Publisher FAQ

Publisher Submission FAQ

Have questions about submitting your site to Pulse? Read below for our frequently asked questions, and feel free to post other inquiries on our help forum.

Pulse is an elegant newsreading application for iOS, Android, Windows, Nook, Kindle, XBox, and the web. It’s a tool for discovery—and with over 25 million users, it’s an excellent way to grow your audience. Great content is at the heart of everything we do, and yours would look beautiful in our streamlined reading view.

Our goal is to bring great content to our community, so it’s free to display your content on Pulse.

To submit your site to Pulse, fill out this form. We’ll get some information from you, including your site’s description, content categories, logo, and any RSS feed URLs you’d like to submit.

Absolutely! We’re currently working to expand our international content, and Pulse is offered in several different languages. Make sure to specify which language your feeds are in on the submission form.

An RSS feed (sometimes called Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to publish updated works like blogs, news, or video in a standardized way. Pulse uses your RSS feed to read and publish the content from your site. For more information on RSS feeds, check out this handy guide at Web Reference.

Pulse accepts RSS, ATOM & XML feeds. APIs can be used if needed. (Email content@pulse.me for this option with subject “API Content Inclusion.”).

Embed videos directly into the RSS feed. All videos must be HTML5-compatible to work properly on Pulse. (Note: we also accept Youtube feeds!) See two ways you can embed videos:

• <iframe width=”560” height=”315” src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/OE4AH4DZtEI” frameborder=”0” allowfullscreen></iframe>
• Include HTML5-compatible video urls in the feed tag <media:content url=’url’ />

Ensure that your images are properly embedded into the RSS feed and also that the image size is at least 200x200 pixels. See two ways to embed photos in your feed:

• Include full size images in the description tag <description><img src=”full_url_to_image” /> </description>
• Include full size images in the feed tag <media:thumbnail url=’full_url_to_image’ />

How do you get more shares, reads, and traffic back to your site? We’ve gathered some great suggestions from Pulse’s most successful feeds:

• Include related links: Publishers see significant spikes in traffic back to their site with the inclusion of “Related Stories” links at the bottom of an article. See the Pulse feeds for Thrillist (Men’s Lifestyle) and OK! Magazine (Entertainment) for some great examples.
• Full text and images perform better. It may be counterintuitive, but complete content performs better for publishers than abridged content. Make sure your feed looks great and features the best representation of your site’s offerings!
• Another important note: make sure to embed images in articles. When images are embedded in your RSS, they’ll be pulled to Pulse’s tile display. Articles with compelling images in the newsfeed view are more likely to be opened!
• Publish often! The most successful feeds publish frequently—it keeps things interesting for readers, and gives people a reason to return to their feeds. Although there’s no hard and fast rule for frequency, we encourage publishers to post at least a few times per week.

We are still a small but growing team.  Please do not reach out to us regarding the status of your feed submission. If we have any questions, we will contact you.

Feed qualifications are addressed on a case-by-case basis, but these are some  of the reasons your feed may not be accepted:

• Your feed isn’t updated frequently. (We encourage sources to be updated at least a few times per week.)
• Your feed features content deemed not suitable for the Pulse audience. (This is open to our discretion, but may include inappropriate images, language, or topics.)
• Your feed doesn’t meet our visual qualifications. (It features few to no images, excess advertisements, abridged text, videos that do not work, etc.)
• Your content is commercially monetized by another organization not affiliated or in agreement with Pulse. (Examples of commercial feeds that are restricted would be press releases, branded content created by advertisers or marketers, feeds with display or click-based ads, etc. If you would like to discuss running paid content in your feeds, email business@pulse.me.)

If you’re unable to find your feed in our content catalog display, it should be available via Pulse’s search field by clicking the “Add Content” button. Type your feed title or publication name in the search bar and the feed should show up at the top of the page.

Stay tuned. Check back soon!

Pulse does not block analytics tags, like Google or Ominture, in our content. If you are curious as to how your users perform on Pulse, include analytics tags on your Pulse feeds.

Please email us at content@pulse.me with any feed changes. This email is used only for the purposes of feed changes and will not be checked for any additional requests.

We are working with several publishers to develop cutting-edge monetization strategies for their brands, and we hope to be expanding these methods soon. If interested in hearing more about monetizing your Pulse feed, email business@pulse.me.

If you’re a third party app developer, OEM, or Telco, please contact us a business@pulse.me.