Somewhere in the Gulf this week, a marketing director will present a coverage report to their board. It will say something like “featured on 500+ sites” and there will be a logo slide, and everyone will nod, and the budget will be renewed.
Nobody in that room will ask the only question that matters. Did one human being read any of it?
I run a press release distribution platform, so understand what I’m about to say is an argument against my own commercial interest. But after two decades in this industry (agency side, publisher side, and now platform side) I’ve watched a quiet inflation destroy the meaning of the word “coverage”, and the Middle East market, flush with launches and growth targets, is buying as much of it as anywhere.
The mechanics are simple. A release goes out through a syndication network and is republished, automatically, across hundreds of sites that exist for exactly this purpose. No journalist chose the story. No editor read it. No audience visits those pages except by accident. The URL exists, so the placement is real in the narrowest technical sense. It is worthless in every sense that matters. Then all of it goes into the report as coverage, sitting in the same column as the one genuine article a reporter actually wrote.
The tell is in the language. “Distributed to 500 outlets” is not 500 stories; it’s one story, photocopied. “Potential reach of 200 million” is the combined theoretical audience of sites whose actual visitors could fit in a majlis. These numbers survive because they’re impressive in a slide and expensive to question. And, frankly, parts of my industry are paid by the appearance of volume.
The industry has formally known better for years. The Barcelona Principles, the measurement standards the global PR profession signed up to, explicitly reject volume-based metrics and equivalent-value calculations in favour of outcomes. Almost every agency in the region would say it endorses them. Look at the average coverage report and ask whether the numbers on it would survive contact with those principles.
Syndication isn’t a scam. Wide distribution has legitimate uses: search visibility, a footprint of record for compliance and investors, raw material for the AI systems that increasingly summarise brands to their customers. I sell it, and I’ll defend it. As infrastructure. But it is not earned media, and the sleight of hand that presents one as the other is the closest thing our industry has to an open secret.
So audit what you’re buying. First, ask for the placements to be separated into pieces a journalist chose to write and pages generated by distribution. Any provider who can’t or won’t split those two lines is telling you something.
Then pick five placements from the report at random and open them. Look for an author with a real byline history, other original journalism on the site, and a readership you can verify. Five minutes of clicking is the cheapest media audit in existence.
Ask next what any placement did: referral traffic, search movement, journalist follow-ups, inbound enquiries, anything downstream of the URL existing. Coverage that never causes anything is simply inert.
Last, ask how the report would change if every placement no human read were deleted. A confident agency will answer happily, because the honest version of the report, smaller and weighted towards genuine editorial, is the one that actually demonstrates their skill.
And if you’re on the agency side reading this with irritation, the inflation hurts you most of all. Every padded report devalues the real Tier 1 hit your team fought for, and trains clients to expect volume instead of judgement. The agencies that will own this region’s next decade are the ones brave enough to hand over a shorter report.
Five hundred sites means nothing. One reporter, at one outlet your customers actually trust, choosing to tell your story. That’s the entire product. Everything else is a photocopy.
(Sam Allcock is the founder and managing director of Digital24, a press release distribution platform, and a digital PR entrepreneur based in Dubai.)
