Best News Aggregator Websites. A content aggregator site collects information from all over the web and posts it in one location for visitors to access. The topics are created around various keywords using RSS feeds. A content aggregator site will often provide attribution and a link to the original site to avoid plagiarism claims. Millions of people use news aggregators on a daily basis to catch up on what’s happening in the world, but which ones are worth your time? Here are 10 of the best news aggregator apps you should check out.
What are News Aggregator Websites?
News aggregator websites allow users to view news and updates from various sources at one convenient location. They fetch the data, organize them in tags / categories, and display it in the right order for easier consumption. You can also think of them as a compilation of news and updates presented according to user’s preference.
Using news aggregators, you don’t need to visit different websites for their latest content. Instead, you can find all the content in one place.
There are different types of content aggregators on the internet. Some are like Google News which simply gather articles from popular online newspapers and display them in related categories. On the other hand, there are others like Feedly, which offer a more personalized experience. They allow you to create your own feed with your selected publishers.
Here’s how it works:
- Follow The Winds fetches content by parsing (analyzing) each source site’s RSS feed through WP RSS Aggregator.
- Once a new piece of content is available on the source site, it is fetched, assigned to a category (such as windsurfing or kitesurfing), and listed on the Follow the Winds website.
- When a visitor clicks on a link, they are taken directly to the original source where the article, video, or other forms of content were originally published.
Examples of News Aggregator Websites
For each news aggregation site, we’ve included a brief description and its monetization model. These are the news aggregation websites that you’ll typically find in most articles that list news aggregators. They have been around for a while, establishing a dedicated following as well as amazing search engine rankings.
AllTop
Similar to Techmeme, Alltop is a news aggregator with content across a variety of topics, including news, tech, sports, entertainment, lifestyle, and business. Each category features content from popular sites in that niche. Alltop uses display ads as their primary means of monetization.
Pocket is a great tool for bookmarking and managing lists of internet articles you want to read later, and it’s also a good place to find stories. All you do is select the Recommended or Explore links to find a variety of trending articles on the Pocket network. Recommendations are partly based on previous articles you saved, so there’s a good chance you’ll find something matching your interests.
Pocket is available for mobile and web browsers, and it’s integrated into over 500 applications, which makes it simple to save and share your favorite stories.
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Flipboard is a popular news aggregator known for its lovely magazine-style layout. Available via web browsers or on iOS and Android, it takes content from news sources and social media, presents it as a personalized digital magazine, and lets users “flip” through it.
Flipboard claims to offer a “curated experience with a plurality of voices,” meaning odds are good you’ll find something worth reading every time you open the app.
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Panda
Panda is a clean, tech-focused popular news aggregator that makes it easy to browse the latest and most relevant news for tech entrepreneurs, developers, web designers, and more. By default, it offers you a list of around 30 different tech feeds displayed as a smart grid of thumbnails, although you can add more as the mood takes you.
As Panda is offered free to users, it relies on sponsored advertising as its main source of revenue.
Google News
Google Reader might be gone, but the technology behemoth still has a popular news aggregator in the form of Google News. Like other apps on this list, it pulls thousands of articles from credible online news organizations, blogs, and magazines, and presents them in a polished format.
Google News gives you the option to set up a personal briefing that updates throughout the day with relevant stories, or you can choose to get full coverage about a topic, including different perspectives, a timeline of key events, and more.
Additionally, Google makes it easy to subscribe to newspapers and magazines with a single tap, so you can support the publications you love.
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Inoreader
Inoreader is one of the more feature-rich services on this list, with powerful automation tools for a truly custom experience. As well as serving as a news aggregator by allowing users to subscribe to RSS feeds and blogs, it also supports Facebook pages, Twitter searches, other social networks and even email newsletters.
Using its workflow rules, users can tailor their reading by setting up filters, sending push notifications about specific types of articles, marking them as read, monitoring keywords, and more.
With its Free plan, you’re limited to 150 subscriptions, supported by ads, but there are a variety of higher pricing tiers that allow more and more subscriptions and customization.
Fark is a good place to find news of a more peculiar variety. Created by Drew Curtis in 1999, community members submit potential news stories to the website on a daily basis, and the Fark team chooses around 100 to display on the homepage. Articles are categorized with tags like Awkward, Creepy, Ironic, or Florida.
Fark is further broken up over several tabs for Entertainment, Sports, Politics, and more. There’s also a mobile app called Hey! On Fark.com for iOS. However, Android users will have to stick with the mobile version of the website for now.
Apple News
Apple News comes preloaded on every iOS device, so it’s a good place to start if you’re an iPhone or iPad owner looking to catch up on the day’s news. The app features a clean format with beautiful photography, and articles are optimized for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, so readers are guaranteed a good reading experience on any device.
Apple News offers a wide selection of news organizations and indie publications, and Apple promises it will get better at understanding a user’s interests the more they use it. It also features a daily, curated digest and the ability to save articles for offline viewing.
With the iOS 14.5 update, Apple News introduced a streamlined search function to make it easier to find the topics, channels, and stories that interest you.
AP News
While a variety of news outlets have their own mobile apps, AP News is the place to go if you’re looking for the facts. The Associated Press is an independent, nonprofit news cooperative providing content to other outlets. The organization has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established in 1917.
Although the app isn’t as fancy as some of the others on this list, it’s clean, readable, and full of beautiful photo galleries from the AP’s award-winning photojournalists.
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Yes, Reddit has a reputation for housing some terrible internet content, but there’s good there as well. If you’re looking for a blend of interesting news, memes, and community chat, it’s worth checking out.
Tailor your news feed by subscribing to various subreddits or contribute your own photos, memes, and stories. Reddit has a pretty engaged community, meaning there’s always something worth reading or discussing. Plus, the official app offers some new features like community group chat, a night mode, and more.
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SmartNews
SmartNews claims to analyze millions of articles every day to deliver the top trending news stories from around the world. It favors discovery over personalization, offering a “both sides” perspective to the latest trending topics. Users can then choose channels, which are articles grouped by publications or by themes like Politics, Science, or Entertainment, and how often they receive headlines as notifications.
The app’s interface is simple, yet colorful, and its SmartView mode promises to tune out distractions and improve readability, a handy feature for people with slower connections.
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Inoreader
Inoreader is an RSS reader with a vibrant community of content curators, a Discovery mode, user-generated subscription bundles, and more.
It offers a free plan where people can subscribe to unlimited news feeds and folders and read them on any device. There are also day and night reading modes, free search and archiving of all your subs, and the ability to save articles to third-party tools like Dropbox or Evernote.
The upgraded Pro plan is paid for and includes push notifications, offline mode, article translation, and more.
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Feedly
Feedly is a news aggregator application for various web browsers and mobile devices running iOS and Android. It is also available as a cloud-based service. It compiles news feeds from a variety of online sources for the user to customize and share with others. Feedly was first released by DevHD in 2008.
Available for browsers, iOS, and Android, Feedly lets you subscribe to content feeds from websites covering a wide range of topics from sports to politics to entertainment. It has multiple layout options, tagging, keyboard shortcuts, and more. A mute filters feature lets you fine-tune your feeds by hiding unwanted topics or keywords.
Best of all, its cloud-syncing feature lets you save and read articles across devices or share them on social media, so you’ll never be without something to read whether you’re at home or on the go.
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Techmeme
Techmeme is a technology news aggregator. The website has been described as “a one-page, aggregated, filtered, archiveable summary in near real-time of what is new and generating conversation”.
Techmeme uses an algorithm to order stories by importance, which depends on several factors that include the number of links to the story’s web page and how old the story is. “Anti-gaming” efforts have been made to lower the effect that a high number of links can have on a story if the links were created in a short period of time, or by a small number of people. The website has a Techmeme Sponsors Program which accepts payment in exchange for a dedicated section for sponsors. A search engine was added to the website on May 20, 2008, which searches all archived stories that have appeared on the website as a full headline. Two weeks later, a “prospective search feature” was added to Techmeme, which allows users to subscribe to future search results and receive notifications when a headline matches their search pattern.
The team and technology behind Techmeme also powers media news aggregator Mediagazer, political aggregation site Memeorandum, baseball aggregation site Ballbug, and celebrity gossip aggregator WeSmirch
| URL | techmeme |
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Techmeme is a news aggregator featuring content from leading world news publications such as The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Other sources also include pure-tech news publications such as 9to5mac.
One of the things it does very well, and which few others do, is to use contextual ads to drive traffic to their advertisers’ sites while ensuring that the readers are being presented with ads that are relevant to them.
Techmeme has a solid monetization strategy offering sponsored posts, contextual ads, event listings, job alerts, and podcast ads.
The prices range from $2,900- $20,000 across ad formats, which will return a substantial amount for any website relying on advertisements to generate revenue.
News360
News360 is a personalized news aggregation app for smartphones, tablets and the web. It attempts to learn a user’s interests by analyzing their interaction with news stories on the app and using semantic analysis and natural language processing to create an Interest Graph and construct a unique feed of relevant content for each user. The app claims an audience of more than 4 million users.
News360 is one of the most popular news aggregator apps on the internet. It lets you find world news as well as stories around your interests. It is an excellent alternative to Google News and Feedly.
Platforms: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, List of Android smartphones, Windows 8, Windows Phone
| Website | news360.com |
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As you sign up to News360, you can choose the topics you are interested in, and then it will show you the latest content on those topics. This gives you a healthy news stream out of the box, which you can further customize by adding or removing topics and sources.
News360 lets you get the most important news from over 100,000 trusted sources on the internet. You can read News360 in your browser, iOS, and Android devices.
