NerdPress Acquires Grow Social Pro

If you watched our 2024 Product Roadmap Live Event in November, you might have seen some pretty exciting news. 

We have officially reached the maximum threshold of things we can call Grow so we have made the decision to sell Grow Social to our friends at NerdPress, solidifying our long-standing collaboration and giving Grow Social the opportunity to, well, grow, while our team at Mediavine focus on our initiatives laid out in our 2024 Product Roadmap. 

To be clear, we know this has been confusing. Two products with the same name? What were we thinking? (That’s an explanation for another blog post.)

Grow is our first-party data solution designed to help publishers thrive once third-party cookies are gone.

Grow Social and Grow Social Pro were our social-sharing plugins that helped your readers easily share your content to their social media pages. And now it has a new name.

Creating a Hubbub About Social Sharing

As we usher in yet another new era of the internet, publishers are in search of reliable ways to share their content and engage their audiences — maybe even create some hubbub about their sites and expand their audiences. 

Hence the new name: Hubbub.

The fun and playful name brings about an end to the long-standing confusion between Grow and Grow Social — finally.

With 60% of NerdPress’s clients already using the plugin, adding it to their offerings — while we focus on first-party data with Grow — felt like the perfect solution for both companies. 

Currently, Hubbub is a plugin that provides social sharing buttons for bloggers using the WordPress platform. It can be installed on your website by visiting the WordPress plugin repository and adding the plugin to your WordPress admin.

Hubbub is Important for the Future of Publishing

Now more than ever, with changes in search traffic patterns and new search engines popping up daily (hello, TikTok as a search engine?), Hubbub’s social sharing capabilities are tools that savvy publishers will want to leverage.

According to Andrew Wilder, NerdPress’ founder and CEO, despite social sharing tools not being talked about very often, they are a very real way to add additional, unbiased validation to your site. 

During one of our calls to plan this transition, Wilder shared that “One of the things Google has been pushing for is EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust) and there are many ways to indicate that on a website. But one of them is social sharing accounts.”

Social share tools, like Hubbub, allow a publisher’s audience to share content they find helpful and which should be ranked higher. 

NerdPress and Mediavine, A Long-Standing Partnership

Andrew Wilder is not only the NerdPress founder and CEO, but he is also a Mediavine publisher with his site Eating Rules, making this recent collaboration even more special. “Mediavine and NerdPress have always enjoyed working together and collaborating, I feel like we are a part of the Mediavine family,” Andrew told us during our recent sit down with him to discuss the big sale, “I love working with Mediavine and what you stand for, your mission to support publishers even as things evolve,” in the tech industry.

The sale of the social sharing plugin to NerdPress only serves to strengthen the already existing relationship between them and Mediavine. We have a long history of collaborating with NerdPress, Andrew has been a guest on both our Podcast and Teal Talks, and many of our publishers are happy NerdPress customers and expressed their excitement at the sale. The sale also means Mediavine has more time to dedicate to our current products, especially Grow and the all-new Trellis. 

The Future of Hubbub

NerdPress is excited to dedicate time and resources to improving the plugin so it has the support it needs to continue to be beneficial for publishers. They are dedicating a team to ensure that the plug-in is kept current as technology evolves and the social media landscape changes, something we know happens far too quickly.

We are excited to see what the future of Hubbub holds under the care of NerdPress. Publishers can find more information and updates about Hubbub at morehubbub.com.