On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, co-hosts Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh chatted with Brett Farmiloe, the founder and CEO of Featured, an insights platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers seeking sources. An entrepreneur at heart, Brett has founded four companies including a digital marketing agency for small businesses, an iPhone app company and a career education website.
In this episode, Brett took us behind the scenes of Featured and the recent acquisition of Help a Reporter Out (HARO) to uncover how his team ensures quality content and how the platform operates based on trusted relationships.
“Everyone’s an expert in something, and everyone needs an outlet to share it,” he explained. “You just need a platform that asks you the right question at the right time and gives you the right insight.” This is the sentiment behind the acronym “HARO” that highlights key principles for engaging with the media and making sure they receive welcome responses: be Helpful, be Authentic, be Relevant and be On Time.
The Pros and Cons of AI in the Newsroom
Brett has kept a pulse on AI’s influence on the media landscape from both a reporting perspective and a contributing expert’s perspective.
One unique way he sees AI supporting journalism revolves around the concept of “local news deserts” where smaller, regional papers fell off or went out of business due to lack of staff and supporting resources. AI helps news companies monitor topic areas like court records, police reports, municipality information and city council meetings to then help generate stories for human editors to review and publish. In short, AI can revive the creation and distribution of local news based on important data that journalists might not have time to research and write about.
At the same time, AI has also created challenges for measuring true website traffic and ensuring expert insights show up when searched for online. “There are more bots that go to websites today than humans,” Brett elaborated. “In response, editors are now producing content for machines instead of readers because they know that their readers are going to access this information via a Large Language Model (LLM).”
Experts and companies now desire to be featured primarily in LLMs because that’s where their customers are going to discover the products and services that their company offers. With this shift away from traditional search engines, Brett advises experts and their PR teams to continue experimenting with content and learning how to make sure it is highly structured and tailored for bots and LLMs.
Listen to the full episode or read the transcript to hear more from Brett about the criteria his team uses to filter journalist and expert submissions to HARO, the three M’s of running a successful business (market, margins and monetization), how he got his hands on an unlimited supply of hot pockets and more!
Timestamps:
0:21 – Christine and Madison’s Podcast Preview
2:43 – Brett’s Journey From Accounting to Entrepreneurship
6:11 – How HARO Fits with Featured, Post Acquisition
13:18 – AI’s Influence on Journalism
18:31 – Strategies for PR & Marketing in the AI Era
21:01 – Listener Questions and Pitching Advice for PR Professionals
27:59 – Hobbies and the Future Roadmap for Featured
Ready to listen to more from Inside the Media Minds? Find all of our past episodes here!
Transcript
Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. This is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio at W2 Communications, let’s go inside the media minds.
All right. So on this episode, we had a great conversation with Brett Farmiloe, who is the founder and CEO of Featured, which is an insights platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers to create content. So, it was a really different type of perspective than the usual journalist perspective that we have on the show. So Brett’s an entrepreneur. He has a lot of really interesting background experience, and then started Featured, and then acquired Help a Reporter Out about six months ago. So we learned a lot about that journey. And then we discussed his perspective on AI, which I thought was really interesting. Madison, what did you take away from that part?
Madison Farabaugh (MF): Yeah, I really enjoyed the AI part of the conversation. We kind of touched on some of the pros and cons of it. So some of the pros being AI has really helped journalism. For example, I think the term he used was local, local news deserts, essentially. So AI is helping journalists with research and coming up with stories and gathering data points that would help fuel the news in those local regions, which I thought was very cool.
And then on the con side, with AI and how they might be influencing, you know, search engines, things like that. There are, there are things like bots that are influencing website traffic. And so measurement for true website traffic and things like that might be a little bit more difficult moving forward. So we talked a little bit about the strategy there and what, you know, different teams, whether it’s PR marketing, journalists, what everyone can be doing to kind of ride this AI wave the most effectively. So good stuff.
CB: Yeah he had a lot to say about that, which was really interesting. And then another good takeaway was the insights he gave about How to Make Your Pitch stand out when you’re when you’re submitting a request, and I think when you’re submitting resources, what you can do. He talked about the HARO acronym and what that stands for. So hopefully you guys enjoy this episode and have some good takeaways from it. Thanks for tuning in.
Hey everyone. This is Christine Blake, one of the co-hosts of Inside the Media Minds.
MF: And this is Madison Farabaugh, the other co-host on today’s episode.
CB: We’re excited to welcome Brett Farmiloe, the founder of Featured. Featured is an expert insights platform that connects subject matter experts with publishers to create content. So Brett, welcome to the show. We’re excited to have you on.
Brett Farmiloe (BF): Yeah, thanks for having me.
CB: Yeah, I know you’ve done a lot. We were looking at your bio. Wow, you’ve started, this is your fourth company now. All kinds of different things, from SEO to launching a charitable coffee company with Hugh Jackman, to leading the acquisition of helpful reporter out. So we want to dig into all of this exciting stuff and and hear more about your journey, hear more about Featured, and kind of your take on the media industry right now as a whole as well.
So let’s jump in. Let’s let’s start with some of your background. As a founder and CEO, you have a very interesting journey as an entrepreneur and unique perspective from the journalism space. Can you share some of your background journey with us, how you got started and how you ended up here today?
BF: Heck yeah. I majored in accounting. I was a financial auditor. That didn’t work out, didn’t fit me too well, so I started a career education website where I travel around the country with three friends in an RV, interviewing people about their career paths and documenting those on a website for other college students to learn from. We were part of an acqui-hire that included the RV and few, few of those friends went to go work for the acquiring company for a few years. Launched a iPhone app company that failed pretty quickly and then stumbled into supporting Hugh Jackman, launched a charitable coffee company that was acquired by Keurig, and that gave me some confidence to be a freelance marketer.
I got my website to rank on page one of Google for the term “digital marketing company,” and decided to start a digital marketing company that scaled where we had serviced more than 500 small business clients over the course of about 10 years. And that company was acquired at the end of ’21 so that I could focus full time on launching Featured which, as you mentioned, is an expert insights network. We connect journalists and publishers with experts for stories. And most recently, as of about six months ago, we acquired and brought back Help A Reporter Out, or HARO, which is a very beloved brand in the, in the space.
CB: Oh, yeah, we, I’ve used HARO 13 years now, so I’m glad that you brought it back to life.
BF: Everyone’s got a story, everyone’s got a connection. So.
CB: Yeah, it’s a great resource for communication professionals.
MF: Yeah, and that’s awesome to hear. Kind of the journey there, of all of those stepping stones, and it’s pretty crazy to think of where you’ve ended up. Now, can you share a little bit about that “Aha” moment, or when you realized what the value would be behind starting something like Featured?
BF: Yeah, absolutely. I think it goes back to the RV. So the the thing that we learned in doing 300 interviews is that everyone needs a meaningful outlet to share their life’s expertise and experience. And that’s at the core of what Featured is today, is when we had all those small business clients, everyone from a credit repair company to an equipment financing company to an eyelash extension supply company. All of those business owners have a ton of expertise to share about their business, but nowhere to share it.
And so we wanted to create a platform that asked them questions about their their knowledge and about their expertise, and then find homes for those insights that would be useful for publishers and journalists writing about those, those those articles. And so that’s essentially where it started, was everyone’s an expert in something, and everyone needs an outlet to share it, and you just need a platform that asks you the right question at the right time and gives you the right insight.
MF: That’s awesome, and especially to just hear how you’re helping storytelling, but also storytelling with experts who have something very valuable to share that they might they just might not know the right avenue to go about that. So that’s very cool. And then could you share a little bit more about maybe how that fits in with HARO? Help a Reporter Out?
BF: Yeah, so HARO is was founded in 2008, It’s a three times a day email newsletter that summarizes journalists’ requests that are looking for sources for stories. And so when we get a source request from a journalist, we’ll put that into an email newsletter. We’ll send the same newsletter out to hundreds of hundreds of 1000s of sources, and then sources can reply directly to the journalist if they could be helpful for that story.
And so how it fits with Featured is, essentially, the problem with HARO is it was found in 2008, it’s the same exact service as it is today. And when we get a request from a journalist, they need a source, like ASAP, like immediately. And since we send out three times a day, sometimes there’s a gap between when we get the request and when it goes out. And so we’ll cross post those HARO requests onto Featured.com immediately so that sources can start to respond to the journalist, and then we’ll use HARO as another wave to get it out there to more sources. So that’s how the two systems integrate.
CB: Great. That’s helpful. When you, six months ago, I guess back in April or so, when you sought out to acquire HARO. How did that come about? Tell us a bit about that, that story.
BF: It’s a great story, and there’s really, it’s very vanilla. When I saw that it was discontinued and that announcement came out, I reached out to the general email address, support@connectively.us and said, “Hey, I’d love to talk with someone,” and ended up talking with the right person, and got her over the finish line and was able to make a deal happen.
CB: I love it. That’s perfect example of what, if you just call them up, like, just call them up, see what happens?
BF: Yeah, we’re all connected somehow.
CB: Yeah, definitely.
MF: Yeah, and we’ve definitely seen, at least on the PR side of things, the art of the phone call. It’s kind of, you know, over the years, it maybe was a little less popular, but nowadays, with lots of spam or anything like that, the phone call is making a comeback.
BF: So one of my buddies said eyeballs and phone calls. That’s how you get stuff done.
MF: I love that. That’s awesome. So when considering the scale of platforms like Featured and HARO, how do you ensure the quality and trust of the experts that maybe you’re vetting for these things and when they’re submitting content? How do you prevent things like spam or kind of low value content?
BF: Great question. Man, it is hard. We’ve been at it for four plus years, and quality and trust is everything for these platforms to work. There’s multiple different ways and steps to ensure quality and trust. One is verification of profiles, so doing everything from email verification to verifying that that email and the information within that profile matches with third-party data sources and matches with with a LinkedIn profile. And there’s a bunch of different stuff that you’ve got to do for profile verification. I think it’s probably seven or eight different steps that we do internally to try to verify that someone is who they say they are, and they have the credentials to match.
From there, it’s the submission. So when the submission comes through, are you, is it AI-generated? That’s a huge, huge one. So we run AI detection checks on every single submission, and we give journalists the filters and the abilities to filter out 100% AI-generated responses. So that that’s spared from their inbox. I will also run automation checks to see if someone has fully automated their submission and has just bypassed the AI detection. So there’s a variety of things there.
We’re also looking at things like location and other elements that I’ll keep secret, but basically doing a lot of platform stuff. So that’s very, very simple for the user, because, you know, at the end of the day, HARO is just an email. You could send an email directly to the journalist. what happens behind the scenes to ensure that that that journalist is going to receive a welcome, helpful response?
CB: And so just to be clear, so as and as far as it goes with journalists submitting prompts and requests, we’ve seen some like crazy ones, probably back in the day, like people are really writing on this topic, is that something that you try to filter out and try to make sure is like on the right track.
BF: So it’s a two-sided marketplace. So in terms of who can submit as a source, we just covered that in terms of journalists who are requesting, we manually review and approve every single request that comes through. And so some of the stuff that we’re looking at is, who’s the journalist? Do they write for the publication? Are we able to verify that that journalist writes for the publication? And we’re again, looking at a variety of different things and signals that would indicate whether or not that person is legit. So there’s things like that.
We’re also looking at the publication-minimum requirements. So we used domain authority from Moz, which on a scale of one to 100, how authoritative is your website? AKA, do people actually want to get featured on the site? And so for podcasts, we make an exception. But for websites, it’s a minimum domain authority of 20 for Help a Reporter Out, and for Featured, anyone can submit a request. We believe in self-serve selection on that side. So if you’re running a very niche site and you don’t have the domain authority requirements, then Featured is a really good place to request content.
CB: Interesting. That’s an interesting topic. We do have some clients who look at domain authority as a measurement of success, right? So I think that’s an important thing to, and I’m glad to hear that you guys do that as well. I think that’s an important metric sometimes. So, you talked about AI and filtering pitches that use 100% AI. What other mistakes do you see most when people are pitching sources to try to get them published, and how should those people avoid making those mistakes?
BF: I think the biggest thing is, this is going to be very cheesy, but the HARO acronym is a really good baseline for the mistakes that you could avoid. So HARO: H, A, R, O. Be helpful, be authentic, be relevant and be on time. Being helpful is, essentially, are you adding value to the journalists and helping with their story? Authentic is be human. Don’t necessarily just use full AI to automate your pitch. Be relevant. Make sure that you have the job title, the credentials that that journalist is actually looking for, and then on time is, know that the journalist is working on deadline, and assuming that they can get connected with the right source, the better. And so being able to have quicker turnarounds and being available is really important.
CB: I love that acronym. That’s cool.
BF: I do too.
CB: It works. It makes sense to remember it. So I want to dive into AI. You brought that up, and I know you have a lot of perspectives when it comes to media and AI. So it’s definitely transforming the media industry, and really every industry. How are you seeing AI influence media right now?
BF: Across every workflow and every dimension, everything in terms of just optimizing article titles and meta descriptions, to full on getting 90% of the content created for a publication, that probably the most innovative thing that I’ve seen recently is, is these local news deserts that essentially have a local newspaper that you know was defunct and went out of business. And so these these communities don’t have a source of local news. And so what AI is doing, well, what companies are doing with AI is they’re monitoring like court records, police reports, municipality, city council type of meetings, and then it’s generating stories based off of those records, and then giving a human editor that information, and they just press, you know, light editing and press “Publish,” and they’re reviving a lot of these local news deserts based off of just data that no journalist would have time to come through and to write about.
So I think that, you know, AI has a really positive use case for on the local level, because you look at problem that AI solves, a ton of different data. You look at the problem that the media that the industry has, which is, how do you cover everything with minimal, you know, staff and minimal support? And that’s where I think that we’re seeing some of the most innovative things happen within media.
MF: I love what you mentioned there too, about reviving the local news desert. That, that was a very interesting description of that, but makes total sense. From kind of a, I guess, the back-end perspective of all of this, how have you seen AI perhaps have an impact on things like website traffic or viewership, considering some of these different, whether it is those local publications or maybe even ones with higher viewership. But have you seen AI impact that at all?
BF: It’s a dramatic impact. There’s more bots that go to websites today than humans, and how publications have responded is they, editors, are now producing content for machines and instead of readers, because they know that their readers are going to access this information via an LLM. And so you need to make sure that your content is highly structured and ready for bots. And I think that’s probably the most dramatic shift.
And in terms of, you know, business model innovations for this, it’s been just entirely transformed historically. Publications would place a lot of value in their archive and be able to charge for that archive of previously published articles. Now that whole archive has been ingested by LLMs, and it’s essentially worthless. So these publications have had to dramatically transform how they go into market, how they’re producing content and AI consumption is pretty much the driver in that transformation.
CB: Yeah, I was curious your take too, since obviously you’re an SEO expert, how are you seeing the evolution of generative engine optimization, GEO, or GEO, and is, are you seeing a big impact? Because we’re getting questions from from clients and vendors, okay, like, how do we optimize our content to be picked up by ChatGPT, and people are using that instead of search engines. So what kind of landscape shift are you seeing there?
BF: We’re seeing the same exact thing where, where people are shifting where and how they want to be featured and where, and they help where and how they want to be featured is primarily in the LLMs because that’s where their customers are. So if your customers are querying LLMs to discover the products and services that your company offers, then how do you appear there? And so I think that no one has a definitive answer in 2025 in terms of what GEO, we don’t even know what to call it. I don’t know if it’s GEO, AEO, whatever it is, AI visibility, yeah.
So I think that, like, first, we need a definition. Second, we need a strategy on how to do it. I think that there’s, there’s some early research that indicates that the more citations that you have, the more often that you’re cited in LLMs. And by citations, these are essentially mentions in articles that are being ingested, you know, by by these, by these bots. And so basically, your goal is to be mentioned in publications that will be cited by LLMs. And so if you’re running your credit repair company and you want to, you know, be cited in LLMs and have AI visibility, then you need to appear in blogs that are talking about credit repair. And so how do you, how do you as a company get into those articles?
CB: Yeah, it certainly makes the case for earned media, right? It’s like reputation, visibility and repetition. It’s like, how many times you’re mentioned in these reputable publications with high domain authority that’s going to infiltrate into the GEO piece of it.
BF: Totally. And I think that it’s really, really interesting in terms of which publications are being cited, because it’s, it’s, yes, it’s, you know, your prominent authoritative sites, but it’s also like these really niche, you know, industry type of sites that are talking about an obscure topic. So I think that that’s one of the craziest parts to this is, is the fact that, again, where and how you want to be featured isn’t necessarily on this prominent publication, but it might be in a really niche area.
MF: That’s definitely a great perspective for our listeners to keep in mind, and just kind of in that theme of like looking ahead, thinking of what PR and marketing professionals perhaps should be preparing for, how do you think AI might further impact how, how how public relations, how marketing, how these teams should be engaging with the media, knowing everything that is happening behind the scenes with AI?
BF: I think it goes back to your question of the media. What is “the media” and and what’s happening is, if niche sites are becoming prominently citate, you know, getting these citations in LLMs, the rise of like, the creator economy happens, and you have people who are able to spin up a blog, a podcast, a newsletter and people and then an audience gravitates to those new forms of media, and you redefine the media.
So in terms of what that means for for PR, it means that this becomes really hard, like, how are you going to track all these new, emerging creators and determine and decipher that it’s worth your client getting featured in those those forums? And so I think that you’ve got to have a lot of experimentation with with PR these days, of trying stuff, measuring what works, what doesn’t, doubling, doubling down on the stuff that does, and what it means for journalism is like a variety of things.
As a journalist, maybe now you have more potential clients that you could write for. Every journalist is is worried about, “Where’s my next assignment going to come from?” And all of a sudden, if you have the ability to create your own assignments and also sync up with other like-minded outlets that that need educated, experienced journalists to write about certain certain topics, now you maybe have more opportunity as a journalist.
CB: Yeah, that’s a good point. I want to move into some of the listener questions, and some of these are kind of more fun. I actually have a question too, before we get into that. How, on average, like, how many responses are you getting for the inquiries that journalists are putting out there? Is it in the hundreds? Is it 1000s?
BF: It depends. It depends on a few things. It depends on the authoritativeness of the publication because a lot of people want to be featured in, you know, a different brand name, type of pub, pub. It depends on the complexity of the question. So if I’m looking for a left handed pulmonologist in Michigan, then, you know, you’ll probably have less responses. And then, you know, the thing that I think is interesting that I could share on this is that about 21% of all pitches that we get are fully AI-generated, and we’re seeing this come from a variety of different sources. They’re coming from the world’s most recognized PR firms, and they’re coming from a “Do It Yourself” small business owner that’s hacked together a way to automate their their media presence. And so I think that’s one really, really unique trend.
And what’s probably even more unique about this is, do journalists care? And I think that there’s two camps in terms of AI usage for journalists. There’s the camp that is adamantly opposed, and there’s the camp that doesn’t care. And the camp that doesn’t care is the interesting one to me because what they’re concerned about is getting connected with the right source. Because once they get connected with the right source, it doesn’t necessarily matter what was said to them, because they’re going to do their job and they’re going to talk to the source, and they’re going to get the information that they actually need into their story.
And so I think AI is amplifying the connections that are being made between journalists and sources, and at the same time, there’s the journalists who, you know, will press the little check box that we have on HARO, filter out AI responses, and you know, they’re missing those 21% of people that are using those automations.
CB: That’s interesting. Do you guys have a, do you use multiple AI authenticator tools? Or do you have, like, one or a couple that you go with?
BF: We got a go-to that we that we’ve we’ve tested and tried, we formed a partnership with, it’s called Pangram. If you go to their homepage, it is AI detection that actually works, run by ex Tesla, Google, Stanford engineers. I think that it beats everything in the market.
CB: We’ve had some discourse about this topic lately. That’s why I was wondering. I know there’s a lot out there that claim to work, and we’ve proven that they don’t.
BF: Yeah, there’s, I mean, there’s, look, I’ve looked at all of them, and there’s a, there’s a, it’s, it’s a tricky topic. Because within these publications and journalists themselves will use their own AI detectors, and sometimes our AI detection disagrees with theirs, and this is a big gray area. So I think the best, best thing here is use it as a guide. It’s not the end all, be all. And you know, for the people who are adamantly opposed, there are such things as false positives, and I think that you got to open up like floodgates a little bit to test and see what works.
CB: Yeah, and at the end of the day, PR is still about relationships, and it paints a picture that PR agencies are so important. And, I mean, we have an originality policy that we follow, so we don’t use AI, and I think that goes a long way, because journalists do test for it. We’ve also heard other journalists on this show before say that they may accept, like an interview, maybe, but they’ll always make it be like a phone call interview, so they actually get the original thoughts they don’t just accept, like canned commentary or written commentary.
BF: Eyeballs and phone calls. It all goes back to that.
MF: Yeah, I actually, I actually recently received a response from a journalist saying they don’t, they won’t accept written Q and A’s anymore. So it’s crazy.
BF: Absolutely.
MF: Yeah, times are changing. Well, another listener question that we got, I know we had previously discussed, kind of the breakdown of HARO and what what that means, and what that should mean for those who are pitching journalists. Do you have any any other tips for perhaps PR professionals to ensure that their pitches do stand out among other responses, or even making them seem less AI-generated. Do you have any general tips?
BF: Yeah, besides the HARO acronym that I shared earlier, I think the biggest thing that we see with with expert sources is challenges of time, like, how do you identify the right media opportunity and find the time to craft a great response? And so I think that probably the tip here is to really lean into technologies like alerts that help you identify the right media opportunities and then give you a starting point for what, how, what and how you should pitch based off of a pre-existing knowledge base that you might have formed for yourself.
So we do have a feature that we recently came out with called Featured AI. It allows you to create a knowledge base essentially of previously written articles and answers and pitches, so that the knowledge base essentially taps into what you know, and then it uses that knowledge base to identify relevant media opportunities that goes beyond just a standard keyword alert, and I think that that’s a really good example of how alerts are evolving, where now you could really tap into LLMs in that power of data to now get you connected with the journalists and publications that are going to move your business forward.
CB: Let’s see. I think we have another one here. We have a more fun one. But this, this next question. I’m curious about your background as an entrepreneur. Do you have any advice or lessons learned that you’ve picked up along the way with starting several different companies and different different industries, even?
BF: Absolutely, I think the hardest lesson learned was from the iPhone app company that failed. And what I learned from that is there’s three Ms that matter. There’s the market, there’s the margins, and then there’s the monetization. And if you look at what makes a good business idea, it typically comes back to that.
The reason why the iPhone app company failed was the margins were horrible because I had to go pay an iPhone app developer to develop every app. The monetization was horrible because it was a one time fee that someone would pay us instead of a recurring, and the market was horrible. I was selling to minor league baseball teams. There’s like 300 potential customers in that market. So I think that with any business idea, those are pretty good filters to look through. It’s those three M’s: market margins and monetization.
CB: I love that, three Ms. And then let’s see. I want to hear more about what you like to do outside of work. I know on your bio you have a bunch of fun stuff in here, like chicken farming. It says you drive mini, a minivan, a dad of three. It sounds like you’re really busy in your free time as well.
BF: Yeah, minivan life. That’s pretty much it, like minivan life on the weekends and then, you know, startups night and day and every day. I think that, you know, the backyard chickens has been great. I’ve been having backyard chickens for probably about a decade now. Fresh eggs are where it’s at.
CB: Oh my gosh, I love that. And then I want to dig into this hot pocket thing. You got an unlimited supply of Hot Pockets also.
BF: Yeah, the opposite end of good food. So when we, when we were trying to get the RV tour together, we were looking for corporate sponsors. And after I had quit my job as a financial auditor, I spent night and day looking for sponsors to, you know, buy, buy an RV, you know, fuel the journey with three friends and go interview you know, people over four months. And we talked to, one of our buddies’ moms was the VP of Marketing for the company that manufactures Hot Pockets, and went to her office in LA, we pitched her. She’s like, guys like, I can’t cut you a check, but I’ve got, you know, this fat stack of of Hot Pocket vouchers that you could use.
And so at the time, like, look man, we were trying to make something happen. So we ate, we ate hot pockets for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 30 days straight. And it was exactly like that movie, Supersize Me, where the guy eats McDonald’s for 30 days and ends up like in the ER. It’s pretty, pretty much like that, except minus the ER. I noticed my buddy was having the sodium sweats and wasn’t looking too good. So I was like, “Alright, dude, no more hot pockets. We’re we’re throwing these away.” And then a week later, we actually found our our title sponsor for for the for the journey. After, after we detoxed, we thought a little more clearly, and that that that corporate sponsor was actually a block away from from our house. So, like we had, we had searched for months all over the country, and you never know what’s in your own backyard.
CB: Yeah, now that, we’ll stick with the fresh eggs.
MF: Yeah. Love the progression. Awesome. Well, I think our last question, another kind of forward-looking one. What’s next for Featured, and is there anything we should be keeping an eye out for?
BF: Yeah, I think that, you know, we’re obsessed with connecting people who need expert insights, and the where the market that we’ve served traditionally has been journalists and publishers for the last four years, and we’ve done an incredible job with that. We’ve also done an incredible job at building up this expert network where there’s over 200,000 experts who want to share their expertise, and so we’re always on the lookout for who else can we connect those experts with?
And I think that’s going to open up some really unique opportunities for for us as a company, where you know, you could come you can get featured in the media, and the business model is very much focused on experts who have a freemium model. You could answer up to three questions a month at no cost, and then beyond that, there’s subscriptions. People always like, we get it. Listeners of this, this podcast, will probably get it. Like, okay, yeah, the monetization makes sense, because the value is getting featured in the media, but for the majority of people who I’ve talked to for the last four years about this, like, what, the experts pay, like, they should be paid. And so I think that there’s real unique opportunities for us to send more dollars to experts for sharing their knowledge, and I think that that’s really where we’re going to be focused on as a company going forward.
CB: Interesting, cool, great. Well, it’s been a lot of fun chatting with you and learning more about Featured and talking about AI and the journalism industry, really interesting stuff. So we really appreciate you coming on the episode today, Brett.
BF: Yeah, thanks for having me.
CB: For everyone listening. Thanks for tuning into this episode.
Thank you for joining us on today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes, please visit us at W2comm.com/podcast, and follow us on Twitter at media minds show, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.