Multimedia news releases grab 77 percent more views, report says

When it comes to getting and keeping people’s attention online, words alone just don’t cut it anymore.

That’s the key finding of new PR Newswire research into the effectiveness of multimedia news releases. From Feb. 27 through March 28, researchers looked at how 200 multimedia news releases—those that included photos, videos and other elements—fared against 10,000 text-only pieces.

They found that readers were 3.5 times more likely to share the multimedia releases, more multimedia elements drew more page views, and readers tended to come back to multimedia releases long after they would have stopped paying attention to a text release.

“Text press releases are syndicated widely and appear on thousands of news sites and portals,” says Sarah Skerik, vice president of social media at PR Newswire. “However, news is constantly flowing, readers place value on currency, and the news feeds that appear online are constantly refreshed. News is temporal. Richer [multimedia] content, which is often positioned more as information rather than breaking news, is more evergreen.”