Nick Carr’s post on pay per view journalism has sparked some interesting debate. It set me thinking that maybe this is the way PR could go ie pay per view on press releases.
For example – when you post a press release on Daryl Willcox’s Sourcewire, you can see how many views each press release has received – will we see the day when agencies will be paid based on the number of views a release gets?
Of course, there are a lot of caveats here – not all views of the release will be from bona fide journalists (indeed, many of those page views will be from rival PR agencies checking out the competitions’s press release – or if a release gets "Dug", then you will have a lot of non-relevant punters looking at it).
But I don’t doubt that some form of this model is going to be increasingly demanded by clients. Then again, as we all know, measurement determines behaviour – so for journalists and PRs who would have to live by this approach, you will no doubt see people using terms and phrases that will help increase "viewability" – rather than relevance or accuracy.