About us
Built by someone who knows both sides.
mention.media is not a marketplace dreamed up on a whiteboard. It grew out of 20 years of link building, on the advertiser side as well as on the publisher side, and out of frustration with what keeps going wrong.
Who is behind mention.media
I’m Alexander Noack, founder and managing director of noack.digital | digital business solutions. I have been working in SEO and link building for 20 years.
At what was then Germany’s leading link building marketplace, I was Head of Sales for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I managed a portfolio of more than 7,000 websites and looked after hundreds of agencies and companies. So I know what advertisers need and how platforms work from the inside.
At the same time, I’m a publisher myself. I have built several websites and magazines that I still run today. Every day they receive requests for article placements, brand mentions, guest posts, sponsored posts, editorials and press releases. With my sites I’m listed on more than 21 link building platforms and marketplaces operating worldwide. So every day I see how requests reach publishers and what platforms make of them.
mention.media was born from both perspectives: a marketplace that gets advertisers good placements without burning the outlets everyone depends on.
Alexander Noack, founder and managing director
- 20
- years in SEO and link building
- 7,000+
- websites managed as Head of Sales DACH
- 21+
- link building platforms seen as a publisher
- daily
- requests to our own outlets
What goes wrong in link building
Stand on both sides long enough and you see the same mistakes again and again, at small shops just as at large agencies.
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Platforms listen to one side only
Most marketplaces care almost exclusively about advertisers and try to fulfil every wish. Many of those wishes cannot be met by a serious publisher, because the link target or anchor text is obvious link spam at first glance.
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Link spam anyone can spot
A money keyword linked to a commercial landing page is the worst combination there is. Every professional has known this for years, and it still happens all the time. Google detects such links reliably. At best the money is wasted; at worst a manual action follows and the site ranks lower than before.
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Everyone loses, the platform too
Spam doesn’t only hurt the client. The outlet loses reach and trust and becomes less valuable. Platforms that wave such links through slowly degrade the very portfolio they sell.
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Outreach without a clue
Every day, impersonal mass emails ask for a “guest article” or a “sponsored post”. What they almost always mean is an unlabelled article with a dofollow link. Guest posts and advertorials are labelled formats, and under Google’s guidelines links in them carry “sponsored” or “nofollow”. Anyone mixing this up doesn’t know the industry.
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Someone else’s text, someone else’s voice
When an agency’s text appears under the name of one of the magazine’s authors, style and tone don’t match. Regular readers notice immediately. Add a money keyword and it’s obvious to everyone what’s going on, and the outlet loses its trust. I turn down such texts at my own outlets every day, even at twice the price.
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Commission that grows with the price
Most platforms take 10 to 30% of the outlet’s price. The more expensive the outlet, the more the platform earns. That works against good, premium outlets, and for advertisers it is a markup with nothing in return.
I wouldn’t publish an article with obvious link spam even at twice the price. It harms my magazine and, in the end, the client too. mention.media is meant to make that attitude the rule.
What mention.media does differently
Publishers are the raw material of every marketplace. We don’t want to use that material up; we want to make it more valuable every year, with good content and clean links.
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Publishers first
We protect the outlets, not just the booking. Publishers set their own formats, prices and requirements, and placements that smell of link spam have no place here.
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Matching outlets, not a watering can
You enter your project site or the landing page you want to rank better. mention.media looks for suitable outlets and formats and takes into account what publishers expect from advertisers. You find the right outlets quickly, and outlets know the request fits them.
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Calling formats by their name
A guest post is a guest post, an advertorial is advertising. Both are labelled. Editorial pieces work best when the publisher writes them, in their own style, on a topic that fits the outlet, with a link that sits naturally in the text.
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Real site owners only
Anyone who sells a website on mention.media proves they own it: via a DNS record, a meta tag or a file on the server. That keeps agencies with large portfolios and their markups out, and you always get the lowest price.
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Credits instead of commission
A booking costs one credit, currently €29.95, no matter how expensive the placement is. If the publisher asks €100, you pay €129.95. If they ask €1,000, you pay €1,029.95. The outlet’s price goes to the publisher in full.
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A sales page instead of a flooded inbox
Every publisher gets their own sales page with all details, prices and rules, where advertisers book directly. Instead of answering every outreach email, they simply send the link.
The company
mention.media is a service of noack.digital | digital business solutions, based in Eberswalde, Germany. We are in beta and building the marketplace together with our first publishers. Questions, ideas or criticism? Write to us; your message reaches me personally.
Join us, as an advertiser or as a publisher.
Join the waitlist. We’ll get in touch as soon as the marketplace opens and onboard the first outlets personally.