PR Newswire’s analytics team recently provided an update to our ongoing research of multimedia usage in press releases and the impact of visuals on online visibility performance.Image and Video Usage is on the RisePR Newswire has advised our clients to include images and video in their press releases for a number of years, and we are now seeing a much greater usage than previously. In 2015, 42% of releases included visual elements.This is a sharp increase from the mere 14% we saw the last time we analyzed these numbers in 2013; however, there is still room for improvement. When you look at last year’s 100 most viewed press releases, 68 included multimedia, a 42% increase compared to 2013’s top 100.It’s clear that the use of multimedia in press releases is quickly becoming standard practice within the industry. With the continued influx of visuals across the larger communications landscape, I expect these numbers to continue to climb.Multimedia Delivers More ViewsFor our latest multimedia study, we reviewed a subset of more than 35,000 press releases distributed in 2015, looking at the number of times each was viewed on prnewswire.com.Press releases that included images received an average of 1.4 times more views than text-only releases. Video releases averaged 2.8 times more views than text-only –double the performance of releases that included images.

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