Earned coverage versus paid placement
Everything on this page turns on one distinction: whether a publication ran a story because an editor chose it, or because someone paid. Coverage counts as earned only when all three are true. An independent editor or journalist decides whether to publish, and can say no. No money, product or other consideration reaches the publisher, the writer or an intermediary in exchange for the placement or the link. And the buyer cannot pick the outlet, the anchor text or the target URL in advance, because the buyer does not control the editorial decision.
Digital PR campaigns pass that test: the agency builds a story worth covering and pitches it, and journalists decide. Journalist-request services pass it by a different mechanic — you answer a reporter's published brief, and the reporter decides whether to quote you. Press-release distribution does not pass: syndication is contractual, not editorial, whatever the product is called. Neither do paid guest posts, catalogue media placements or niche edits, where the slot is sold and the buyer picks the site.
The buying difference is control. Contributed placements and catalogue products let the buyer select a site or placement specification; digital PR contracts research, story development and pitching, while an independent editor chooses whether and where coverage runs.
The practical complication: some providers on this page sell both kinds of product, sometimes under one “digital PR” heading. FATJOE, The HOTH and Page One Power each sell earned products alongside paid placement or syndication products. When you request a quote, confirm which product you are being quoted for.
What a digital PR campaign actually involves
The shape is consistent across agencies, even when the vocabulary is not. First, research and angle selection: deciding what story a journalist would cover, and why it serves your commercial goal. Then asset production — the survey, dataset, interactive tool or expert commentary that gives the story substance. Then media-list building and pitching, then the coverage itself, then reporting.
Published timelines set the expectations. Fractl publishes one to three weeks of production plus four to six weeks of outreach for a data-journalism campaign, and days for reactive work. Page One Power puts asset creation at two to three months before outreach begins. The HOTH states four to six weeks to first results. FATJOE allows up to 90 days per campaign. Reboot Online reports first links in week two or three. Digital Third Coast allows a typical two months of active promotion per campaign, and Bottle lists eight to twelve weeks from brief to post-campaign report.[3][9][13][19][36][47][50]
Any agency that cannot describe its version of this sequence before you sign is asking you to buy a black box.
What you are actually buying: scope versus coverage
In an earned model, what you contract is campaign scope: research, asset production, story angles, a pitching programme and reporting. Coverage is the objective, not the deliverable — because coverage depends on an editorial decision nobody can sell you.
Three agencies on this page contract a minimum link count anyway: Reboot Online, FATJOE and The HOTH each commit to keep producing and pitching until the minimum lands, and each disclaims the outlet, the anchor and the country. That is a promise about effort and remedy, not a promise that a named publication will run your story. Siege Media, Fractl and Digital Third Coast publish the opposite position — no coverage guarantee, because an editorial decision cannot be promised — and Siege adds that you should be wary of any company that offers one.[3][9][13][25][34][50]
Both positions are defensible, and they are a real fork. A guaranteed minimum buys a known budget and shifts topic-relevance risk onto you. No guarantee buys relevance discipline and shifts volume risk onto you. What is not defensible is a guarantee with nothing behind it: one agency on this page claims all its links are guaranteed without publishing a mechanism, a count or a remedy. Ask what is guaranteed, from which sites, by when, and what happens if it misses.[37]
And never divide a retainer by hoped-for links to manufacture a cost per link. A cost per link is meaningful only where the provider itself contracts a link count against a published price — and even then it is a minimum, not an expectation.
Budgets and engagement models
Published entry points across this set span roughly an order of magnitude, and the models are not comparable like for like. Fixed-price campaigns: FATJOE from $4,200. Monthly journalist-request bundles: The HOTH from $1,500 on a three-month minimum. Retainers: Reboot Online from £3,500 a month, Digital Third Coast at a typical $5,000–$15,000 a month, Siege Media from $12,000–$15,000 a month. Rise at Seven publishes an all-service monthly range of £5,000/$6,800 to £70,000+/$100,000+, with Rise Live reactive PR from the same £5,000/$6,800 floor. The Germany page separately lists a €7,000 monthly press-office minimum, a €8,000–€12,000 general-retainer range, and a broken £X placeholder — those figures conflict rather than forming one price.[3][9][13][25][44][45][50]
Four agencies publish no usable price at all: Fractl, JBH and Page One Power are quote-only, and Bottle publishes programme terms without prices. Quote-only is not evasive by itself — campaign scope genuinely varies — but it means you cannot compare those agencies on cost until you are in a sales process. Ask each for the scope, the term, the output count and the remedy in writing.
There is no honest industry average. The figures that exist are the providers' own published numbers, quoted as published.
How to tell whether it is working
Measure outputs first: coverage secured, and where; linked and unlinked mentions; the authority and real traffic of the placements; how relevant each outlet is to your category; referring domains gained. Then outcomes — rankings, organic traffic, pipeline — with the honest caveat that a campaign is one input among many.
Refuse, as proof: a rankings screenshot with no coverage attached; a placement count with no URLs; a traffic-value estimate presented as revenue; syndicated copies of one release counted as separate coverage.
Two providers on this page show what accountable reporting looks like. Reboot Online publishes a live feed of its recent placements, with authority figures, for anyone to inspect. Digital Third Coast separates unique from syndicated links in its client reporting, so one story picked up by a network is not counted as twenty wins. You can reasonably ask any agency for both.[5][9]
Campaign control and buyer fit
Digital PR buys research, asset production and pitching rather than a named outlet. It fits buyers who value editorial coverage and authority and can give the agency room to develop angles for journalists.
Buyer-fit variables are topic relevance, the balance between coverage quality and volume, the sectors an agency knows, and how newsworthy your data or expertise is. FATJOE publishes that maximising coverage can broaden the story beyond the buyer's core topic, so agree the relevance boundary in the brief.[13]
When digital PR is the wrong purchase, and what to buy instead
Siege Media publishes the most useful fit test on this page: digital PR works when the brand already has a trusted presence, has something to say, and has internal experts willing to be quoted. If none of those holds, a campaign has nothing to pitch, and no agency can fix that with effort.[25]
If what you actually need is a predictable placement on a site you choose, that is a contributed-placement purchase — see our guest-posting ranking. If you need to broadcast an announcement, a press release is a distribution purchase, not a coverage purchase. And a per-unit contributed placement sold with a delivery guarantee is a third thing again: neither a campaign nor a wire. Buy the thing that matches the need.
The broad link-building ranking and the full provider directory carry the alternatives.
