Press releases borderline useless?

When a large, costly wire distribution service is bad news for your message.

We tested a “leading wire service” by distributing a media release. It should have been simple enough, but it proved complicated and costly, and the results—or lack of them—were eye-opening.

So you hired a PR firm. And on the eve of your first big announcement, your new rep plans a press release. This press release will go everywhere, the rep says, to thousands of outlets, with a potential audience of nearly 100 million people. He gives you a lot of other numbers as well. You don’t quite understand them, but then you’re not a PR person, and 100 million people is a lot of people. Sounds great, you say. And out it goes.

You’ve just participated in the press release industrial complex, a system in which the only guaranteed outcome is that public relations agencies, newswires, distribution services, content aggregators and media companies all make money. One company that distributes press releases, Comtex, says it processes up to 80,000 of them a day. Kevin Akeroyd, the CEO of another such firm, Cision, says, “The overall volume of press releases both in the U.S. and globally, as well as price per press release, is at an all-time high.”

But what about you paying for all this? The value you receive is less certain. To understand why, first, you must understand how this system works, which means following the money.

Everything starts with the PR firm, which charges hundreds, even thousands, of dollars to write a press release. The firm then uses some of that money to distribute the news through various “press release newswires.”

This often may not include eTN Corporation because we tell you the truth about our distribution. We are more effective, but we don’t manipulate numbers.

Pricing varies, but one such firm, PR Newswire (owned by Cision), has a program that charges customers $795 for the first 400 words of a release and then $205 for each additional 100 words. Once a press release is posted to a newswire, it is distributed to top-tier outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, CNBC, and MarketWatch.

YAHOO Finance

But that doesn’t mean it arrives as editorial coverage, where it’ll be promoted through, say, Yahoo Finance’s social media accounts. Rather, it will most likely be posted to an automated section dedicated to press releases. The areas are clearly labeled; Market­Watch, for example, has “Press Release” written at the top and “The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in creating the content” at the bottom. (There are also middlemen at work that, frankly, are too complicated to get into here. But they make money, too.)

Associated Press (AP)

PR Newswire claims a release goes to thousands of AP contract publications.
Wrong! The PR Newswire release goes on the back pages of the AP website and will not be pitched to any journalists or partner publications buying content from AP. The release is also not visible on the front page of this newswire and no journalist would ever notice it or know about it.

Misleading, Inaccurate

These press release sections — some of which newswires pay to post on — don’t get readers. They serve mainly as a way to drive incremental ad revenue for the publishers. Nevertheless, there are enough of them that the newswires can produce impressive-sounding audience numbers — often by tallying individual websites’ total monthly users, rather than the actual number of people who viewed the press release.

Clients who use PR Newswire, for instance, may get a 32-page report full of charts, numbers, brand-name journalistic outlets, and feedback like “Your release has generated 245 exact matches with a total potential audience of 90,730,143″—an exact quote from a report one publicist showed us.

Content on the Business Journals

Companies like PR Newswire have agreements similar to those of business journals. There are Business Journals in many US cities. Let’s take Pacific Business News as an example. PR Newswire claims the Pacific Business News picked up our story.

Talking to the Pacific Journal Editor-in-Chief K. Napier, it was confirmed that even he didn’t immediately know where to find the PR Newswire releases on his publication. He pointed out that the disclosing statement on the right side of the release says:

“The information on this page is provided by PR Newswire. Pacific Business Journal is not responsible for this content.”

PR Newswire claimed in their success report that the Pacific Business Journal has 204,256 readers, and our release was “picked up” by that publication in every U.S. city they serve. All business journals are important and widely known publications serving the business world in many U.S. cities. A pick-up by every Business Journal publication nationwide would have been fantastic.

Unfortunately, the PR Newswire success report about “pick up” could not have been further from the truth. The same applies to the remaining 108 pickups our story had, according to the PR Newswire report.

For example, the Pacific Business Journal in Honolulu has 10,000 paying subscribers to the print edition and 14,000 to 15,000 free subscribers to the Morning and Afternoon Edition email newsletters. The monthly traffic to all Business Journal websites averages over 1 million page views and a quarter-million unique visitors.

Our release was not published in any print edition or part of the Pacific Business News email newsletter. It was also not visible on their web edition. The same counts for all the other Business Journals in the country PR Newswire told us our story appeared.

The journal counts 3.2  readers per print copy. Most print newspapers use this calculation. The page view on their website is for all Business Journals in the U.S.  combined and not just for one edition.

Business Journal counts its page views based on a month of traffic. It’s not the pageview or unique visitor count on one single day (our release was published one time and on one day. Unique visitors are in fact visitors sorted by IP addresses. Since most IP addresses constantly change one single reader going to the Business Journal website every day can easily count for 50 or more readers using this method.

Our “picked up story on the business journal” was only “published on a secondary linked page with thousands of other PR Newswire releases.”  The Pacific Business Journal page showing PR Newswire releases is placed on a hidden page: The information on this page is provided by PR Newswire. Pacific Business Journal is not responsible for this content in the disclosure for those that are lucky enough to see such a story.

No Business Journal editor ever saw or noticed our release and could have made a decision to publish our story within their true editorial content.

Views eTN received from the Pacific Business Journal was ONE. This “one view” was our team member testing.

The PR Newswire reported that every single Business Journal from Wichita, Kansas, New York, to Honolulu, had exactly 204,256 readers each—another myth.

Little of this, of course, creates actual news. Instead, it creates “the optics of news. Those “picking up” your press release are never journalists wanting to write about  it. They’re computers posting your content to websites designed to pick up press releases so PR folks have websites to show they picked them up. It’s an industry speaking to itself.”

It’s become borderline useless.

SATELLITE FEED:
A Whopper Of A Myth Fed to Brands Wanting Coverage

PR Newswire claims to have a satellite feed going directly to journalists’ computers from key publications.

eTN talked to key publications; no one had heard about such a feed. Some journalists receive emails, and others subscribe to an RSS feed. In the case of Business Wire, no real journalist has ever seen or even had a chance to notice our story.

Who Authentically Viewed Our Release?   PR Newswire claims 249 media and 296 public viewers saw our release.

Ironically, every single “view,” except for three, was a media release eTN searched for and clicked on when investigating this story. Very disingenuously, TravelTalkMedia was listed as viewing our story, yet this media outlet ceased operations some time ago.

PR Newswire noted that 1035 web crawlers “crawled” the story. This may be true because any website is crawled constantly to be seen by search engines.

One eTN staff member found us on YAHOO, on BING and on Google. This was eTN searching for the other sources PRNewswire claimed we had reached. Four readers found us on PR Newswire.com, three were our own reporters.

Are you reaching serious journalists with PR Newswire? Not really! 

With hundreds of press releases emailed by PR Newswire every day, the chance a journalist will actually see your release and pick it up is very remote – unless the story is “a must tell” and constitutes unique breaking news, and a reporter reads through thousands of PR Newswire emails or feed posts every day.

Journalists prefer original and brand-new content. Since PR Newswire also posts on Google News, Yahoo Financial News, and other portals, the wire is competing with the story for first place in the search world. A journalist checking to make sure releases and information are timely will notice PR Newswire is already claiming ownership of the story and circulating it on search engines. In addition, the story will be posted on other automatic and irrelevant RSS feeds that PR Newswire circulates.

Even though they are posted on some back pages of news publications that have an agreement with PRN, they should not be considered traffic, and unfortunately, there won’t be any readers.  To make matters worse, this activity will scare most serious journalists away from the story.  A newswire is left acting as a source for stories, scaring other publications away from covering it.

Hundreds of made-up pickups declared a victory by PR Newswire remain irrelevant and harmful to getting real coverage on truly established publications and news platforms.

PR agencies love PRN reports; it makes them look successful.

It Doesn’t Add Up To Waste Marketing Dollars On Costly Ineffective Distribution

Adding this up, $1200 later, no relevant journalist would have seen your story; it was not “picked up” by anyone—certainly not 109 times as claimed by PR Newswire. We had five unaccounted hits, not 90 million as presented to us in a report from this expensive, useless distribution.

So, where does that leave you? Simple. If you feel you’d benefit from hiring a PR firm, ask many questions. What model will they follow for press release distribution? Is there a strategy? Can it be attached to hard revenues? Can it demonstrate fruitful relationships with actual human journalists in your field who have written actual news stories about other clients? If not, keep looking.

“Our job is not to throw information against the wall,” says Mel Webster from  Travelmarketing Network. “It’s to tell a story to the right person at the right place, and at the right time. Spamming on the wires can’t do that.”

Cost for PR Newswire distribution

  • PR NEWSWIRE  US Release posting: $850.00 + $190.00 set up
  • PR NEWSWIRE Global posting: $6500.00 + $190.00 set up

The cost to post to eTurboNews globally usually ranges from $100.00 to $950.00