If you have looked at press release services and wondered why one costs nothing and another costs hundreds of dollars for what looks like the same announcement, there is a straightforward reason. They are not really selling the same thing.
Four services, four different jobs. Here is what each one is actually for, so you can pick on fit rather than on price.
What does a press release distribution service actually do?
A press release distribution service does one or more of four jobs: publishes your announcement on a credible site, delivers it to journalists, syndicates it across partner news sites, and makes it discoverable in search and AI tools. Most services lean towards one or two of these rather than all four.
| The job | What you get | Who it suits |
| Publication | A real page on a news site, with your announcement properly formatted and dated. | Anyone who needs something credible to link to or show a client. |
| Journalist delivery | Your release lands in newsroom inboxes and on newswire feeds. | Stories with genuine news value that might get written up. |
| Syndication reach | The release appears across partner sites and aggregators. | Brands wanting broad visibility, especially internationally. |
| Search and AI visibility | Indexed in Google News, picked up by AI tools that cite news. | Businesses thinking about long-term discoverability. |
It helps to know which of the four you are buying, as the services are built for different ones. A low-cost publication service isn’t designed to put you in front of journalists, and a newsroom-facing service works best when there is a strong story behind it.
Best for Australian businesses wanting fast, credible publication: News Today (NewsToday.au)
News Today (NewsToday.au) is built around the first and fourth jobs, which is where most Australian small and medium businesses actually sit.
Every release goes through editorial review before it publishes, and goes live within 24 to 48 hours, which is worth knowing if an announcement is tied to a date. Formatting follows SEO conventions for Google News and search, so the release keeps working as a result long after the day it goes out. Pricing is straightforward: $39 for a single release, or $300 for a bundle of ten at an effective $30 each, with credits that do not expire and no subscription attached. The bundle adds priority editorial review, homepage placement eligibility, and email alerts to journalists and media partners. Larger organisations can ask for a custom package with a dedicated account manager and more detailed analytics reporting.
Their published archive gives you a fair sense of who uses it: Australian service businesses, clinics, regional operators and small retailers, across twelve industry categories. If that sounds like your business, you are squarely who the service is built for.
Worth knowing: This is publication and visibility rather than a journalist-pitching service. If your goal is a story in a major masthead, treat that as a separate piece of work.
Best for reaching actual journalists: Medianet
Medianet grew out of Australian Associated Press (AAP), and that heritage is the point. It can push a release onto the AAP newswire and out via email and SMS directly to newsrooms, drawing on a media contacts database of more than 36,000 journalists that their team keeps updated.
You can also attach audio, video, or supporting documents, and there is monitoring and reporting on the other side so you can see where a release travelled. As an AsiaNet member, they can extend distribution across the Asia-Pacific region.
Pricing works per release against the lists you choose, with subscription tiers for teams running regular campaigns.
Worth knowing: This is the most newsroom-facing option here, and priced accordingly. It suits organisations with stories journalists would plausibly cover, rather than routine business announcements.
Best for international reach and AI discoverability: EIN Presswire
If your audience sits outside Australia, EIN Presswire is the one built for that. Releases can reach Google News, AP News, the USA TODAY Network and more than a hundred regional television affiliates in the US, plus Bloomberg Terminals, Yahoo and Bing.
They are also unusually direct about AI. Feeding large language models (LLMs) and chatbots is listed as a distribution outcome, and they publish guidance on getting a brand discovered by AI tools. Whatever you make of the claim, they are clearly building for it rather than ignoring it. Pricing is in US dollars and pay-as-you-go, from $149 for a single release down to roughly $67 per release on larger bundles.
Worth knowing: Volume is high, with around 2,000 releases posted every 24 hours. Broad syndication is real, but so is the crowd you are publishing into.
Best free Australian option, especially for tech: PRWire
PRWire sits inside the Influencing network and lets you post news at no cost after registering as a business or agency. What makes it useful is the other side of the platform: journalists register, too, and follow topics and companies they care about.
The coverage skews towards business, IT and consumer technology, which is unsurprising given the same network runs the IT Journalism Awards and the Tech Leaders Forum. If you are a technology business, the audience is more concentrated than the price suggests.
Worth knowing: Being free, there is less editorial support than a paid service offers, and no particular promise of attention. It tends to work best alongside other channels rather than on its own.
Which service fits your situation?
| What you need | Where to look |
| A credible Australian page, live quickly | News Today (NewsToday.au) |
| Google News and long-term search visibility | News Today (NewsToday.au) |
| Your release in front of Australian journalists | Medianet |
| Audio, video or documents attached | Medianet |
| Readers and media outside Australia | EIN Presswire |
| Visibility in AI tools and chatbots | EIN Presswire or News Today (NewsToday.au) |
| A no-cost option to test the format | PRWire |
| A low-cost first release | News Today (NewsToday.au) |
| Technology or IT audiences specifically | PRWire |
Do press release links help SEO?
Press release links generally do not pass SEO authority, because Google asks publishers to mark them as sponsored or nofollowed. Releases can still help in other ways: they build branded search results, feed AI tools that cite news sources, and give journalists something to work from. Backlinks are simply not the reason to use them.
It is worth saying, because a lot of marketing in this category still suggests otherwise. The benefits are real; they are just different ones:
- Branded search. When someone looks up your business name, a dated announcement on a news site is a reassuring thing to find.
- AI citation. Assistants draw on news content when answering questions, and a well-structured release is the kind of source they can use.
- Something to point at. A published release gives you a link for your own site, your investor updates, or a client report.
- Journalist access, where the service offers it and the story earns it.
Will a press release get you media coverage?
A press release on its own rarely produces media coverage. Distribution puts your announcement in front of journalists, but whether anyone writes about it depends on whether the story is actually new or useful to their readers. Treat coverage as a possible bonus rather than the thing you are buying.
A sensible way to start
If this is new to you, start small. Pick an announcement that marks a real change, a new service, a new location, a senior appointment, and run it through one service rather than three.
Then, look at what came back. If a credible, indexable page and a lasting search result are what you were after, you may not need to spend more than that. If you were hoping a journalist would pick it up, and nobody did, it is worth revisiting the angle before changing services. Reworking a story usually costs less than upgrading a plan.
