How Buffer’s Open Salaries Became a Compounding Backlink Magnet: The $0 PR Hack

In December 2013, Buffer did what almost no company dared: it published every employee’s salary and the exact compensation formula on a page anyone could visit. The move lived on a canonical URL—Buffer’s transparent salaries—so readers and reporters had a single source of truth to reference.

The company paired salaries with a live dashboard of financial and usage data at Buffer’s open metrics.

By keeping the proof owned by Buffer, the story stayed verifiable and evergreen, which made it irresistibly easy for journalists to cover—and to link.

A single, canonical source made reporting effortless

Journalists hate chasing screenshots and dead links. Buffer gave them the opposite: a clean, living URL for pay and a real-time metrics hub.

When an outlet needed to double-check the salary formula, they could point straight to transparent salaries. When they wanted revenue, customers, or growth figures, they could cite open metrics without emailing anyone.

That small editorial convenience mattered. Reporters reflexively link to primary sources. Because the artifacts sat on Buffer’s domain—not in a PDF or a transient post—the links that coverage generated flowed authority directly back to Buffer.

The press carried the story, and the links flowed back

Editors love novelty they can verify. “This startup literally published everyone’s pay—and its finances” writes itself, and it came with receipts. Coverage from mainstream business and tech publications repeatedly pointed back to transparent salaries and open metrics, because those were the authoritative anchors of the story.

Business Insider broke it as a headline story in December 2013 and linked straight back to Buffer’s transparency post and salary formula. Inc. quickly followed, embedding the formula and examples. Fast Company analyzed the implications (and linked back), while Forbes later enshrined Buffer as a case study in transparency.

An idea became a movement—and Buffer became the reference point

Buffer’s stance didn’t remain a quirky one-off. It became the early spark for the broader Open Startup ethos. Soon after, Baremetrics popularized the idea at scale with its directory of companies sharing key numbers through Open Startups, turning transparency into a recognizable label founders could rally around.

In parallel, indie maker Pieter Levels brought the same energy to the bootstrapped world, putting revenue and usage in public for Nomad List via Nomad List Open. Across blog posts, founder interviews, and product pages, Buffer showed up as the reference point—the case everyone cited when explaining what “open” could look like in practice.

Why the flywheel worked

First, Buffer offered a genuinely newsworthy act, not a pitch. In 2013, publishing exact salaries (not ranges) and the full formula was rare, bridging an HR culture story and a tech trend story in one move, as set out in the open salaries announcement.

Second, the company made the facts impossible to misquote by centralizing proof on transparent salaries and open metrics. That clarity nudged every write-up to link back to the source.

Third, the assets were evergreen and updatable. A new journalist or entrepreneur could return 6 months or a year later, see new data, and write a piece on it linking to the same canonical URLs. That’s how a values decision becomes an SEO moat.

What smart teams can emulate without copying the topic

The playbook isn’t “publish salaries or it doesn’t count.” It’s to ship something verifiably bold that your industry wishes existed—and host it on a stable, memorable URL.

If you design the artifact so coverage must point back to your page, links will follow you home.

Buffer didn’t chase coverage—it created a story worth citing and made the citation effortless.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Seedream 4 is incredible with gore stuff. Once a big company takes a stance and a few others follow it, the laws get mended.

The same can happen with governments. Once a government (CCP) that spies on its citizens is normalized, it eventually (USA x Palantir) becomes the norm because you can't catch bad guys with E2E encryption. You need to read their (and everyone's) messages to stop the attacks.

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Reddit is #1 for AI stuff right now and many people behind-the-scenes manipulate it. Where there's money, there's manipulation.

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I like the sea because mountains are far away in a city.

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