Featured Startup Pitch: Newslines looks to take on Wikipedia and Google News with its crowdsourced news search platform

By Mark Devlin, Newslines co-founder and CEO

ELEVATOR PITCH

Newslines is a crowdsourced news search engine that combines the best of Google News, Wikipedia and YouTube. Our aim is to organize the world’s news. We offer 50 percent revenue share to contributors.

PRODUCT/SERVICE DESCRIPTION

Our contributors compile all the newsworthy information (news and life events, YouTube performances and interviews, tweets, Instagrams, etc.) about any person, news story, company or product into easy-to-understand timelines that can be filtered and sorted by the reader.

Newslines offers contributors 50 percent revenue share on all user-generated content. Because Newslines is a reference site, contributors have the potential to earn multi-year income by building a portfolio of posts. Contributors can earn by writing and editing posts, and by introducing other contributors to the site.

FOUNDERS’ STORY

In Tokyo in 1993, with my partner and wife Mary, I founded a four-page classified ads sheet that was to become an 80-page full color city guide called Metropolis, the number one English magazine in Japan. In 2000, we started Japantoday.com, which is the number one news and discussion site in Japan in English. In 2007, we came to the U.S., and after a break trying to build up a karaoke room business, we went back to our media roots. Newslines grew out of the desire to understand how important events in the news develop over time. The site officially launched in May, 2014.

MARKETING/PROMOTION STRATEGY

Our revenue-share system lets contributors treat their content like their own business. As they invest their time into building up their presence on the site, they have a strong interest in promoting their work because more readers equals more revenue. To help them succeed, we have added tools to help them build their friend network and to promote their work on social networks.

MARKET OPPORTUNITY

Right now, you are probably one of the millions who use Wikipedia to find out more about a topic when it hits the news. Our aim is to replace Wikipedia as that ‘go to’ resource for biographies and any kind of news because Wikipedia is old-fashioned, unreliable, biased, has terrible textbook-like design, no video and many other problems that create a poor reader experience. The advertising market is worth billions of dollars.

HOW WE’RE UNIQUE

We are the only company that competes directly against Wikipedia and Google News. Our sortable and filterable news timelines give readers a unique and fun way to learn about a topic that does not exist anywhere else. We are also the world’s first company to allow writers to be able to get paid for checking and approving other writers’ posts, an innovation that lets the business grow quickly without the need for a fixed editorial team.

BUSINESS MODEL

Mary and I have many years of experience building popular, low-cost, high-quality ad driven businesses. A key difference between Newslines and other revenue-sharing systems is that our content is used as a long-term reference, giving contributors the potential to earn multi-year income from adverting and other promotions on their pages.

CURRENT NEEDS

We are looking for contributors and promotion partners.

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HEADQUARTERS: Sarasota, Florida