Publisher Partnerships
If your web content is behind a paywall, students aren't reading it. But they want to. Partner with us and start building your future subscribers today.
Funding Great Journalism
To date, we've distributed over
$350,000
to our publisher partners.
Fact
Gen Z won't build a relationship with you if they can't engage your content.
Publisher Fit
You publish original, high-quality content
Any of your content is behind a paywall
You want to reach more Gen Z and Gen Alpha readers
If you check all three, let's talk.
How It Works
On Sooth, students search exclusively across the web's most credible and diverse sources of information without distractions. No ads, no AI overviews, no sketchy sources. Not familiar with Sooth? Check out our landing page.
Sooth is web search. We do not host any content. We always send students to your website to engage your content, just like a traditional search engine (but much better). No AI.
When a student clicks a search result belonging to one of our partners, the student is given full access to read that single article on the partner's website without hitting a paywall.
We share our revenue with you, send you student traffic, provide you access to anonymized engagement analytics, and help you drive your future subscriber growth.
Paywalled Content
If any of your content is behind a paywall, we mark it with this icon. Schools asked us to add this icon due to their frustrations hitting paywalls. They just want to skip it.
Partner Content
Our Partners receive this smiley face icon instead of the lock. Students are 20x more likely to engage it because they know it's premium and accessible.
Partner Content on Sooth
Fact
Paywalls are the #1 frustration among teachers and students when conducting online research.
Benefits to Publishers
Start building brand loyalty when it matters most.
Future-proof your brand. Build relationships with Gen Z and Gen Alpha by making your content accessible in critical moments of learning and need.
Increase global student traffic to your site. Sooth does not personalize search results. Your content gets surfaced equally whether it's for a student in Dubai or Oshkosh, Wisconsin.
Get paid. We share revenue with our publisher partners based on student engagement with your content. You get unlimited upside.
Stand out by elevating access to your original, high-quality content. In a world of AI summaries and aggregators, Sooth sends students to the real thing: your work. So let them read it!
You own the interaction. Unlike Apple News or AI answer engines, Sooth always directs students to your website to engage your content, building awareness and habit.
Selling into education is very hard. We do it for you. As an edtech company, we handle all that so you can focus on your core competency.
Doesn't replace a full subscription to your publication. Our novel access solution is "on-demand, single-article access only." It complements any of your other education initiatives.
Gain unique insights with 3D engagement analytics. Understand how students find and interact with your content in ways no other analytics can deliver.
Fact
Most schools can't afford subscriptions.
Most publishers don't bother selling to schools.
But you both want each other.
This is called an unrealized market.
With Sooth, it no longer exists.
Benefits to Schools & Students
Schools don't want AI Answer Engines because they're harmful to learning.
Sooth uniquely solves the growing "internet search" problem for students by surfacing exclusively the highest quality, human-generated content on the internet so that students can actually discover and learn. Backed by evidence.
Modern research experience (not AI answers) loved by students and educators. Read their testimonials.
Designed with education and pedagogy at its core. AI Answer Engines are not designed for learning. Sooth is.
Access to premium sources only when needed. Schools can't afford subscriptions to every publication. Sooth solves that.
Affordably priced to reach all students, with subscriptions available for schools and districts of any size.
Student data privacy compliant. We're even approved for use by NYC Public Schools (the strictest district in the country).
Brief Technical Overview
Super lightweight to implement and maintain.
Article access is granted using a short-lived JSON Web Token (JWT) generated by Sooth and appended to the content URL, validated by your server before granting access. Set-up takes less than 4 hours.
Revenue share is 20%, paid quarterly and prorated based on proportion of clicks across all partners.
Publishers must grant SoothBot (Cloudflare-verified as a Search bot) access to your public pages so Sooth can index your content and surface it in search results.
Our content access agreement is fewer than 10 pages.
$350K+
Over $350,000 in distributions so far
Current Partners
We're proud to partner with these respected names in journalism and media. Please consider joining them.
20x
Students are 20x more likely to click these than paywalled content
Frequently Asked Questions
No. This is a novel "content access" arrangement. Sooth does not host any publisher content so a content license is not required.
No. Our partnership is focused on content access for students. Sooth does offer a single feature that uses Gen AI to perform content "levelling" - rewriting content into lower Lexile reading levels. Our content access agreement treats this single use-case as opt-in only for publishers. This use-case is the most requested Gen AI feature by educators and has incredibly high educational value for students. But it is optional for publishers. More than half of our current partners have opted in.
No, for two reasons. First, this partnership does not replace all the benefits of a regular subscription to your publication. The user journey must begin on Sooth by clicking a search result, and then access is only granted to that single article. Students cannot continue accessing various content on your site. If they want to engage more of your content, they must return to Sooth and click a new link or purchase a full subscription. Second, our core focus is selling to schools and districts. Unless you're outselling us in K-12 globally, this will be a great complement to your existing education initiatives.
Yes, today K-12 makes up 99% of our customers. All of our users are either students, educators, or librarians.
Highly unlikely. We don't know the specifics of your existing licensing agreements, but based on our experience working with many premium publishers, there shouldn't be a conflict because (i) this partnership is not a licensing agreement, and (ii) Sooth is not selling subscriptions to your publication.
Yes, so long as SoothBot is allowed access to index your content and that your content meets our quality standards.
We focus on content that covers topics shaping our society and that is relevant to students. We have a rigorous internal vetting process and are guided by NewsGuard Reliability Ratings, when available. For individuals publishing on Substack or other third-party platforms, they must have an extensive track record of publishing high quality information.
That's ok. In some respects, students find that more frustrating. If ANY of your content is behind a paywall, we encourage you to partner with us.
There are three main reasons: (i) running an internet search engine is much more expensive than a news aggregator, (ii) school budgets are much more limited on a per-user basis than consumer B2C apps, and (iii) we send all users to the publishers' websites whereas Apple owns the entire relationship for which publishers require additional compensation.
SoothBot is our verified Search crawler (bot). It is not an AI crawler or used for any AI purposes. Its sole mission is to identify and index your content so that we can surface it as a search result and send students to engage it directly. SoothBot is polite and it obeys all robots.txt directives. To learn more, visit SoothBot's public page here.
We attempt to perform content levelling when a user activates the feature by deploying a different crawler (not SoothBot) designed to retrieve the full text of the article. This step fails ~20% of the time due to technical reasons or at the publisher's request. When we are able to retrieve the full text, we pass the content to a language model using a "few-shot instruction" framework to ensure the article is re-written at the chosen reading level. The content is not used for model training nor is any user PII disclosed. It is an extremely valuable use of Gen AI in education as it allows for a broader audience to engage with a specific piece of content.
In only three years, we're already supporting nearly 1 million students across more than 1,600 schools and districts around the globe. Perhaps more important to publishers is our growth (200%+ annual) and our customer retention rates (99.8%). This is the future of web search for students and the best means for premium publishers to reach those students. As one high school student from Waterloo, Iowa recently quipped, "Why am I just getting this now? This is amazing."
The technical side takes about 4 total hours to implement and test the JWT token solution (this is a commonly used, off-the-shelf encryption solution your IT team will be familiar with), about 10 minutes to authorize SoothBot crawl access to your website (again, this is not an AI bot, as verified by Cloudflare), and legal usually takes about two turns of our 10-page content access agreement. That's it.
There's only one way to find out. If it's high quality content and not sensational or gratuitous, we're interested in talking to you. Schools are particularly interested in accessing niche, specialized content that provides unique perspectives across a wide range of topics. You'd be surprised.
No, we cannot and do not share any data with 3rd parties. Our publisher partners do get access to aggregated and anonymized engagement analytics.
Get in Touch
Tell us about your publication and we'll be in touch within 48 hours. Please add "@sooth.fyi" to your email safe recipients list (we go to spam a lot). You can also book time with us directly here.
