There’s overpriced, and then there’s Cision. A PR platform that markets itself as the gold standard in media outreach, media monitoring, and earned media analytics—but in practice? It’s more like a polished spam cannon firing into the abyss. And yes, that is my professional opinion.
Let’s not sugarcoat this: Cision provides little to no return on investment for the modern PR professional or brand. It’s a bloated, legacy service that charges upwards of $500 or more for the privilege of having your press release flung across a meaningless distribution list, picked up by zero outlets, and posted to a Cision-branded subdomain that Google doesn’t even bother indexing much of the time.
Case in point: today, I received yet another one of Cision’s infamous spray-and-pray press releases. It landed in my inbox completely uninvited—sent by a system that clearly doesn't care about consent, targeting, or relevance. It had nothing to do with Australia, no bearing on my beat, and absolutely no business being sent to me.
Let’s call it what it is: spam.
And not just colloquially. Under the Spam Act (and equivalent regulations in many countries), sending marketing or PR emails to individuals or publications who never opted in is a direct violation.
I have never signed up for Cision’s mailing lists. I have never asked to be contacted by their clients. Yet, their system continues to blast my inbox—unsolicited, untargeted, and unrelenting.
So not only is their ROI laughable, but their practices may well be legally questionable.
But the real tragedy here isn’t that I received a pointless email. It’s that some poor client paid hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars for this so-called “media coverage” and measurement service. They paid for reach, visibility, and potential impact.
What they got was a press release buried on a Cision subdomain, not indexed by Google, not covered by a single credible news outlet, and finally resulting in me publishing this article.
It’s Not Public Relations. It’s A Cash Dumpster Fire
Cision likes to present itself as the industry standard, the necessary tool for any serious PR campaign. But the truth is, it’s a glorified list broker with a self-serving dashboard that shows “potential reach” and “impressions” while delivering no actual results.
The contact databases are outdated, the analytics are vanity-driven, and the user interface feels like it hasn’t seen a UX designer since the Y2K bug.
PR is about relationships. It’s about storytelling. It’s about sending the right story to the right person at the right time. What Cision offers is the opposite: a one-size-fits-all, fire-and-forget model that treats journalists like targets, not people.
Why Should Publishers Give Away Free Real Estate for Cision’s Paid PR?
Here’s something that’s been bothering me for a long time—and if you’re a blogger, publisher, or run a niche news site, it should bother you too:
Why in the world would I, or any site owner, use my time, my platform, and my bandwidth to publish someone else’s paid press release... for free?
Think about it. A company forks over hundreds—sometimes thousands—of dollars to Cision to distribute their press release. That money doesn’t go to journalists. It doesn’t go to publications. It doesn’t go to anyone actually doing the work of running a website, editing content, or maintaining an audience.
Instead, Cision pockets the full amount, fires off the release to an unfiltered, often untargeted list of media contacts, and then—somehow—there’s this unspoken expectation that site owners will graciously hit "publish" without a single cent of compensation.
Sorry, but… what kind of business model is that?
We’re talking about real online assets here. A blog, a news site, a niche content hub—they take time, money, and constant effort to run. Servers aren’t free. Editors don’t work for exposure. Even uploading a piece costs something in time, attention, and operational overhead.
Yet, under the Cision model, there’s this absurd assumption that independent publishers will act as free labor in someone else’s paid PR campaign. The client pays Cision. Cision keeps the money. And the publisher? Gets nothing. Not even a thank you.
If you’re a business considering using Cision to "get your news out there," let me save you the heartbreak: don’t. You’re paying top dollar for a press release that will most likely be:
- Ignored by journalists.
- Deleted by editors.
- Buried on a Cision subdomain that no one reads
Instead? Take that same budget and do something smart with it:
- Pay a few reputable websites directly to host your release as sponsored content.
- Use targeted content partnerships with niche publishers who actually reach your audience.
- Track performance with tools that cost a fraction of Cision’s bloated fee—services like Google Analytics, UTM parameters, Mention, or Brand24, many of which are 90% cheaper (or even free) and provide more actionable insights.
Stop throwing money into the Cision furnace and hoping for a media miracle. It’s not coming. PR should be about building value—not siphoning budgets into legacy platforms that contribute nothing to the publisher ecosystem and deliver very little in return to the client.
If you want coverage, offer value. If you want placement, pay fairly. And if you want results, ditch the middleman who’s doing nothing but padding their margins off your good intentions. Better still, pay news publications directly.
Because in the end, the only people winning with Cision are the ones cashing the checks—not the ones writing them, and certainly not the ones being spammed.
So yes, I feel sorry for the companies throwing money at this machine. I hope they stop. I hope they learn. I hope they figure out that Cision is a total rip-off when it comes to ROI and media coverage.