How to Calculate Earned Media Value (EMV)

What Is Earned Media Value?

Earned Media Value is a metric used to assign a dollar value to the visibility your brand gets through earned media channels, such as news coverage, social media shares, and influencer mentions. It offers a way to approximate the value of PR-driven exposure by comparing it to the cost of equivalent paid media.

Think of it as asking: "If I had to pay for this exposure, what would it have cost me?"

EMV is not standardized across the industry, and that's part of what makes it controversial. But when calculated thoughtfully and contextualized properly, it can be a useful benchmark for assessing PR performance.

How to Calculate Earned Media Value

There are a few approaches to calculating EMV, and the best one depends on the media channel and data available. Here are the most common methods:

1. Impression-Based Calculation

• Formula: (Total Impressions) x (CPM Rate)
  
  
• Example: If an article about your brand earned 500,000 impressions and your average CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) is $25, your EMV would be $12,500.

2. Advertising Equivalency Value (AVE)

• Formula: Equivalent ad placement cost in the same media outlet
  
  
• Example: If a full-page ad in The New York Times costs $100,000 and you receive a full-page feature, your EMV could be pegged at $100,000 (though some discount this by 50% to account for the difference in editorial vs. advertising).

3. Engagement-Based Calculation (for social)

• Formula: (Number of engagements) x (Value per engagement)
  
  
• Example: If influencer content generates 10,000 engagements and you value each engagement at $0.20, your EMV is $2,000.

These formulas are flexible. What matters is consistency and aligning your model to benchmarks that your leadership team understands and trusts.

What If You Don’t Have Access to the Right Data?

Many marketers struggle with EMV because they lack impression data, CPM benchmarks, or engagement rates from earned content. Here’s how to work around those limitations.

Use Platform Proxies

Platforms like Similarweb, Semrush, or Ahrefs can help estimate traffic to earned media placements. 

This is an Ahrefs screenshot examining a popular article from USA Today.

They’re not perfect, and they likely need time to make the estimation, but you can also try to look up articles you think performed comparatively well on the site where your content was placed (based on comments, shares, etc.) to get a sense of how much traffic your article may have received, as well.

Leverage Media Kits

Many media outlets publish their advertising rates, which can serve as proxies for ad value. If it’s not public, you can email a sales representative and ask for a copy. These kits are also likely to have readership numbers, click-through rates, and other useful data for estimating reach.

Adopt Standard CPM Values

If you lack CPM benchmark numbers, encourage your team to establish them for each general type of placement. For example, you could decide to assign $25 for top-tier publications, $10 for niche blogs, and $5 for social placements. 

Try it on a past campaign to see if it feels intuitively correct and make adjustments accordingly. As long as stakeholders sign-off, this will help give you more consistency in reporting.

Track Comparable Paid Performance

Paid data can be an asset in measuring organic impact. Use historical paid campaign data from similar channels to estimate EMV for unpaid coverage.

The key is to document your assumptions, apply them consistently, and improve your model as better data becomes available.

Tools That Help Calculate EMV

A growing number of tools and platforms now include EMV calculations or help you gather the inputs needed to calculate it manually.

• Stacker: Starts at $2,000/month. In addition to built-in EMV indicators like total story views, media pickups, and backlink types, Stacker distributes brand-sponsored stories through a network of high-authority news outlets, helping brands earn trusted media placements at scale.
• Muck Rack: Pricing by request (typically starts around $5,000/year). Known for its media database, journalist monitoring, and press outreach tools, Muck Rack also offers PR measurement dashboards including reach, sentiment, and EMV estimates.
• Cision: Enterprise-focused with pricing starting at $7,200/year. Offers a comprehensive suite for media monitoring, distribution, and analytics. EMV is included as part of its PR attribution and coverage reports.
• Onclusive: Custom pricing. Offers advanced analytics that go beyond EMV to include revenue attribution, sentiment analysis, and PR-to-sales correlations using AI-driven media intelligence.
• CoverageBook: Starts at $99/month. Simplifies PR reporting with clean visuals and automatic metric pulls for coverage. Offers EMV estimates based on outlet-level data, social shares, and potential reach.
• Sprout Social: Plans start at $249/month. Primarily a social media management tool with robust analytics, including engagement metrics that can be used in EMV models.
• Hootsuite: Plans start at $99/month. Offers publishing, monitoring, and analytics tools for social media; provides engagement and reach data that can be repurposed for EMV tracking.

The right tool depends on your PR strategy, but the best ones combine data capture with analytics so you can confidently report performance.

The Drawbacks of EMV (and How to Circumvent Them)

Despite its usefulness, EMV is not without flaws. Understanding these drawbacks — and how to mitigate them — is essential.

Lack of Standardization

As we mentioned, there’s no universal EMV formula. Companies often use different benchmarks, making cross-brand comparisons difficult and undermining confidence in the metric.

What to do: Develop and document a standardized methodology for your organization. Use conservative assumptions for values like CPM or engagement and apply them consistently across all campaigns. Share this methodology transparently with stakeholders.

Missing Qualitative Insights

EMV doesn’t account for tone, sentiment, or message pull-through. A negative article could have high EMV but hurt your brand.

What to do: Pair EMV with appropriate context, like sentiment analysis, message resonance scores, and outlet quality assessments. Use media monitoring tools to supplement the quantitative with the qualitative.

Undervaluing Long-Term Impact

EMV often measures impact at a single point in time. It doesn’t reflect the SEO benefits, referral traffic, or long-term brand awareness effects.

What to do: Complement EMV with applicable metrics like backlink equity, organic search traffic increases, or branded search growth. Show how coverage creates compounding visibility over time. Provide updated data in future reports to show expanded reach and impact.

Getting the Most Value Out of EMV

EMV isn’t only useful for measuring the results of one campaign. When used carefully, EMV can feed into broader ROI calculations for PR. 

• Benchmark channels: Evaluate EMV across different initiatives — like press releases, thought leadership articles, influencer campaigns, and syndication — to identify which tactics are most efficient and adjust strategy accordingly.
• Justify continued investment: When leadership asks why PR deserves a line item, EMV offers a tangible metric to show growing visibility, reach, and media value over time.
• Forecast future returns: Use historical EMV data to estimate the impact of upcoming campaigns and set performance expectations. This helps with strategic planning and resource allocation.

Ultimately, while EMV shouldn’t be the sole measure of success, it serves as a valuable piece of the puzzle in demonstrating the business impact of earned media.