Yep it gets more interesting if you flip it around. Say you pay $10K for the mother kahuna press release you've always wanted. Now you can't pay to send people

Yep it gets more interesting if you flip it around. Say you pay $10K for the mother kahuna press release you've always wanted. Now you can't pay to send people to go look at your work of art on some other site, simply because they might/could/probably click through? The assumption here is that the only reason to have a press release is to get people to click on something. Is that assumption always true? Sure if I owned the intermediate site, I could purposely set up various schemes, but these guys just made a PR and bought some ads. The marketwatch site could pull or change the links tomorrow and they can't do much about it. Not a very smart or secure conspiracy. Perhaps you can't use adwords to send people to sites that host your press releases? Nope, that doesn't sound right either. I dunno. Just playing devil's advocate. Seems like, as the author indicated, you could tell this story two entirely different ways.