NewsCred founder Shafqat Islam always looked up to Daylife, a pioneering service which provided Internet publishers with tools for presenting articles, links, and images.
Now he owns the company. NewsCred just acquired Daylife, whose customers include publishers like the Associated Press and BuzzFeed, for an undisclosed amount.
"We used to look at Daylife and always think, 'Man, one day we're going to be as big as Daylife,'" Islam told us. "They really pioneered this whole idea of selling technology solutions to publishers."
Islam says he has always been impressed with Daylife's tools, especially its Smart Galleries, which many say is one of the best tools on the market for collecting and displaying images.
When NewsCred first launched in 2008, they were initially focused on tools. They switched to licensing content. (Full disclosure: Business Insider is a NewsCred customer.)
Over the last year, Islam says NewsCred has significantly grown on the brand side of the business and he eventually realized the potential for merging customers' content with Daylife's publishing tools.
"Offering up their tools to our customers, plus offering our premium content to their customers just made total sense, which is why we kind of went ahead and did this deal," Islam says. "It’s a big decision for us because it represents we’re going to be doubling our customer base overnight. Almost doubling our revenues. It’s a serious acquisition for us."
Islam says that the experience will be completely seamless for Daylife customers and will be able to benefit from NewsCred's fully licensed articles, images and videos. For NewsCred customers, they will be able to access all of the tools Daylife has to offer.
“The fit was just unnaturally perfect,” Islam says.
For now, NewsCred and Daylife will continue to operate as separate websites but over time, Islam says they will eventually put Daylife under the NewsCred brand for the sake of consistency.
"I think the combined entity, to me at least, would really cement our places as the leaders here in this space," Islam says.
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