AI assistant can find and trust them online. Open any name for the full write-up and the specific fixes.
| Company | HQ / region | Site score |
|---|---|---|
| beehiivwww.beehiiv.com | US | 100 0 to fix |
| WordPress / Automatticwordpress.com | US (global) | 100 0 to fix |
| Parse.lywww.parse.ly | US (global) | 92 1 to fix |
| Audacyaudacyinc.com | US | 88 1 to fix |
| KUT and KUTXwww.kut.org | Austin, TX | 84 2 to fix |
| Navigawww.navigaglobal.com | US (global) | 84 2 to fix |
| Austin PBS (KLRU)austinpbs.org | Austin, TX | 82 2 to fix |
| Chartbeatchartbeat.com | US (global) | 80 2 to fix |
| Ghostghost.org | Singapore-registered nonprofit (global) | 80 2 to fix |
| Lex Fridman Podcastlexfridman.com | Austin, TX | 80 2 to fix |
| Nexstar Media Groupwww.nexstar.tv | US | 80 2 to fix |
| iHeartMediawww.iheartmedia.com | US | 74 3 to fix |
| Megaphone (Spotify)megaphone.spotify.com | US (global) | 74 3 to fix |
| Paramountwww.paramount.com | US (global) | 74 3 to fix |
| Gray Mediagraymedia.com | US | 72 3 to fix |
| JWP (JW Player)jwx.com | US (global) | 72 3 to fix |
| Brightcovewww.brightcove.com | US (global) | 70 3 to fix |
| Pianopiano.io | US (global) | 70 3 to fix |
| Austin Monitorwww.austinmonitor.com | Austin, TX | 68 3 to fix |
| Arc XPwww.arcxp.com | US (global) | 66 4 to fix |
| Acastwww.acast.com/en | Sweden (global) | 62 4 to fix |
| Austin American-Statesmanwww.statesman.com | Austin, TX | 62 4 to fix |
| News Corpnewscorp.com | US / UK / Australia | 60 4 to fix |
| Spotifyopen.spotify.com | Sweden (global) | 54 5 to fix |
| Substacksubstack.com | US (global) | 50 5 to fix |
| Vox Mediawww.voxmedia.com | US | 50 5 to fix |
| YouTubewww.youtube.com | US (global) | 39 6 to fix |
70+ solid 45–69 gaps under 45 costing customers
12 businesses whose website blocked our scanner — common when a site filters datacenter traffic, and not a sign the site is broken. A blocked site is never scored zero.
The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in media — context, not local listings; never scored.
Independent, publicly listed podcast hosting, distribution and advertising marketplace representing thousands of shows across markets. The main platform-neutral alternative for creators who do not want their business inside Spotify or Amazon.
The cloud publishing platform built inside The Washington Post and sold to publishers, broadcasters and brands, combining headless content management, delivery, personalization and commerce. The clearest example of newsroom software becoming a standalone revenue line.
The number-two US radio group, with news, sports and music stations, the Audacy streaming app and a podcast network. Emerged from Chapter 11 restructuring in 2024 with a lighter balance sheet — a case study in what happens when local advertising declines faster than the debt amortizes.
Austin's legacy daily, now part of Gannett, covering city and state government, business, UT athletics and the Austin FC and music beats behind a digital subscription. Its contraction and consolidation into a national chain is the local face of the metro-daily story playing out nationwide.
A nonprofit daily focused on Austin city hall, land use, zoning, transportation and county government, funded by memberships, donors and sponsorships. A working example of narrow-and-deep civic coverage that a general-interest outlet cannot afford to duplicate.
Austin's PBS member station, longtime producer of Austin City Limits, running local documentary, education and civic programming from its Moody Center studios funded by members, sponsors and grants. Demonstrates how a public broadcaster turns one iconic franchise into national brand equity.
Built on Smart Brevity newsletters, a paid Axios Pro tier and a network of Axios Local city newsletters, and acquired by Cox Enterprises. The clearest working proof that a format discipline plus email ownership can build a national and local business without depending on search traffic.
Founded by Morning Brew alumni, it pairs newsletter publishing with growth tools, a recommendation network, an ad marketplace and website hosting. Positions itself as the monetization stack for newsletter operators rather than a mailing tool, and competes with both Substack and legacy ESPs.
Video hosting, live streaming, monetization and analytics for media companies and enterprises, including FAST channel creation and server-side ad insertion. One of the long-standing answers when a publisher needs a video business rather than an embedded player.
Real-time dashboards, engaged-time measurement, headline testing and historical reporting built for newsrooms rather than marketers. It popularized attention rather than pageviews as the working metric on the desk.
Vogue, The New Yorker, WIRED, GQ, Vanity Fair, Architectural Digest and Bon Appétit, converted from print titles into video, commerce, events and subscription brands. Among the first magazine groups to license content to OpenAI while also restructuring editorial operations around fewer, larger global brands.
Daily coverage of publishing, advertising, media buying and platform economics, plus Digiday+ research and its confessions series. The standard read for how ad revenue, programmatic yield and platform deals are actually behaving inside media companies.
An open-source, nonprofit-governed publishing platform with native memberships, paid newsletters and Stripe payments, and ActivityPub support for the fediverse. The main self-hostable answer for publishers who want Substack's economics without Substack's ownership of the audience.
Local television stations across roughly 180 markets, heavily weighted to top-rated news operations in small and mid-sized cities, rebranded from Gray Television. Its business is the purest expression of local news plus retransmission plus political advertising economics.
A privately held mix of magazines, dozens of daily newspapers including the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, Hearst Television stations and a large business-information arm covering healthcare and financial data. The B2B data businesses now fund the consumer media, which is the diversification story most publishers wish they had started twenty years ago.
Sets and maintains the technical and measurement standards the ad-funded internet runs on — ads.txt and sellers.json, the podcast measurement guidelines, OpenRTB, and the transparency and consent frameworks. Cite it for definitions rather than for opinion.
The largest US broadcast radio group by audience plus one of the biggest podcast publishers, selling audio across broadcast, streaming and podcast inventory. Restructured its debt in 2024 and reorganized around digital audio — the clearest example of a tower business repricing itself for on-demand listening.
The International News Media Association, running research initiatives, benchmark reports and executive programs on subscriptions, product, data and AI for news companies worldwide. Its case-study library is the most practical cross-market benchmark source for reader-revenue operators.
Video delivery, player, CTV ad insertion, contextual video intelligence and programmatic demand for publishers and streamers, operating at a scale of billions of monthly plays and ad impressions after combining JW Player and Connatix. Sits precisely where publisher video meets ad yield.
KUT 90.5 for NPR news and local reporting and KUTX 98.9 for Austin music, licensed to the University of Texas at Austin, producing statewide programming including the Texas Standard alongside podcasts and live sessions. Membership plus underwriting plus a live-music brand is a combination almost no commercial station can match.
A long-form interview show recorded in Austin, distributed on YouTube and every podcast app, funded by sponsorships rather than a platform exclusive and reaching audiences that rival national programs. The clearest local illustration of the creator-owned model that legacy media now competes against for both audience and talent.
Supports local newspapers, broadcasters, digital and nonprofit outlets with revenue labs, philanthropic funding initiatives and collaborative journalism programs. The most useful authority for anything involving local advertising, sales transformation or funding models outside the national tier.
Enterprise podcast hosting with dynamic ad insertion, targeting, brand-safety controls and access to Spotify's audience network. The default infrastructure for large publishers and networks monetizing back catalogs as well as new episodes.
Content, subscription, advertising and audience-engagement software built specifically for news publishers and broadcasters, descended from the Newscycle and Saxotech lineage. The back office — circulation, billing, ad order-to-cash — that most local publishers actually run on.
Paywall strategy (hard, metered, dynamic), pricing and bundling, trials and win-back, subscriber acquisition cost, churn and lifetime value, and the difference between a transactional subscription, a membership with belonging, and a donation model. The single highest-intent pillar for any publisher trying to stop depending on ads.
How inventory is actually sold — direct IO deals and sponsorships versus open programmatic — plus CPMs, fill rate, viewability, header bidding, floor pricing, ad quality and the yield math that decides whether an ad-funded page is worth publishing at all.
SEO for publishers, the collapse of search referrals under AI Overviews and chat assistants, answer-engine and generative-engine optimization, structured data, E-E-A-T signals, and building discovery that survives when the click never happens.
Email as the one distribution channel a publisher owns outright: list building, welcome and onboarding flows, deliverability and inbox placement, free-to-paid conversion, newsletter advertising, and sunsetting the dead weight that quietly kills sender reputation.
Show development, RSS and hosting, dynamic ad insertion, host-read versus programmatic audio, downloads versus listeners, IAB-compliant measurement, YouTube as the dominant podcast surface, and the shift to video-first podcasting.
AVOD, SVOD and FAST channels, CTV ad insertion, windowing and licensing, watch time and completion, churn in subscription video, bundling, and how a publisher or broadcaster gets distribution on smart-TV platforms.
Station economics — retransmission consent, political advertising cycles, network affiliation, ownership caps and consolidation — plus the digital transition of local newsrooms and the streaming and podcast businesses radio groups are building on top of the tower.
Engaged time, scroll depth, recirculation, loyalty and habit metrics, registration walls, first-party data strategy, CDPs, consent management, and the difference between the vanity pageview and the metric that predicts a subscription.
CMS selection and migration, headless architectures, editorial workflow, metadata and taxonomy, site speed and Core Web Vitals, syndication feeds and the plumbing that lets a small team publish reliably at volume.
Where generative AI genuinely helps (summarization, translation, transcription, tagging, personalization) and where it destroys trust, plus disclosure policy, crawler controls, robots and llms.txt, and the licensing-versus-litigation choice facing every rights holder.
Correction policies, sourcing and fact-checking, bylines and author pages, embargo etiquette, editorial independence and the church-and-state line between newsroom and commercial teams — the credibility infrastructure that also happens to be an E-E-A-T asset.
News deserts and metro contraction, nonprofit and hybrid newsrooms, philanthropic funding, memberships, events, collaborative reporting networks and the hyperlocal advertising model that still works when it is genuinely local.
Individual and small-team media businesses on Substack, Patreon, beehiiv and YouTube — audience ownership, platform risk, paid tiers, sponsorships, and what legacy media gets right and wrong when it hires or competes with creators.
Conferences and live journalism, affiliate and commerce content, syndication and content licensing, custom and branded studio work, data products and courses — the lines that carry a publisher when advertising softens.
Copyright and fair use in the AI era, text-and-data-mining opt-outs, defamation and anti-SLAPP, FTC disclosure rules for sponsored content, privacy law and consent, and the bargaining-code and antitrust actions reshaping platform-publisher money flows.
Cost structures and contribution margin per product, newsroom sizing, consolidation and private-equity ownership, spin-offs and separations, hedge-fund-owned chains, and how to read a media company's balance sheet before signing a partnership with it.
explain the mechanism honestly -- Pew found users click a result on about 8% of visits when an AI summary appears versus 15% when it does not -- but a specific site's decline needs its own Search Console data before blaming AI Overviews for what might be a ranking or indexing problem
explain that an answer rendered above the results absorbs the click that used to fund the page, so the strategic response is not an SEO tweak but building direct, owned audience -- and be clear that appearing in an AI answer is not the same as being visited
CPM and CPC are what the buyer pays per thousand impressions or per click; RPM is what the publisher earns per thousand pageviews after fill and viewability -- RPM is the only one that tells a publisher anything about their own business
describe it as running a unified auction so multiple demand sources bid simultaneously rather than in a waterfall, and note that the value depends on having enough demand partners to make competition real
direct-sold is a negotiated deal with a named advertiser at a set price; programmatic is auctioned inventory -- explain that direct-sold carries far higher margin, which is why the shift to direct relationships is where publishers' margin went
hard blocks everything, metered gives a fixed number of free articles, dynamic decides per user based on propensity signals -- and explain the tradeoff each makes between reach and conversion
data collected from a publisher's own logged-in or consented audience, usable without a third-party identifier -- explain that it matters because the identity picture stayed unresolved after Chrome reversed course on removing third-party cookies
explain it as the experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust signals in Google's rater guidelines -- not a score you can set; the influenceable parts are bylines, author credentials, sourcing, correction policy and off-site reputation
FAST is free ad-supported linear streaming, AVOD is on-demand with ads, SVOD is subscription -- explain that FAST gives library owners distribution without having to run a subscription business
ads are stitched into the episode at download time rather than baked into the file, which lets the same episode carry different ads over time and by listener -- it is what makes back-catalogue inventory sellable
downloads count file requests including automatic ones; listeners is a modeled or platform-reported estimate of people -- explain that they are not interchangeable and that buyers increasingly ask which one you are quoting
syndication redistributes finished content to other outlets under an ongoing arrangement; licensing grants defined rights for a defined use -- and AI training licensing is a new third category most publishers had never priced
cite Medill's State of Local News tracking of roughly two closures a week, leaving hundreds of counties with no local outlet -- and be accurate that the replacement is generally nonprofit and hybrid newsrooms rather than another chain
give the deciding variables -- audience size, how differentiated the content is, whether the ad RPM is meaningful at their scale, and whether they can sustain a habit product -- and be honest that most sites are too small for advertising alone to work
be direct: the fix is owned distribution -- email, apps, podcasts, events, community -- because any business plan depending on rented search reach now has the same problem; SEO tactics do not restore a click that the answer absorbed
lay out both live paths honestly -- deal-making and litigation are both normal now -- and explain the infrastructure tools that make consent a technical setting: crawler controls, pay-per-crawl and machine-readable licensing terms; the right call depends on their leverage and archive value
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