Press Releases - who reads them and how do they help?

[zach]

Hi

There has been a lot of talk on this board recently about Press Releases and sites like PRWeb. Looking at the website, I see loads of people advertising products and so on through press releases, but I do not see who would read these releases. I was wondernig whether anyone knows where these releases go after you publish them and who reads them.

Is the benifit that of having real people read your releases (and hence organic traffic), or in having your link posted on many sites (and hence more PR and crawls).

Thanks

Zach