I have been keeping track of “who’s funding Edsurge” for a while now as the company operates as one of the major storytellers for Silicon Valley’s ed-tech industry. In addition to investors and venture capitalists who fund the site, there is also a substantial number of companies who pay for articles to appear on the site. So, “who’s sponsoring content on Edsurge”?
In addition to CZI sponsoring posts on “personalized learning,” the following companies sponsored posts on Edsurge last year:
- Autodesk
- Carnegie Learning
- Cignition
- Clark
- Course Hero
- D2L
- Digital Promise
- DreamBox Learning
- Ed Leadership SIMS
- Ed-Fi
- Edmentum
- Espark Learning
- EverFi
- Guidebook
- Gutenberg Technology
- Hapara
- Istation
- ISTE
- Kiddom
- Learning.com
- LearnZillion
- Legends of Learning
- Mangahigh.com
- MCH Strategic Data
- NewSchools Venture Fund
- Online Learning Consortium
- Teachervision
- TrueShelf
- TurnItIn
- Unicheck
- VidCode
- Vital Source Technologies Inc
- Writable
- Zpsace
Although the words “sponsored content” appear in orange at the top of articles, there is no indication in articles appearing in RSS, nor often when an article is shared on social media, that the content is sponsored. Edsurge also rarely discloses that there’s an existing financial relationship with a company when it writes about its sponsors in other, non-paid articles.
I do not currently subscribe to any of Edsurge’s newsletters, although I should. Is there sponsored content there? Do companies pay to appear in the newsletter? What sorts of stories are the loudest in education technology, particularly when they are amplified by stories that companies pay publications to tell?