Before Techcrunch or Reuters or any major news outlets could break the story… They self-published it on their blog.
The full press-release copy, CEO quotes, valuation details… everything lives on their domain.
As a byproduct…
1) They own the canonical URL. Google indexes Rippling’s page first (not any external PR). All SEO value, keyword rankings, and backlinks accrue to Rippling’s domain.
2) The ensuing social buzz hits their site. Twitter and LinkedIn posts link directly to the on-site announcement. Media outlets pick up the story and link back to the original URL. Within hours, all the major outlets published the story of their series G raise and quoted Rippling’s blog verbatim.
3) They repeat the process and build an inbound engine. New features, funding rounds, acquisitions, partnership announcements, they do the same thing. Every hit amplifies Rippling’s domain authority and funnels traffic to the site.
Meanwhile, if you search funding news for brands like Snowflake, Hashicorp, and many others, you will find their sites' posts buried below a sea of media outlets that moved first.
More and more brands are going to start building their own newsrooms and routing attention to an asset they own.
It’s the same reason I prefer internal blogs to Substack. I want site traffic on my domain, interacting and navigating around.
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