Who actually owns the wires

Six networks originate press distribution: PR Newswire (Cision), Business Wire (Berkshire Hathaway), GlobeNewswire, ACCESS Newswire, EIN Presswire and Newsfile. Everything else sold online sits in front of one of them as a reseller, with its own brand, tiers and outlet count. Which network carried your release is readable off the published page itself, from four tells: the dateline, the URL path, the disclaimer, and whether a native permalink exists on the wire's own domain.

Almost every press-release product sold online resolves to one of six networks. The reseller in front of it has its own brand, its own tiers and its own outlet count, but the release is carried by a wire that has existed for decades — and which one it is decides your price, your outlets, and the part nobody mentions: whether your link passes any search credit at all.

Here are the six, with what each publishes about itself.

The six

PR Newswire

Cision quote-gates pricing on its own site, but the official 2024 Domestic Pricing Guide is publicly hosted as a PDF by the IBPA, and it is the most useful document in this industry. That card puts US1 National at $1,020 for 400 words, with $325 for each additional 100 words, on top of a $305 annual membership. Add-ons are itemised: logo $595, image, video or audio $490 each, PDF $490, and AP News direct placement at a flat $310.

That last line is the most instructive number on the card, and why the same outlet is priced so differently by different sellers is where it leads.

One caution: most pricing articles still quote Cision's older card — $195–249 membership, $805 national, $245 per 100 words. The figures above are the ones on the 2024 PDF.

Business Wire

Berkshire Hathaway's wire publishes no rate card and no content policy. The page at /legal/prohibited-business-practices-policy is Berkshire's anti-corruption and anti-money-laundering policy, not a set of content rules. The site is Akamai-protected throughout, so the pricing page cannot be read by anything except a person in a browser — and on re-checking for this piece in August 2026 we could not read it that way either: businesswire.com returned an Akamai "Access Denied" page to a real browser session as well as to every scripted client. We are therefore not linking a Business Wire source here, because we could not open one. Everything in this section is reported from earlier reading and should be treated accordingly. The figures usually quoted — roughly $760 for 400 words national, $195 per additional 100, $425 for the first multimedia item — come from Prezly, which labels them "industry estimates, not gospel". We repeat that label rather than removing it.

GlobeNewswire

No rate card, and no published editorial guidelines at all: /editorial-guidelines, /content-guidelines, /terms and /legal all return 404. Ownership has moved twice in eighteen months — an Equiniti transaction in May 2025 and a Bullish transaction in May 2026 — and as of August 2026 the globenewswire.com footer reads "© 2026 Digital Media Innovations, LLC". If a supplier quotes you a GlobeNewswire rate on a contract term, re-confirm it; the entity behind the name has changed twice while those contracts were being signed.

Reported list pricing sits at $700–$1,200 for a standard North American release with a logo and an image. Treat that carefully: the underlying cluster of numbers ($350 base, $140–175 per 100 words, $100 logo, $200 image) appears verbatim across Prezly, Pressonify, NewswireJet and RedPress — four companies that sell competing distribution. That is one unsourced figure repeated four times, by parties with an incentive to inflate it. The only independent cross-check available is NewMediaWire, which publishes a real $429 flat rate and claims 40–60% savings against Cision, Business Wire and GlobeNewswire; back-solved, that implies $715–$1,072 — which supports the higher end, and argues against the $350 "base rate" every SEO page leads with.

ACCESS Newswire

The only one of the six that publishes a complete ladder: Budget $475, National $865 (adding Yahoo Finance, AP and broker terminals) and US Premium $1,205 (adding Business Insider), with unlimited words and images and no multimedia fees, 5% off three releases and 10% off five. It publishes no editorial guidelines — that URL 404s like GlobeNewswire's.

EIN Presswire

The cheapest of the six by a wide margin, and the most candid. $149 for a single release, $499 for six ($83.17 each) and $999 for fifteen ($66.60 each), with AP News, Nexstar and the USA TODAY Network in every tier. Its own FAQ then says the quiet part out loud:

"To get your news into Yahoo Finance you need to use PR Newswire, GlobeNewswire, or Business Wire."

That single sentence, on the vendor's own FAQ, is the fastest test available for a cheap "Yahoo Finance included" offer: it names the only three upstreams that produce Yahoo Finance, and none of them sells anywhere near EIN's price. If a $200 package claims Yahoo Finance, ask which of those three carried it, and ask for a permalink.

EIN also publishes real content rules, which most of the six do not. It bans gambling, adult content, all supplements "irrespective of legality", forex platforms and firearms — including airsoft and parts — and allows crypto and NFT releases subject to a transparency gate. Which categories get refused, and where a route still exists, sets those rules against the rest of the field.

Newsfile

Quote-only, no published pricing, and the most gated of the six on content: its published editorial guidelines require that every crypto asset "must be listed on CoinMarketCap as a Tracked Listing or ICO", and mining rigs, mixers and scam-recovery services are refused outright. It is exchange-backed and acts as a SEDAR and EDGAR filing agent, which is why small-cap, IPO and SPAC issuers use it and why it does not compete on price.

The seventh thing, which is not a wire

Publisher networks are not licensed wires, but they produce a footprint that is visually indistinguishable from one. MarketersMedia is the clearest example: AP News, Barchart, the Globe and Mail, Manila Times, all on the same segregated press-release paths a wire uses.

In a sweep of more than 30 live placement pages we ran on 28 August 2026, the AP News page carried by MarketersMedia gave the client three plain dofollow links, while the AP News page carried by GlobeNewswire gave none at all — the client's URL did not appear on the page even as plain text. Same outlet, opposite outcome, decided entirely by which network was underneath. The cheaper route produced the better link. (What those attributes mean is Google's own documentation, not a vendor's interpretation; the full sweep, and how to tell a paid page from an earned one, is written up separately.)

Two different products share the name "GlobeNewswire"

Both are sold as "GlobeNewswire distribution". They are not the same product, and the price gap between them is roughly three to one.

How to tell which wire carried your release

Four tells, all readable on the published page itself:

1. The dateline. Wire copy carries it verbatim — LONDON, May 26, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- or Singapore, Singapore--(Newsfile Corp. - June 9, 2026) -.
2. The URL path. Syndicated releases sit on segregated paths that name the network: apnews.com/press-release/globenewswire-mobile/…, apnews.com/press-release/marketersmedia/…, theglobeandmail.com/…/markets-news/Newsfile/…. Benzinga press-release IDs carry a g prefix for GlobeNewswire.
3. The disclaimer. AP prints "PRESS RELEASE: Paid Content from GlobeNewswire - Mobile. The AP news staff was not involved in its creation." The wire is named in the disclaimer on every outlet that runs one.
4. The native permalink. The decisive test. A native release has a page on the wire's own domain. A syndication package does not. Ask any supplier for a sample permalink on the wire's own domain before you sign — it settles the question in one click, and it is the check we would want a buyer to run on us.

We are a reseller too

Proofwire does not own a wire. We buy distribution wholesale and sell it with our writing, our compliance checks, our support and our verification on top — structurally the same business as most of the companies you are comparing us against, and the one this article has just described. How that layer works, and how to price one honestly, does the arithmetic in public, including on us.

What we will be judged on is narrower than that: we say which network carried your release, we open every published URL before we call it a placement, and we publish the link attribute we found rather than the one that would sell better. Those readings are published outlet by outlet, and on the sample report as they land on a delivered order. None of that requires owning a wire. It only requires being willing to write down what actually happened.