Connectively (HARO) is Dead: Here's 3 Better Alternatives

There's a trick in business to get rid of your competition. Instead of trying to undercut them or outdo them and drive them out, you just buy them. You can merge with them, take whatever value they have, and strip out the rest. Or you can keep them running on a skeleton budget for a while and eventually just shutter their branch, citing poor performance (and ignoring the lack of budget that caused it.)

So, when a service you use or like is bought by someone bigger in the same space, one of three things is going to happen.

• The bigger service will invest in it and make it a compelling part of their offerings.
• The bigger service will roll the key features of the acquisition into their business and drop the rest.
• The bigger service will eventually just close the smaller service.

Why am I bringing up all of this? Let's look at a timeline.

The History of HARO

In 2008, a guy named Peter Shankman had an idea. With the internet, it was easier than ever to reach out and contact people who might be able to help you with your business. You didn't necessarily need to hire a PR firm to be able to contact journalists, you could just find their emails or social media profiles and do it directly.

The problem was, it's not very easy to know what those reporters are looking for, or whether or not you would be beneficial to them. It led to a lot of spam, a lot of ignored emails, and a lot of wasted opportunity.

Peter decided to build a platform where experts and journalists could meet. Journalists could post a query about a subject they're working on, and people who have experience in that subject could respond. Experts could help a reporter out and, in exchange, get a link or a shout-out. He named it, appropriately, Help A Reporter Out, or HARO.

Just two years later, a PR firm – Vocus – came in and bought HARO from Peter in 2010. They immediately made changes to how it worked, and while some people didn't really like it, it built some confidence among journalists, who trusted the big name more than an underdog.

Four years after that, in 2014, Cision came in and acquired and merged with Vocus to form one giant PR firm under the Cision banner. Cision does this a lot; they've purchased dozens of firms, including Streem, Brandwatch, PR Newswire, Factmata, and more.

Each time they acquire a brand, one of three things happens.

Cision is fueled and owned by Platinum Equity, and as we all know by now, private equity loves nothing more than building monopolies and crushing competition. Platinum Equity bought Cision for $2.7 billion dollars, so they have a lot of cash to throw at whatever they feel like they want – or don't want – hanging around.

HARO's story doesn't end here. The service continued operating for years after the Cision acquisition. But, during that time, it started to fall behind. Some people, disappointed by the purchase, jumped off and made their own versions of HARO, aiming at different industries or different scopes or different angles of PR. Some grew and have ended up successful; others failed in short order.

Between 2014 and 2024, HARO slipped further and further behind. Running on a relatively antiquated email system, lacking in now-common features, it just lost steam. Don't get me wrong; it was still effective! A little under half of the effective results I got from my link outreach service came from HARO.

Interestingly, even Peter Shankman saw the slow decline of HARO and has launched another service in the same vein. It's called Source of Sources, and it's basically just a free mailing list, but it's there. Originally, he named it Help Every Reporter, but of course, a billion-dollar venture capital firm isn't pleased with brand dilution, so he changed the name.

In early 2024, Cision rebranded HARO to Connectively. I don't know if they hoped to make people think it was a platform refresh or trick people into thinking it was a new brand or what. They didn't change much in the back end, though, and the platform as a whole still lagged behind.

You see where this is going, right? Private equity acquisitions, ten years of stagnation… and now a closure.

That's right; effective December 9, Connectively (formerly HARO) is shutting down service. Their excuse?

"After assessing feedback from our customers and evaluating our product portfolio, we have decided to focus our attention on core offerings where we see significant opportunities to deliver even more value to our PR & Comms professionals – namely our integrated, award-winning CisionOne platform."

In other words, "we didn't invest in the platform so now it's way outdated, but if you want, you can pay us for our premium platform."

HARO costs $19/$49/$149 per month. CisionOne hides its pricing but reportedly starts at a minimum of $475 per month for access to the journalist database, with added fees for press releases and for the whole PR platform.

All of this leaves us with a pretty big opening in low-cost PR. HARO/Connectively might have been feature-stagnant, but it did have possibly the largest database of active journalists you could connect with.

Picking an Alternative to Connectively

The trouble begins. How do you pick a new platform to use? You have a few options.

First, you could just register for every one you can find and try them out. This is a fine approach! You might even find that a less-reputable or less well-known platform works really well for you specifically. But since most of these platforms cost a good chunk of change to use, you'll be throwing a bunch of money around while you look.

Second, you can wait and see who shakes out on top. Connectively dying leaves a big gap, and you can bet all of the "HARO alternatives" are going to bump up advertising and toss out introductory sales to try to bring in the people HARO leaves behind. This is also a fine option, but it does mean you don't get to do any PR for 6-12 months while the industry settles.

It's also not a bad idea to wait and see where the journalists go. I'm sure a ton of marketers are going to migrate this way and that based on X threads and Reddit posts, but it's the journalists who really matter.

Third, you can use curated lists from people with experience. I can't say for sure which direction the journalists will go. I'll definitely be keeping my ear to the ground. For now, though, I can give you my personal experience and recommendations.

I have three recommendations for now and probably more later. Want my insight? Keep on reading.

My Top Three Connectively Alternatives

As I've built up my HARO link-building and outreach service, I've been trying out a bunch of different HARO-like platforms. Some of them aren't worth giving the time of day. Some of them are fine, if a little under-featured. I mostly use four different platforms, including Connectively, so that leaves three options.

#1: Featured

Featured.com is a relatively new platform in the PR outreach space. They launched just four years ago in 2020, under the name Terkel. Terkel wasn't created by PR people, but rather a marketing company named Markitors, who wanted their own HARO-like platform. At some point they rebranded to Featured.com.

Much like Connectively, you can join Featured as a publisher or an expert. The publisher side is equivalent to the journalist side of Connectively and is free to join and use. After all, these sites rely entirely on an active publisher side to provide value.

For experts – that's us, when you use my link outreach or do it yourself – you can pick one of three tiers.

• Free. Obviously it's free, but very restricted. You get three pitches per month. You can pay extra for additional answers if you want; you can get about 250 answers worth for the same price as the Pro plan.
• Pro. $50 per month (or $40 paid annually) gives you unlimited answers, keyword alerts for up to 25 keywords, and some filtering features.
• Business. $100 per month (or $80 paid annually) gives you some extra stuff like interview profiles, a bylined article you can submit for consideration, and an AI to give you suggestions to "improve" your pitches.

It's a little more expensive than Connectively was, but that paywall is important to keep out the spam. In my experience, it works really well at keeping publishers engaged, and there are authors for a lot of big sites using it. You can get citations from places like Fortune, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, Inc., and a lot more.

Featured also has a layer of editorial review, both to stop the obvious spam and unrelated pitches and to make sure publishers get the best quality information they can.

When Connectively was still active, around half of my outreach results came from it. Featured accounted for most of the other half. You can read more about how I use the site effectively – and how you can too – in my guide to Featured.com here.

#2: Qwoted

Second on my list is Qwoted. Qwoted is a lot more like HARO in that it's owned by a PR firm, in this case, Vested. In concept, it works pretty much the same way. Journalists and publishers register a free Media account and can post their requests. They can even specify what kind of people they're looking for, including expert content, guests for blogging or interviews, products to review, or even speakers for an event.

The flip side is that Qwoted has two kinds of expert accounts. One is experts, which is meant for individuals and small businesses. The other is a PR account, which is meant for larger businesses or agencies like myself. They both work the same, it's just that PR accounts get some extra features and a higher price point.

Qwoted also has several tiers of pricing. Their free plan is effectively unusable, and the basic paid plan is $100 per month, making this the priciest of the three options I'm recommending. Why do I say the free plan is unusable? They put you on a two-hour delay on even seeing publisher requests, so 99% of the time, they're full by the time you even know they exist.

Other than the pricing, Qwoted has an unfortunately high number of poor-quality sites on the publisher side. I've gotten some extremely good, high-DA citations! I've also tracked pitches and seen my links show up on deindexed sites, spammy AI sites, and zero-traffic sites.

Why don't I just avoid those? Qwoted anonymizes publisher requests, so you can't cherry-pick. It's a good idea in theory, but it makes the site a little riskier.

If you want a deeper review of Qwoted, you can read mine here.

#3: SourceBottle

Third on the list is SourceBottle. If I told you it works the same way as Connectively, Featured, and Qwoted, would you believe me? It sure does. There are a few small differences, though. They have a bunch of added features like the option to run a giveaway or to submit a case study that anyone can see and cite. They also promote the fact that they work with more small-scale and mid-tier journalists since Connectively had minimums on how big you had to be to be a journalist on their platform.

Interestingly, I tended to think of SourceBottle as a relatively small newcomer, but they've been around since 2009. They were just initially limited to Australia. They are still relatively small compared to Featured or Qwoted, but you can get some good value out of them.

SourceBottle also has a free plan, and premium plans start at $25 per month.

Further Exploration

These are just my top three now that Connectively is dead. There are dozens more out there, and I'm very interested to see which ones spike in value with the migrants from HARO.

Options to keep an eye on include:

• PitchBox, though it's more of a competitor to CisionOne than Connectively.
• PitchRate
• OnePitch
• Pitch Response
• JustReachOut
• Meltwater (also more comparable to Cision, including in pricing.)
• Prowly
• JournoRequests
• ResponseSource
• HelpAB2BWriter
• Synapse
• Cision itself

If you have any insight into which ones are taking off, or if you have one that stands out as more effective than the rest, let me know. If it's good enough, I'll probably even add it to my link outreach services.