This is a follow-up to a previous post where we analysed who makes media requests on ResponseSource and what they ask for.

In this infographic we’ve drilled-down to those enquiries that are specifically about products – either products for review, as competition prizes, reader offers, give-aways or goody bags.

Product requests on ResponseSource can be valuable opportunities for brands that wish to get visibility for their wares, but sometimes such requests can be perceived as being a bit of a ‘blag’, especially when coming from low-profile media outlets and as lesser-known blogs. However there is a school of PR professionals and search marketers who believe that product reviews in blogs are very valuable and can drive online sales, so there are clearly two sides of the argument here.

Either way, it is of course possible to filter out product requests using the ResponseSource preferences system.

Back to the infographic, and the message here is that that vast majority of product requests come from staff journalists (62 per cent), and only a minority (15 per cent) come from bloggers. However, the proportion of product requests compared to others is much lower among staff journalists at 29 per cent, compared to bloggers of which 71 per cent of their enquiries are product related.

Freelance journalists do not represent big users of ResponseSource for product requests – they are behind 23 per cent of product requests and this is only 12 per cent of the total enquiries sent by freelancers.

This infographic is based on the same dataset as our previous one (May 2012 to May 2013).