We examined all HARO queries from January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022, 6000 sent pitches and 1200 published articles to determine the current state of HARO.

Queries

Key takeaways

• There were 66020 queries in 2022.
• 59% of them are from DR50+ media outlets
• 12% of them are from anonymous journalists
• 28% of queries have a deadline in less than 24 hours

Total number of queries

We are constantly getting an average of 4000 to 6000 queries per month for both years with the exception of March 2022. There was a significant increase with the total number of queries in March 2022 at 6000+. A slight downward trend month-to-month can be seen when comparing both years per month.

Number of queries by category

The Lifestyle and Fitness category makes up about 27% of the queries, while 24% falls under the Business and Finance category. General comes in third, accounting for 23% of the queries we received.

Deadlines

There has been an increase in queries with deadlines greater than 72 hours in 2022.

Journalists & Media Outlets

Key takeaways

• There are 6038 journalists from 6962 different media outlets
• 41% of queries come from just 40 media outlets

Most active media outlets

There were 37,411 queries from DR50+ media outlets, and 41% came from just 40 media outlets.

Most active journalists

12% of queries come from anonymous journalists.

Pitches & published articles

We’ve analyzed 980 successful pitches and 1200 articles that went live after journalists’ queries in Q3 2022.

In this section, we are only looking into DR50+ media outlets that link out to experts’ websites.

Key takeaways

• 51% of articles go live within the first two weeks.
• In 58% of articles, journalists quote less than four experts.
• The best day of the week to respond to queries is Tuesday.
• For queries with tight deadlines you’ll get the best conversion rate when responding within the first six hours.
• For queries with a 3+ days deadline, the best conversion rate is achieved when responding in the last six hours.

Time to publication

We've found that 30% of queries answered take around a week to be published. Only about 8% of queries answered have been published in 60 days or more.

# of experts quoted

For the articles where experts were quoted with links to their websites, we found that:

• In 58% of cases, there were 1-3 experts in the article.
• In 26% of articles - 4-7 experts.
• In 16% of articles - more than seven experts were quoted.

Dofollow / nofollow links ratio

We’ve analyzed 500 random articles from DR50+ media outlets that contain links to experts’ websites and found that exactly 80% of these links are dofollow.

Best day for pitching

Tuesday is the best day for pitching, with a 26% higher-than-average conversion rate. Monday is the weakest day for pitching, with a 17% lower-than-average conversion rate.

When to respond to queries

Responses made within the first 6 hours of the queries appearing on HARO have a 20% higher chance of getting picked, compared to the average conversion rate.

There is one exception, though, and that is for queries with a deadline of three days or more. You might expect a 20% higher conversion rate (compared to the average) if you respond during the final six hours of the deadline.