1. The Media Monitoring Market
| Market size (2025) | ~$5.7 billion |
|---|---|
| Projected growth | ~140% over the next decade |
| Key drivers | AI/NLP advances, social media proliferation, brand reputation management, crisis detection |
The market segments into three tiers by price and complexity:
- Enterprise ($10K–$100K+/year)
- Brandwatch, Meltwater, Sprinklr, Cision. Deep analytics, massive data archives, dedicated account teams, long sales cycles. Sell to Fortune 500 communications and marketing departments.
- Mid-market ($1K–$10K/year)
- Mention, Talkwalker (Hootsuite), BuzzSumo, YouScan, Determ, Sprout Social, Hootsuite. Good feature sets with some limitations. Sell to mid-size companies and agencies.
- Budget ($300–$1,200/year)
- Brand24, Awario, Mentionlytics. 80% of the features at 10% of the enterprise price. Sell to SMBs, startups, freelancers, and small agencies.
Critical trend: The market is consolidating rapidly. Agorapulse acquired Mention (2025). Hootsuite acquired Talkwalker (2024). Cision owns Brandwatch (2021). Standalone social listening tools are being absorbed into larger social media management suites. This creates both risk (harder to compete as an independent) and opportunity (acquirers are paying for these products).
2. Mention (Reference Product)
All-in-one media monitoring and social listening platform. Tracks online conversations in real time across 1 billion+ sources. Three core pillars: Monitor (real-time mention tracking), Analyze (sentiment, reach, volume analytics), Engage (social media publishing and content creation).
| Founded | 2012 (Paris, France) |
|---|---|
| Original pitch | “Google Alerts but better” |
| First acquisition | Mynewsdesk (August 2018) |
| Second acquisition | Agorapulse (April 2025, via court-ordered receivership) |
| Current branding | “Mention by Agorapulse” |
| Combined entity | 180+ employees, 9,000+ clients, ~€25M combined revenue |
| Notable clients | Microsoft, Hyundai, Dailymotion, Stanford University, Warner |
Key backstory: Mention was acquired through court-ordered receivership, meaning the standalone business was struggling financially. The original Solo plan at ~$41/month was later acknowledged as “a business mistake” — too cheap to sustain the business. Post-acquisition pricing jumped to $599/month.
Key Features
- Source Coverage
- 1 billion+ sources: social media (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, Reddit, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube), news, blogs, forums, 75+ review sites (Google, Trustpilot, Amazon, Glassdoor).
- Language Support
- 42 languages.
- Boolean Search
- Precise alert configuration with Boolean operators.
- Emotion Analysis
- Goes beyond positive/negative sentiment: detects joy, anger, fear, sadness, admiration, disgust.
- Review Site Monitoring
- 75+ review sites — broader than most competitors.
- Historical Data
- Up to 2 years retention.
- Social Publishing
- AI-assisted content creation, approval workflows, shared content library.
- Reporting
- 10+ report templates, customizable dashboards, white-label reporting.
Current Pricing
| Plan | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Starting at $599/mo | Annual billing saves 2 months. Includes all features, dedicated account manager, priority support, API access. |
Pre-acquisition pricing ranged from $41/mo (Solo) to $249/mo (ProPlus). The jump to $599/mo reflects repositioning toward mid-market/SME.
3. Enterprise Tier
Brandwatch (Cision)
- What it does
- Consumer intelligence platform. Three suites: Consumer Intelligence (researchers), Social Media Management (marketers), Influencer Marketing (campaign managers).
- Pricing
- Custom/quote-based, annual contracts only. Estimated: $800–$2,000/mo (Basic, 3–5 users), $2,000–$5,000/mo (Professional, 10+ users), $5,000–$15,000+/mo (Enterprise). Most teams spend $10K–$18K/year. No free trial.
- Key differentiators
- Deepest historical data archive. Most powerful analytics and AI/NLP. Image recognition for brand logos. Custom reports (~$500/mo extra).
- Gartner rating
- 4.6/5 (25 reviews)
- Trade-off
- Most powerful analytics in the market, but expensive, complex, and requires significant onboarding investment.
Meltwater
- What it does
- Global media intelligence. Covers Media Intelligence, Media Relations, Social Listening, Social Media Management, Consumer Intelligence, Influencer Marketing, Sales Intelligence, Data/API. AI assistant “Mira” for contextual summaries and crisis response.
- Pricing
- Custom. Median ~$25,000/year, range $6K–$100K+. Three plans: Essentials, Suite, Enterprise. No free trial.
- Key differentiators
- Broadest feature set in the industry. 1M+ media contacts database. Strong media relations tools. Global coverage.
- Trade-off
- Expensive, opaque pricing, steep learning curve, long sales cycles.
Sprinklr
- What it does
- Unified CXM platform. Social listening, social management, customer service, marketing, advertising — all in one. 30+ digital channels.
- Pricing
- Custom enterprise. Most deals start ~$50,000/year, can reach $100K+. Sprinklr Social Advanced: $299/user/mo (annual). Implementation fees additional.
- Trade-off
- Most comprehensive unified platform, but months-long onboarding, extremely expensive, overkill for anyone but large enterprises.
Cision (CisionOne)
- What it does
- PR and media intelligence. Media database, journalist outreach, press release distribution, media monitoring (print, online, TV, radio), social listening, analytics.
- Pricing
- Custom. Median ~$12,563/year (based on Vendr data, 80 purchases). Range $7,200–$30,000+.
- Key differentiators
- Strongest media database and journalist outreach tools. Broadcast monitoring. Press release distribution network. Owns Brandwatch.
- Trade-off
- PR-focused rather than pure social listening. Opaque pricing. Two separate products (CisionOne + Brandwatch) that don’t fully integrate.
4. Mid-Market
Talkwalker (by Hootsuite)
- What it does
- Consumer intelligence and social listening. Acquired by Hootsuite in 2024.
- Pricing
- Not publicly listed. Four plans: Listen, Analyze, Business, Premium. Estimated starting ~$500–$9,600/year.
- Key differentiator
- Visual listening technology — identifies brand logos in videos, images, and podcasts. Unique in the market alongside YouScan and Brandwatch.
Sprout Social
- What it does
- Social media management with listening as an expensive add-on.
- Pricing
- Per-user: $199/mo (Standard), $299/mo (Professional), $399/mo (Advanced). Listening add-on: +$999/month ($12K/year extra).
- Trade-off
- Excellent social management UX, but listening is prohibitively expensive as an add-on. Core listening limited to Twitter on base plans.
Hootsuite
- What it does
- Social media management with listening capabilities. Now owns Talkwalker for advanced listening.
- Pricing
- $99/mo (Standard, 1 user) to $249/user/mo (Advanced). Listening add-on: $7,000+/year. Enterprise: $15,000+/year minimum.
- Trade-off
- Market leader in social management but listening is a costly bolt-on. Prices have increased significantly.
BuzzSumo
- What it does
- Content research, monitoring, and influencer identification. More content-focused than pure social listening.
- Pricing
- $159/mo annual (Content Creation, 1 user) to $999/mo (Enterprise, 30 users). 7-day free trial.
- Key differentiator
- Best-in-class content discovery and research. Strong for content strategy and trending topic analysis.
- Trade-off
- Content-focused rather than comprehensive social listening. Limited social monitoring depth compared to dedicated tools.
YouScan
- What it does
- AI-powered social listening with visual intelligence.
- Pricing
- $299/mo annual (Starter-3). Add-ons: Visual Insights, Audience Insights, API.
- Key differentiator
- Industry-leading visual/image recognition and analysis. Detects brand logos in photos across social media. Strong for CPG and retail brands.
Determ
determ.com (formerly Mediatoolkit)
- What it does
- Real-time media monitoring. Three plans: Plus, Premium, Multibrand.
- Pricing
- $99–$499+/mo. Annual plans save 20%. 7-day trial after demo call.
- Trade-off
- Good for real-time monitoring at mid-market prices. Multi-brand capability is useful for agencies. Less well-known brand.
5. Budget Tier
These tools offer 80% of the features at 10% of the enterprise price. They are the biggest threat to mid-market tools like Mention, because the feature gap is narrowing while the price gap remains wide.
Brand24
- Pricing
- $49/mo annual (Individual) to $999/mo (Enterprise). 14-day free trial, no credit card.
- Sources
- 25 million+ online sources. Social, news, blogs, podcasts, review sites.
- Key differentiator
- Emotion detection (joy, anger, fear, sadness, admiration, disgust — 95% accuracy across 90+ languages). Transparent pricing. Easy setup.
- Trade-off
- Real-time data not available on lower tiers. Limited features vs. enterprise tools. But at $49/mo vs. Mention’s $599/mo, many SMBs will accept the trade-offs.
Awario
- Pricing
- $24/mo annual (Starter, 3 topics, 30K mentions/mo) to $249/mo (Enterprise, 100 topics, 1M mentions/mo).
- Trade-off
- Most affordable option in the entire category. Solid feature set for the price: Boolean search, influencer discovery, sentiment analysis, competitive analysis. Lower mention limits and less powerful analytics than premium tools.
Mentionlytics
- Pricing
- $69/mo (Basic) to $399/mo (Pro). Free trial included.
- Key differentiator
- All features available on all plans (just with different limits). Good price-to-feature ratio. Podcast monitoring with AI summaries and timestamps.
6. PR-Specific: Muck Rack
- What it does
- PR-focused media monitoring and journalist database. Media lists, journalist tracking, news monitoring, press release distribution.
- Pricing
- Sales-led. Entry ~$5,000/year, most teams $12K–$15K/year, larger deployments $25K+/year. Recently increased prices for first time in 13 years.
- Key differentiator
- Best journalist database and media relations tools in the market. The go-to tool for PR professionals.
- Trade-off
- PR-focused, not a general social listening tool. Opaque pricing.
7. Price Comparison (Annual Cost, Entry-Level)
| Tool | Entry Price (approx.) | Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Awario | $288/year ($24/mo) | Budget |
| Brand24 | $588/year ($49/mo) | Budget |
| Mentionlytics | $828/year ($69/mo) | Budget |
| Determ | $1,188/year ($99/mo) | Mid-Market |
| BuzzSumo | $1,908/year ($159/mo) | Mid-Market |
| Sprout Social | $2,388/year + $12K listening | Mid-Enterprise |
| YouScan | $3,588/year ($299/mo) | Mid-Market |
| Muck Rack | ~$5K–$15K/year | Enterprise |
| Mention | $7,188/year ($599/mo) | Mid-Market |
| Talkwalker | ~$9,600/year+ | Mid-Enterprise |
| Brandwatch | ~$10K–$18K/year | Enterprise |
| Cision | ~$12K–$15K/year | Enterprise |
| Meltwater | ~$15K–$25K/year | Enterprise |
| Sprinklr | ~$50K–$100K+/year | Enterprise |
8. Feature Comparison Matrix
| Feature | Mention | Brand24 | Awario | Brandwatch | Meltwater | Sprout Social |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Real-time monitoring | Yes | Paid tiers | Yes | Yes | Yes | Add-on |
| Sentiment analysis | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Add-on |
| Emotion detection | Yes | Yes (6) | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Visual/image analysis | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Review site monitoring | Yes (75+) | Limited | No | Limited | Yes | No |
| Social publishing | Yes | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Boolean search | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited |
| Historical data | 2 years | Varies | Limited | Extensive | Extensive | Limited |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Enterprise | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| White-label reports | Yes | No | Enterprise | Yes | Yes | No |
| Free trial | Yes | 14 days | Yes | No | No | 30 days |
| Transparent pricing | Partial | Yes | Yes | No | No | Yes |
9. Market Trends (2025–2026)
- 1. Consolidation is accelerating
- Agorapulse acquired Mention. Hootsuite acquired Talkwalker. Cision owns Brandwatch. Standalone social listening tools are being absorbed into social media management suites. The trend is clear: monitoring becomes a feature of a larger platform, not a standalone product.
- 2. AI is table stakes
- Emotion detection, AI summaries (Meltwater’s “Mira”), AI content creation — every tool is adding AI features. This is no longer a differentiator; it’s baseline.
- 3. Visual intelligence is the next frontier
- Image/logo recognition in social media posts is an emerging differentiator. YouScan, Talkwalker, and Brandwatch can detect brand logos in images and videos. Most budget tools cannot.
- 4. Unified platforms are winning
- Buyers increasingly want monitoring + management + publishing in one tool rather than separate point solutions. This favors integrated suites over standalone monitoring tools.
- 5. Budget tools are eating the mid-market
- Brand24 at $49/mo and Awario at $24/mo offer increasingly powerful features. The gap between budget and mid-market is narrowing, while the price difference remains 10–20x. This is the existential threat to mid-market tools like Mention at $599/mo.
10. How to Compete as a Bootstrapper
The Hard Truth
This is a brutally competitive market with 15+ established players, rapid consolidation, and pricing pressure from both ends (enterprise tools getting cheaper features, budget tools getting more powerful). Mention itself — with Microsoft and Hyundai as clients — ended up in court-ordered receivership. That should give any bootstrapper pause.
The three ways bootstrappers die in this market:
- Pricing too low: Mention’s $41/mo Solo plan was “a business mistake.” Data infrastructure is expensive. You cannot give it away.
- Going horizontal: Monitoring “everything everywhere” means competing with everyone. Enterprise tools will always have more sources, more analytics, more features.
- Getting consolidated out: If your tool becomes a feature of Hootsuite/Sprout/Agorapulse, your standalone value proposition disappears.
Viable Bootstrap Strategies
Strategy 1: Vertical Media Monitoring
Build a monitoring tool for one industry. Healthcare brands monitoring patient discussions. Financial services tracking regulatory mentions. Real estate tracking market sentiment. The key: understand the industry’s specific vocabulary, compliance requirements, and workflows. Integrate with industry-specific tools (healthcare CRMs, financial compliance systems, real estate listing platforms). Price at $200–$500/mo. A general tool can’t match the domain expertise.
Strategy 2: Review Monitoring Specialist
Mention monitors 75+ review sites. But review monitoring is treated as a secondary feature in every tool. Build a product focused exclusively on review monitoring and response management: aggregate reviews from Google, Trustpilot, Amazon, G2, Capterra, Yelp, App Store, Play Store. AI-powered response drafting. Review trend analysis. Competitive review benchmarking. Price at $99–$299/mo per location/product. Target multi-location businesses (restaurants, retail chains, hotel groups) and SaaS companies.
Strategy 3: Crisis Detection & Alerting
Strip away the analytics dashboards, social publishing, content calendars, and report builders. Build a tool that does one thing: detect brand crises before they blow up. Real-time spike detection. AI severity scoring. Instant alerts via SMS, Slack, PagerDuty. Escalation workflows. Playbook templates for crisis response. Sell to comms teams as insurance: “Know about it before the CEO calls you.” Price at $500–$2,000/mo. This is a tool you pay for and hope to never need — like insurance.
Strategy 4: Reddit & Community Monitoring
Reddit, Hacker News, Discord, Stack Overflow, GitHub Discussions, indie hacker communities — these are where developers, early adopters, and product enthusiasts talk about products honestly. General monitoring tools cover them poorly. Build a tool specifically for monitoring and engaging with developer/tech communities. AI-powered lead detection (“someone just asked for a tool like yours”). Competitor mention tracking. Sentiment trends by subreddit/community. Price at $49–$149/mo. Target B2B SaaS and developer tools companies.
What NOT to Do
- Don’t build another general social listening tool. You will be competing with Brand24 at $49/mo and Meltwater at $25K/year simultaneously. You cannot win on both fronts.
- Don’t price below $99/mo. Mention proved that cheap monitoring is a death trap. Infrastructure costs are real. Charge accordingly.
- Don’t try to be a platform. The consolidation trend means platforms are absorbing monitoring tools. Be a focused tool that does one thing better than any platform feature can.
- Don’t ignore the API. The most defensible monitoring businesses (Podscan, Listen Notes) derive significant revenue from API access. Developers building on your data create lock-in that dashboard users never will.
The Bootstrap Verdict
The general media monitoring market is not a good place for a bootstrapper. It’s crowded, consolidating, and structurally favors platforms over point solutions. Mention — a well-funded, well-known player with enterprise clients — still ended up in receivership.
The opportunity is in going narrow where the big tools go wide. A vertical monitoring tool for one industry, a review monitoring specialist, a crisis-only alerting product, or a community-specific monitoring tool for developers — these are defensible niches where a bootstrapper can charge premium prices because the value prop is specific and the competition from general tools is weak.
Best bet: Review monitoring for multi-location businesses, or community/Reddit monitoring for B2B SaaS. Both have clear buyers, recurring need, and underserved by general tools. Both can start small and grow without venture capital.