Does Good Tech Need PR?
Behind the scenes of many tech blogs these days, there's a rat race for attention, with PR agents struggling to overcome the noise of feeds, news sites and other agents in order to get coverage for their clients. Tiny web tech companies pay $5k …
Context & Ripple Effects
The story joins an already active argument over startup publicity, including advice on PR for startups and criticism focused on tech-blogger incentives. Its significance is the cost of being heard: tiny web companies are paying roughly $5,000 for PR while agents compete against feeds, news sites and one another for coverage.
First-order effects
- Tiny web companies incur a roughly $5,000 communications expense to pursue attention from tech blogs and news sites.
- PR agents must compete in a more crowded distribution environment, where access to bloggers is only one of several routes through the noise.
Second-order effects
- Startups with limited budgets face a sharper trade-off between paying for publicity and funding product work, making earned coverage a more explicit operating cost.
- Tech blogs gain leverage as scarce attention channels, while PR firms are pressed to show that their outreach can produce coverage rather than simply contacts.
Third-order effects
- If the competition for online attention persists, startup PR is likely to become a specialized market built around navigating fragmented publishing channels rather than a simple press-release service.
The trend: The story is one point in the shift from publicity as a broadcast function to publicity as competition for scarce attention across proliferating online media channels.