The Advent of Pay-to-Play Publicity

Pay-to-play pub­li­city — it had to arrive soon­er or later.

A Swedish com­pany now offers a pay-to-play func­tion­al­ity that allows brands to unlock pay­walled art­icles to increase vis­ib­il­ity for pos­it­ive mentions.

Quite a few Swedish news organ­isa­tions have already joined:

The ser­vice tar­gets PR pro­fes­sion­als, and their pitch is that online PR does­n’t work any­more; it’s a shame that great brand men­tions get locked away behind pay­walls.

Here’s how it works in a nut­shell: below is a loc­al news art­icle with a pos­it­ive brand men­tion behind a paywall:

The brand, or any oth­er brand, can unlock this piece of con­tent for a fee.

For com­par­is­on, 10,000 SEK is roughly 1,100 USD.

At these rates, most Swedish com­pan­ies work­ing act­ively with PR would con­sider unlock­ing a pos­it­ive brand men­tion for the allot­ted time. But they won’t be too happy about it — the thrill of pub­li­city is, of course, that any­one can read about your brand.

Not just the people you send the art­icle to.

Publicity work now becomes laden with anoth­er task; brands will have to take full own­er­ship of dis­trib­ut­ing their “super link.”

How do you share this “super link?” Via social media, most likely. And that, as we know, comes with an addi­tion­al fee today.

I can­’t help but feel that pay-to-play pub­li­city takes some of the fun out of get­ting tra­di­tion­al pub­li­city. I’m sure that most PR pro­fes­sion­als would agree.

We can say many things about pub­lic rela­tions, but no one can say it’s a high-mar­gin busi­ness. Each addi­tion­al cost will have to come out of the pock­ets of com­mu­nic­at­ors and PR professionals.

Still, we can­’t be blam­ing the com­pany behind this solution.

If the altern­at­ive has your brand men­tions pay­walled forever, this provides PR pro­fes­sion­als with an extra option. But the “good news” stops there, I’m afraid.

What will hap­pen if pay-to-play pub­li­city becomes the norm?

Here’s what to expect from news publishers:

• An uptick in pub­lish­ing art­icles with strongly pos­it­ive brand men­tions since brands won’t pay to unlock just plain mentions.
• An incent­ive to move more busi­ness news behind paywalls.
• Proactive sales teams to con­tact busi­nesses who are men­tioned in edit­or­i­al art­icles with offers to unlock them.
• Journalists will quickly learn what art­icles gets unlocked and which that doesn’t.
• Internal score­cards that already include clicks and shares will start to be weighed for rev­en­ue as well.

And here’s what to expect from PR professionals:

• Exploring the poten­tial of unlock­ing neg­at­ive brand men­tions of com­pet­ing businesses.
• Exploring the pos­sib­il­ity to stra­tegic­ally unlock all art­icles por­tray­ing just one side of a broad­er story.
• An open­ing to ini­ti­ate site-wide nego­ti­ations for do-fol­low linkbacks.
• Pushback for edits: A small mis­quote or mis­rep­res­ent­a­tion of the busi­ness = no payment.
• When pitch­ing a news story to the report­er, PR pro­fes­sion­als will offer to unlock the story at full price already at the gate.

Let’s hope that we all can do bet­ter than this.