In this round‑table discussion, three participants (A, B, and C) dissect the shifting economics of public relations, publishing, and online media. They describe a three‑way tension: agencies feel publishers are unhelpful, publishers claim agencies don’t understand the lack of profit, and clients demand guaranteed coverage. The conversation pivots to the online CPM model, revealing that even a well‑crafted story may attract only a few thousand views, generating mere dollars, while “fed” press releases often garner only dozens of reads, making the cost of producing coverage (travel, writing, staff time) unsustainable. The panel notes that PR budgets have shrunk in real terms, yet clients still expect traditional mass‑circulation outcomes (e.g., placement in the Straits Times) despite the higher value of reaching a handful of decision‑makers such as CIOs. They discuss how bloggers produce content for love, but most industries cannot rely on that, and how publishers increasingly reject low‑traffic pieces. To adapt, participants suggest leveraging alternative channels—SlideShare, YouTube, personal blogs—and employing broader marketing tactics to reach niche audiences directly. The concluding takeaway emphasizes that clients must better understand the media cycle, tailor messages for different platforms, and accept that one‑size‑fits‑all coverage is no longer viable.
Chapters
The idea of the forum was fighting like cats and dogs. Agencies say the publisher's being unhelpful. The publisher says the agency doesn't understand that we don't make money if we do it. And the clients say, why don't you guys give me coverage? So how do we— what do we need to do differently, really, so that we're all getting part of the marketing dollars? Because that's what we need. I think the first thing is we need to be clear about what we're trying to do.
So, therefore, everything coming from a corporation via or direct from their public relations agency immediately goes into my world. That's going to be for online.
That's news.
And then I look at the business model for online, and you sell CPM. So, every story has to attract a certain number of views.
Right.
Now, a story that is fed to us, like let's say a good story, if I had someone talk to 3 people, do a really good story or something that a journalist does that is not fed, on one of my websites, may attract 4,000 people to read it. You sell the ads against that, you might, online doesn't make much money, you might make, you know, a couple hundred bucks. A story that is fed to you, we're launching this new thing, we're launching that new thing, we're doing this, our CEO's coming out, do you want to talk to him? That wouldn't get you 4,000 reads. That wouldn't even get you 400 reads. It would get you 40 to 80 reads. 'Cause it's boring news. You can't force people to read it. They've got to decide to click on it. Unless you have a vested interest in that company. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So, uh, you— so if you're looking at 100 reads or 200 reads, you're looking at a revenue of about $10 maybe? $5 to $10 on a good day if you sold all your inventory. Now, if they want me to send someone down to cover some event, go down, write, come back, that's 3 hours of time. It's going to be at least costing me $150, $200 for something that's going to only return me $5. You soon go broke that way. So it really comes down to how can you reduce my cost of content. And okay, so for the bloggers, they're doing it for the love, that's great. Not many industries can get bloggers writing pieces for the love. So that's really where it's at. And it really gets down to the stage of even if I look at, you know, every 100 press releases we get in, and I don't want to go to any of them, but then I still have to deal with all the phone calls. Did you get the press release? Did you see it? Are you going to run it? I have to employ someone to take those phone calls.
Mm-hmm.
Again, that is becoming an irrelevant waste of time to take the calls. Well, yes. Did you get a bounce-back message? No. Well, email works. We get 100 emails a day, and if we want to run it, well, look on the website.
So when 15 years ago I started EastWest, we charged about $2,500 to do a press release distribution for us. Now it's maybe $1,500. So for the same amount of work, a decade and a half later, okay, it's nearly half the price.
Yeah.
So what the— one of the challenges on the agency side is the client actually still asks the agency to do the same thing. It's not that the agency doesn't struggle. That's why we wanted to have a conversation on this. Because when we talk to clients and say, it's not the same anymore, their response is, it's because you can't do it.
Right.
So, they'll say, in China, they say, you need to guarantee me coverage. And so what happens is the agencies, although we do not, but many agencies in China just pay the journalists to turn up. Because the client still says, if you're a PR, I want coverage. And we say, well, actually, you may only need to talk to 30 CIOs to sell your software for banking. And they say, but I want to be in the Straits Times. 200,000 people in Singapore aren't going to buy banking software. 30 are. So a big challenge for the agency is the economics have changed. Their budget for PR is much less in real terms than it used to be. The client still expects the agency to do the same work as it was doing, because often it's a 40, 50-year-old CEO who says, I I just want to be in the Straits Times. And as a result then, when we employ people, there isn't the budget anymore. Because the client says, I'll give you 15 hours' worth of time. And by the time we've got all the material together, briefed it, managed to navigate Tim's email system and get hold of him, it's actually not economical for us.
If 5 CIOs— and when I was a software vendor— if 5 CIOs read my posting, It's much more valuable than 10,000 people who actually have no interest or buying cycle starting in the background actually read my post.
Yes, but not to me as the publisher.
Not to you, exactly. And this is where we come back to this.
So you, if you can only get 5 views, I'll let you write your piece for free and put it on my website. Actually, you know what? If you can only draw 5 people to read your article, I wouldn't even give you space on my website.
But this is—
but that's—
Nowhere—
This is the challenge though as well as an agency. How do we— when these guys have got this economics, these guys can basically write at will, and the agency historically has been paid either an hourly fee or a project fee to get access to a publisher, and because he had this— he was the guardian of 10,000 copies or 100,000 copies.
And keep in mind, it's called public relations, not publisher relations. We reach public— we go through— I'm sorry to say— we reach publishers, journalists, and editors, and so on, simply because they seem to be a way to reach the public. Now, what's actually happened— so if you're not going to give me the 5, for example, that I wanted— I'm only interested in those 5 CIOs. And I remember the discussion I used to have with other publishers and so on. And I said, well, it's OK. I'm going to put it into SlideShare. And I'll get those 5 CIOs. Or I'll put it into YouTube. I'll put it into my own personal blogs, et cetera. And what I'll do is I'll use other marketing techniques to let them know that this is actually being published and so on. So again, it's a different work. PR, brutal journalism. But also keep in mind, it's public relations. It's about the public. I have to reach them no matter what. So the interest of the PR agency, the interest of me as an ex-customer, is that we want to reach the public. If the publishers, for their own economic interests, will not bring me access to them, that's fine. They'll be on just one, just like I said, some kind of decision tree. I need to reach the end user. And I'm going to use PR. I'm going to use marketing. I'm going to use sales. I'm going to use blah, blah, blah. One of them within the PR world would be the publishers, who allows me, because the question— I have to understand what your readers want to read. And if my story is interesting, then we work together. If you don't find it interesting, I need to know very quickly. I'll find another way.
I think the positive takeout from this is that clients need to understand the media cycle a lot better. And need to understand that they need to tailor interesting messages for different areas of the media cycle. And if they can understand that, that it's not one size fits all, but be more accommodating to the demands of the media operators, they'll find they'll get better coverage.
