Better Alternative to the Wire Service Cartel?

As a kid, my idea of a fun Saturday was sitting by my Dad in the darkened transmission room of the local NBC affiliate, where he worked as an engineer.  This early fascination with content distribution spilled over into my career in telecom and IT.  You might say I’ve been in and around networking all my life.

So, to bridge quickly to my topic here, I’ve always wondered why press release distribution services charge $hundreds/$thousands to handle a transmission that I know for a fact costs them mere pennies.  I think the answer may be,  “because they can.”

Now, I have nothing against a company making a buck.  Price gouging is another matter.  It’s a sad fact of business life that when power is concentrated in the hands of a few, that monopoly (or in this case, duopoly) practices take root.  Clients grin & bear it because they figure they have no choice.

That’s changing.  Services like PR Web and others now offer comparable distribution — linking stories to Google, Yahoo & providing direct feeds to journalists — at a fraction of the price of the industry giants.  Why this new model is working and will ultimately prevail: All that matters in a press release distro service is that your story hit the major search engines.  That’s fairly cheap to do.  Choices are a good thing, right?  For your next release, consider all the distribution choices you now have.

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