Part of our Value of Newswires Series.
When you publish your release on a newswire, you might get a heap of online ‘hits’. The inexperienced account exec or marketing manager might proudly go to his / her boss and say, “our media release was picked up nine times!”. But what are these online media outlets and who reads them?
Have you ever browsed through Silobreaker, Earthtimes or i4u.com for your news? Me neither. So why would you assume that your customers or your client’s customers have too?
In the hopes of putting the issue to bed, once and for all, we commissioned an omnibus survey through ICM Research in which we asked 2,000 UK adults which of these sites they visit. We used the Guardian for comparison and included a site that doesn’t exist (Newsnow.com) to catch out those survey respondents who just answer yes to everything.
| Website | % UK adults visit | Location of newswire releases | | Daily | Weekly | Never visited | | Silobreaker.com | 1% | 1% | 97% | Press releases are separate from core news – headlines appear in a small box on the bottom right below the page fold and remain there for around 30 minutes. | | Marketwatch.com | 1% | 1% | 95% | Couldn’t navigate to a newswire release from the home page, even when searching for the title of a release syndicated from a newswire to Marketwatch. | | Congoo.com | Less than 1% | 1% | 97% | Newswire releases on the home page – including headline, synopsis and link. | | Finance.yahoo.com | 1% | 2% | 89% | Couldn’t navigate to a newswire release from the home page. Gave up after 4 minutes. | | Onenewspage.co.uk | Less than 1% | 1% | 97% | Couldn’t navigate to a newswire release from the home page. | | Topix.com | Less than 1% | 1% | 97% | Couldn’t navigate to a newswire release from the home page. | | Venturebeatprofiles.com | Less than 1% | 1% | 97% | Couldn’t find any media releases on the site. | | i4u.com | Less than 1% | 1% | 97% | Couldn’t find any media releases on the site. | | Londonthenews.com | Less than 1% | 1% | 95% | Homepage is basically a list of newswire releases with links with some content syndicated from the Huffington Post. | | Newsnow.com (for comparison) | 1% | 1% | 95% | This site does not exist. | | Guardian.co.uk (for comparison) | 4% | 8% | 70% | No media releases here! |
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Conclusion?
Want to reach less than 1% of the population with your news release? Send it out on a newswire for £250 + VAT. Or give me £200 and I will show it to my team, my sister and my friend Craig who just got engaged (congratulations Craig – you deserve to be happy, but you’re also lucky because not everyone gets what they deserve).
This post originally appeared on the B2B PR Blog.