Creator News goes live, offering aggregated arts, culture, and lifestyle stories while rewarding content producers

The parent company of Vancouver’s Georgia Straight and Toronto’s NOW Magazine has announced the launch of a new online destination for arts, cultural, and lifestyle articles.

Called Creator News, it’s being billed as a “non-political and stress-free aggregated content website” designed to reach a global audience. It can be reached at creatornews.com.

Creator News is 25-percent owned by Media Central Corporation (CSE: FLYY, FSE:3AT), which bought the Georgia Straight from the McLeod family in 2020. Media Central also owns the CannCentral and ECentralSports websites, in addition to NOW Magazine.

According to a Media Central news release, it “will earn 20 percent of the revenue Creator News generates determined by the percentage of page views its titles generate”.

In addition, Creator News has licensing agreements with other content producers on the same terms—and it’s hoping to develop more partnerships like this in the future.

This approach has already been applied successfully in current affairs with aggregators such as Google News, Apple News,and Smart News. They’ve succeeded by offering the works of many content producers providing politics and other contentious subjects on a single website.

Creator News has been created to do the same with regard to arts, culture, and lifestyle—resulting in a relaxing experience for users—while leaving divisive political coverage to others. The site will not feature political-clickbait headlines. Creator News is choosing instead to develop its audience through referral traffic from those who enjoy arts, culture, entertainment, and lifestyle-oriented stories commonly found in alternative newsweeklies and other media.

“We are very excited to introduce the first digital-only news product that will accelerate our audience scale beyond the potential of our existing city-focused websites,” Media Central board chair Manos Pavlakis said in the release. “It also will diversify our revenue streams to reduce the risk of relying only on local revenue to support our existing holdings.”

Most Internet aggregators use on bots and artificial intelligence to gather content. Creator News, on the other hand, has a human curator: Adam Waxman, editor of Toronto-based DINE magazine. It’s a founding partner of Creator News.

“As someone who scours the Internet for news highlights, Creator News saves its users time by providing engaging curation and curator notes that are as easy to follow as they are stimulating,” Waxman said in the release.

A supply-side programmatic partner, which was integrated into the site during the “soft launch”, is intended to generate advertising revenue when a short ad-free period comes to an end. Income generated from those ads will be shared with content partners.

Creator News is working with a development team at Guelph, Ontario–based Lunarstorm Technologies, which is developing a mobile application is expected to be introduced later this year. In addition, Creator News will soon be introducing social-sharing functionality to drive more traffic to the site.

The most successful aggregated-content site, Google News, generated 1.83 billion page views in July, according to Similar Web. Yahoo News attracted 726 million page views, whereas the Drudge Report drew 653 million.

All three of these online aggregators eclipsed well-known media brands such as the Washington Post, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, and the three major U.S. news networks.