This article was originally posted on Business Insider.
- EZ Newswire hopes to disrupt press release distribution, dominated by PR Newswire and Business Wire.
- The company uses OpenAI and its own algorithm to automatically write press releases.
- 2,500 companies, including Alibaba and 3M, have trialed an early version of the product.
Writing and distributing press releases is time consuming and expensive.
"It's about $5,000 every time, with some additional fees," said Lesley Klein, senior vice president of strategy and brand marketing at the travel company Priceline. "I also think about the business cost — hours and hours of laborious drafting, editing, reviewing, and alignment across all levels of the organization."
That cost also makes it difficult for smaller businesses that don't have the same resources as big companies like Priceline to draft and distribute press releases.
PR tech startup EZ Newswire launched in beta on Wednesday to remove these challenges and give smaller businesses the ability to cheaply write and distribute press releases. The company hopes to massively disrupt the press release distribution space and steal share from its two legacy stalwarts: PR Newswire, owned by PR tech giant Cision, and Business Wire, owned by Berkshire Hathaway.
Users input information like what type of company they have and the key details they want to cover. Then, EZ Newswire uses a combination of its own algorithm and OpenAI's large language model to automatically write press releases, said company cofounders and co-CEOs Caitlin Kelly and Neel Shah.
ChatGPT alone isn't good enough to write press releases on its own yet, said Klein.
"ChatGPT is okay for some things, but isn't there yet in terms of delivering a practical document with the sophistication and pragmatic application that we'd need in a press release," Klein added.
While Priceline has only demoed the EZ Newswire product, Klein said it would be part of its beta, and that she has more faith in its output because it was "built by someone with years of practical and operational comms experience."
Press release generation is a free part of EZ Newswire's service. The company instead makes its money by offering targeted distribution of press releases and it plans to release metrics in autumn that show how many people actually saw the release.
"The legacy players throw this content in the basement of their sites, where these press releases are barely seen," said Kelly. Metrics from the legacy distribution companies are usually the total visitors of the entire site, not the people who saw the specific release, said both Kelly and Priceline's Klein.
"Those total potential audience members are very misleading," said Shah.
EZ Newswire will send press releases to websites where the news is actually relevant, so a release from an automobile manufacturer would go to a site that's devoted to automotive coverage.
At launch, EZ Newswire hosts the press releases on its own site, and has a partnership with the Associated Press to distribute them. It is hoping to expand from there by adding one to two new publishers a month to its distribution network, Shah said.
Instead of thousands of dollars per release, EZ Newswire charges its users in tiers: $25, $100, or $125. Publishers get the largest cut of that fee, though Shah wouldn't specify how much since it varies across publishers.
Around 2,500 companies, including PR agencies, small businesses, and larger brands like Alibaba and industry products company 3M, have used the pre-beta version of the product. Shah hopes to have 10,000 customers over the next six months.
EZ Newswire, which has seven employees, raised a $1 million pre-seed round in 2020, from investors like MediaLink Vice Chairman Wenda Harris Millard, Madison Park Ventures principal and former Hearst president Cathie Black, and Forbes Vice Chairman Mike Perlis.
The company plans to raise between $5 million to $10 million in additional funding this summer, said Shah.
In making press release generation and distribution accessible to both big and small businesses, EZ Newswire hopes to blow wide the market around press release distribution. Shah believes that market is worth between $2 billion to $3 billion, but sees an opportunity for its value to increase since, currently, only large companies are willing to pay high rates to distribute press releases.
"Our contention is that by removing that exclusivity and building a product that any company can use, we'll greatly expand that user set," Shah said.