Meltwater
From AltData.wiki, The Alternative Data Encyclopedia
Meltwater is a private software company providing media intelligence, social listening, consumer intelligence, media-relations, and influencer-marketing tools. Its platform collects news, social conversations, and content generated by artificial-intelligence services, then provides monitoring, alerts, analytics, and reporting for communications and marketing teams.[1][4].
Meltwater was founded in Oslo, Norway, in 2001 by Jørn Lyseggen and Gard Haugen and is headquartered in San Francisco, according to the independently maintained company history on Wikipedia.[3] The company says it serves more than 27,000 organizations and operates approximately 50 offices with 2,300 employees.[2]
What It Does
Meltwater monitors public information relevant to brands and organizations. Its advertised capabilities include tracking news coverage, identifying changes in social-media sentiment, examining how AI platforms describe an organization, finding journalists, and managing relationships with online creators.[1] The resulting data is intended for public-relations, communications, and marketing workflows rather than primarily for securities trading.
The platform combines discovery with analysis and presentation. Meltwater describes automated filtering, summaries, alerts, dashboards, and executive-oriented reports that connect media coverage, audience conversation, campaigns, and competitive signals.[1] These functions can support early awareness of a developing issue, campaign measurement, and research into consumer discussion.
Data And Methodology
Meltwater reports ingesting more than 1.3 billion documents each day, delivering approximately one million alerts daily, and supporting more than 240 languages.[1] These are company-published scale figures; the reviewed independent source does not provide a current audit of ingestion volume or language coverage.[3]
The company says an AI layer filters and organizes data, detects changes, and generates summaries.[1] Public product descriptions do not fully specify source-by-source coverage, model training data, precision, recall, or language-level performance. Users therefore need to distinguish between measured media activity and inferences such as sentiment or narrative change.
Products And Delivery
The current platform groups its main capabilities under Media Intelligence, Social Listening, AI Visibility Tracking, Media Relations, and Influencer Marketing.[1] Listed features include media and social-media monitoring, GenAI Lens, consumer insights, a media database, press distribution, public-relations reporting, social analytics, and influencer management.[1]
Meltwater offers web-based dashboards, alerts, reports, product tours, and mobile applications.[1] The public website does not display standardized prices and instead invites prospective customers to request pricing or a demonstration.[1] Product scope and commercial terms may therefore vary by contract.
History And Ownership
The business began in 2001 as Magenta News with a news-clipping service and later adopted the Meltwater name.[3] Meltwater says the founders began with $15,000 in a shipyard in Oslo.[2] Its product scope subsequently expanded from online news monitoring into social, consumer, and sales intelligence.[2]
Growth included acquisitions of social-monitoring and data businesses. The independent history records purchases including IceRocket, Wrapidity, DataSift, Sysomos, Linkfluence, Klear, and Owler.[3] Meltwater listed on Euronext Growth Oslo in December 2020 and is now described as a private company.[3] John Box is identified as chief executive on both the official leadership page and the independent profile.[2][3]
Copyright Litigation
Meltwater's news-clipping activities have been examined in copyright litigation. In the United States, a federal district judge rejected Meltwater's fair-use argument concerning its use of news stories in litigation brought by the Associated Press; the parties dismissed their claims after a settlement in 2013.[3]
A separate United Kingdom dispute concerned whether clients needed a licence when temporary copies were created while viewing online extracts. The United Kingdom Supreme Court reversed an earlier adverse decision in 2013 and treated temporary technical copies made during lawful viewing as permissible, subject to questions referred to the European Court of Justice.[3] These cases concerned specific earlier services and legal frameworks rather than every current Meltwater product.