What to Charge for a PR Article: Pricing for Online Media

If you run an online daily or an industry magazine, you know it: an enquiry for a commercial article comes in and you shoot from the hip. Sometimes needlessly low, other times so high the advertiser never writes back. Yet the price of commercial content is not a matter of guessing but of calculation – and advertisers today know very well what they pay for.

The four parameters the price is made of

1. Domain authority. DA/DR above 40 is the threshold from which a medium becomes interesting to serious advertisers; above 50 you enter the category where the price stops being haggled over. It is the main reason anyone pays for a publication with you rather than with the competition.
2. Real readership and its structure. Not just the visit count, but who reads you. An industry title with 15,000 readers from one profession is worth more to an advertiser from that field than a general website with 100,000 random visits. Be able to prove it – an analytics screenshot, the audience composition, the traffic sources.
3. Editorial strictness. A paradox many media do not realize: the more demanding you are about text quality, the higher a price you can ask. A strict newsroom means a publication with you carries weight – and exactly that is what the advertiser buys.
4. Permanence of publication. An article guaranteed to stay online has markedly higher value than one with a time limit. If you offer permanence, it must show in the price.

How to build a price list you can defend

Instead of one amount, offer three tiers. The advertiser then does not choose whether to buy from you, but what to buy from you:

• Basic – publication of a supplied text after editorial review, standard placement, permanently online.
• Standard – additionally placement in a section and a teaser on the homepage or in the newsletter for a defined period.
• Premium – a text written by your newsroom, accompanying imagery, sharing on social networks, a longer promotion period.

Charge separately for every item that costs you work or space. The most common mistake of smaller newsrooms is including everything in the base price – and then having nothing to offer to whoever wants more.

Where not to drop the price

• Do not give volume discounts below the value of the space. Ten cheap articles damage credibility more than the money they bring.
• Do not charge by text length. What is bought is the space and the authority of your title, not the character count.
• Have a firm floor. A price you do not go below, come what may. Once you cross it, word spreads through the market faster than you expect.

Spare capacity is the only cost you have already paid

You pay for the newsroom, the server and the domain anyway. Every publication slot that stays unused is a pure loss – and unlike banner advertising, a commercial article has no variable costs beyond the editor’s time. That is exactly why, for media with their own newsroom, it carries the highest margin of all advertising formats.

The condition, though, is that advertisers learn about you. Most buyers today do not look for media on Google but in catalogues and on marketplaces – where they see the parameters and the price and can order right away. Listing your title on the Linketica marketplace means advertisers and agencies see your spare capacity without you having to actively sell anything: you set the price list and the rules yourself and the demand comes to you.

What to nail down from the start

The price list is only half the matter. The other half is the rules: what topics you do not take, how you label commercial messages, what type of links you give and what happens when a text does not pass. Write them down once and send them with every offer – it saves you most of the unpleasant discussions and gives advertisers the certainty they are dealing with a serious partner.