A media monitoring service tracks what is published about your company, your competitors and your market, and reports it back to you. That single sentence covers two products that behave nothing alike: a platform, which gives your team a dashboard and leaves the reading to them, and a managed service, which does the reading and sends you the conclusions.
Most buyers start looking for the first and eventually want the second. This hub explains the difference, what drives the price in each model, and which one fits the way your team actually works.
Every media monitoring service performs the same four jobs. Where products differ is how many of them you are left holding.
Collection. Ingesting news, trade press, broadcast, social platforms, filings, regulatory publications and tender portals. This is the part vendors compete on loudest, and the part that has largely commoditised: most serious platforms see most of the same public web.
Filtering. Reducing that volume to what concerns you. Platforms do this with boolean queries and saved searches that someone on your team writes and maintains. Managed services do it against a scope you agree once.
Interpretation. Deciding what an item means for your business. No platform does this. It is the step that turns coverage into a decision, and it is almost always the step that quietly falls to whoever has the least time.
Distribution. Getting the result in front of the people who act on it. A daily digest nobody opens fails here even when collection and filtering worked perfectly.
Neither model is better in the abstract. They fail in different places, and the right question is which failure your team can absorb.
A platform fits when you have an operator. Someone whose job includes maintaining queries, tuning noise, running reports and writing the summary. With that person in place, a platform is excellent value and gives you self-serve depth on demand.
A managed service fits when you do not. If the licence is shared between people who each have another full-time role, the platform degrades into an alert stream nobody reads. Paying for coverage you never process is the most common way this budget is wasted.
The cost comparison is usually mis-drawn. Buyers compare a platform licence against a service fee. The honest comparison is the licence **plus the fraction of a salary that operates it** against the service fee, because the service fee includes that work.
They are not mutually exclusive. If you already hold a licence with coverage or archive rights you value, keep it. A managed service can read your licensed exports as one source layer among others rather than replacing the contract.
Almost no vendor in this category publishes a price list, which makes the market hard to compare. The variables that move a quote are consistent, though, and knowing them shortens the negotiation.
Seats. Platform pricing is usually per-user and per-year. Seats are also where cost grows fastest, because the people who would benefit from reading are rarely the people who hold licences.
Licensed content. Print, broadcast and paywalled publisher content carry separate licensing costs, often through a copyright agency. Public web monitoring is much cheaper than full media coverage.
Markets and languages. Each additional country and language adds sources, and in Europe that multiplies quickly.
History and exports. Archive depth and data export rights are frequently priced as add-ons rather than included.
Contract length. Annual commitments are the norm in this category. Ask what happens at renewal before you sign the first term.
We do not publish figures for third-party vendors here, because quotes vary by an order of magnitude with the variables above and a stale number would mislead you more than no number.
That is the gap the Market Signal Desk fills. You set the scope once, and one brief a week arrives with 8 to 12 source-linked signals, each carrying the implication for your business and a suggested next move, reviewed by a senior analyst before it sends. Unlimited readers, nothing to log into.
A media monitoring service tracks what is published about your company, competitors and market across news, trade press, broadcast, social and regulatory sources, and reports it back to you. It exists in two forms: a platform, where your team writes the queries and reads the results, and a managed service, where a provider does the filtering and analysis and sends you a finished brief.
Media monitoring tells you what has been published. Competitive intelligence tells you what it means and what to do about it, and draws on sources beyond media: regulators, payers, tenders, filings, trial registries and standards bodies. Monitoring is an input to intelligence, not a substitute for it.
Almost no vendor publishes pricing, and quotes vary by an order of magnitude depending on seats, licensed print and broadcast content, number of markets and languages, archive depth and export rights. Contracts are typically annual. When you compare options, compare the licence plus the internal time needed to operate it against a managed fee, because the managed fee already includes that work.
Google Alerts covers a fraction of the indexed web, misses most trade and regulatory publications, and offers no filtering, weighting or analysis. It is a reasonable free tripwire for your own brand name. It is not a basis for competitive or regulatory decisions.
Yes. If you hold a licence with coverage or archive rights you value, a managed service can treat your licensed exports as one source layer among others. That is usually cheaper than replacing a contract mid-term and keeps your archive intact.