What to Include in a Media Kit
A media kit answers seven questions: who reads you, how many, what you sell, what it costs, what your link policy is, who to contact, and how fast you reply.
The one that decides the deal: a number attached to the audience.
The one most sites skip: price. Two thirds of the pages we read never mention one.
Format it as a live web page, not a gated PDF.
We read 221 live publisher submission pages in September 2026 and scored each one against those seven sections, to see what a buyer can learn without sending an email.
The median page carries 2 of the 7. Only 6 pages carried six or more.
62% state a word count, but only 24% state an audience size and 36% state a fee.
112 of 221 pages state neither audience nor price. That is half the sample.
222 URLs attempted, 221 read, 1 could not be checked. Measured 1 September 2026.
Who a media kit is actually for
Most advice about media kits is written for creators pitching brand sponsorships. This page is about the other version: the kit a blog or website publishes so that people who want to appear on it can work out, without asking, whether it is worth their time and money.
The reader you are writing for is not a fan. It is somebody with a budget and a shortlist, comparing your site against nine others in an afternoon. They have one question that comes before every other question, which is whether you are in range. If your page does not answer it, they either send an email to find out or they move to the next site on the list. Most move on.
That framing changes what belongs on the page. A creator media kit leads with personality and past collaborations. A publisher media kit leads with a number, a price and a policy, because those are the three things that let a stranger make a decision alone.
The seven sections
Every question a buyer needs answered before they can say yes falls into one of seven groups. This is the checklist we scored our sample against.
- Audience, with a number. Who reads the site and how many of them there are.
- What you sell and what it costs. The formats available and a price or a range.
- Link and disclosure policy. How many links, which attributes, and how paid placements are labelled.
- Editorial rules. Length, topics you take, topics you refuse.
- Author or byline requirement. Whether a bio is allowed and what goes in it.
- A named contact. An address that reaches a person.
- Reply time. How long a sender waits before assuming no.
None of these needs a paragraph. Each one compresses to a line. The reason to treat them as a fixed list is that a buyer scanning quickly is looking for the absence of an answer, and a missing line reads as a risk rather than an oversight.
What publishers really put on the page
We took the 222 sites in our guest posting sites dataset, fetched each submission page live on 1 September 2026, stripped the markup and tested the text for each of the seven signals. 221 pages returned readable content. One could not be checked and is excluded rather than counted as a zero.
The result is a picture of an industry that documents its rules carefully and hides its commercial terms.
| Section | Pages stating it | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Word count or length rule | 137 | 62% |
| Contact email on the page | 109 | 49% |
| Link or attribute policy | 82 | 37% |
| A fee, price or rate | 80 | 36% |
| Author bio or byline rule | 74 | 33% |
| Audience or traffic number | 53 | 24% |
| Reply time or turnaround | 33 | 15% |
The order matters more than the individual figures. The three best covered items are all rules the publisher wants the writer to follow. The three worst covered are all facts the buyer needs in order to decide. Publishers are writing these pages to filter inbound work, not to sell placements, and the two goals want different pages.
The distribution is starker than the averages. Scored out of seven, the median page carries 2. Nineteen pages carry none of the seven at all. Only six pages in the whole sample carry six or more, and just two carry the full set.
| Sections present | Pages |
|---|---|
| 0 | 19 |
| 1 | 44 |
| 2 | 49 |
| 3 | 44 |
| 4 | 39 |
| 5 | 20 |
| 6 | 4 |
| 7 | 2 |
The single most useful finding for anyone writing a kit this week: 112 of the 221 pages state neither an audience number nor a price. Half the market gives a buyer nothing to evaluate. Twenty four pages state both. Twelve state both and also publish a contact address, which is the complete set of what a buyer needs to act without a back and forth.
Coverage also varies by subject. Among the niches with at least eight pages in the sample, SaaS publishers are the most willing to name a price and travel publishers the least.
| Niche | Pages | State a fee | State an audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS | 25 | 60% | 28% |
| Marketing | 39 | 41% | 33% |
| Technology | 32 | 31% | 28% |
| Business | 20 | 30% | 25% |
| Education | 10 | 30% | 30% |
| Health | 17 | 18% | 24% |
| Travel | 19 | 16% | 11% |
Audience numbers and how to state them
Three quarters of publishers give no audience figure. That is the gap worth taking, because it costs one line and it is the line the buyer scans for first.
State a number you can defend and name its source. Monthly visitors from analytics is the default, but it is not the only option and it is often not the best one. Newsletter subscribers is a stronger signal for a small site because the number is owned rather than borrowed from search. Average time on page suits a site with a slow, loyal readership. For a niche publication, the composition of the readership beats its size: two thousand procurement managers is a better pitch than fifty thousand unsorted visitors.
Two rules keep this section honest. Attach a date, because a figure without one decays into a claim. And do not publish a number you would not show in analytics if asked, since the buyers who matter will eventually ask. If you are unsure what a realistic figure looks like at your size, our note on how many backlinks a site needs covers the same trap on the acquisition side.
Rates, and whether to publish them
Publishing a price is the most contested item on the list. The argument against is that it caps what you can charge a large buyer. The argument for is everything in our data: two thirds of publishers do not publish one, so a stated price is a differentiator, and every unstated price costs an email round trip before the buyer knows whether to continue.
The middle position that works is a range with the variables named. State the floor, state what moves the price up, and reserve the right to quote. Something like a starting rate for a standard placement, a higher band for competitive categories, and a note that multi-post agreements are quoted separately.
Set the number against what the market pays rather than what feels right. We keep a separate breakdown of real publisher quotes in how much backlinks cost, and the equivalent for bulk local listings in citation building packages. Both are useful for calibrating a rate card, because they show the range a buyer is comparing you against.
If you sell more than one thing, list the formats separately. A sponsored review, a link inserted into an existing article and a full contributed post are three different products with three different costs to you, and collapsing them into one price loses money on the expensive one and deters buyers on the cheap one.
Link and disclosure policy
37% of the pages we read say something about links. This is the section that protects you, and it is worth being specific rather than diplomatic.
Say how many links a placement includes, whether they are followed, and how a paid placement is labelled. Publishers who take payment and mark the link with the sponsored attribute are following Google's stated guidance. Publishers who take payment and pass a followed link without disclosure are carrying the risk for both parties. Say which one you are, because the buyer is deciding whether your site is a liability.
Also state what you will not do. A short refusal list, covering the categories you decline and the anchor text you will not accept, saves more time than any other line on the page. For the buyer's side of this trade, our backlink audit guide covers how these placements get judged after the fact, and buying backlinks covers the risk being priced in.
Editorial rules
This is the one part publishers already do well. 62% state a word count, and it is the single most common thing on a submission page. Keep it, and add the two things that usually go missing next to it: the topics you actually publish and the topics you refuse.
A list of accepted subjects does more filtering work than a word count does, because most bad submissions are off topic rather than short. Our vertical pages show what a tightly scoped version reads like in practice, for example write for us fitness, write for us roofing and write for us beauty. Each states a narrow subject range, and the narrowness is the point.
Contact and reply time
Half the pages we read publish an email address. Only 15% say how long a reply takes, which makes reply time the rarest item in the entire sample and therefore the cheapest one to win on.
Give a named address rather than a role inbox where you can. A role address is fine operationally, but a name signals that a person reads the queue. Then state the window: five working days, ten, whatever is true. The purpose is not speed. It is telling the sender when to stop waiting, which prevents the follow up chain that makes both sides resent the exchange.
If your inbound volume is heavy enough that you cannot answer everything, say that too. A line saying you reply only to submissions that fit is more respectful than silence, and it lowers the number of follow ups you have to ignore. Our notes on guest post pitch templates show the sender's side of that same problem.
Format, length and where to host it
Publish it as a live page on your own domain with a stable URL. Every one of the 221 pages in our sample was a public URL, which is why they were readable at all. A kit that exists only as a PDF behind an email form cannot be compared against nine other sites in an afternoon, cannot be quoted in an internal budget request and cannot be indexed.
Keep it to one screen. The six pages in our sample carrying six or seven signals do it inside a normal page, not a slide deck. Length is not what makes a kit convincing, and a long one usually signals that the numbers are missing and prose is filling the gap.
Offer a PDF only when a buyer asks for one, and generate it from the same page so the two never disagree. A rate card that contradicts the live page is worse than having no PDF at all.
Media kit versus write for us page
These are different documents with an overlapping middle, and most sites publish only the second one. A write for us page sells the chance to contribute, and its reader is a writer. A media kit sells access to an audience, and its reader is a buyer with a budget.
The shared part is the editorial rules. The parts that belong only in the kit are the audience numbers, the rates and the link policy, which is exactly the set our data shows going missing. If you run one page today, the cheapest upgrade is to add those three blocks to it rather than build a second page, since the traffic and the links already point at the page you have.
Run two pages only when the audiences genuinely diverge, which usually means you sell display or newsletter inventory as well as editorial placements. For most sites, one page with a rate section is the right shape. For context on the surrounding market, our guest posting services and guest posting guides cover how buyers approach these pages.
What loses the deal
Four patterns come up repeatedly in the pages we read, and each one is fixable in a line.
No number anywhere. The most common failure, present on the 112 of 221 pages that give neither audience nor price. The buyer cannot qualify you, so they qualify someone else.
Rules without terms. A page that specifies word count, formatting and bio length but never mentions what a placement costs is a page written for the wrong reader. It filters writers and repels buyers.
An undated traffic claim. A visitor figure with no date attached ages badly and reads as marketing rather than measurement. Put the month next to it and refresh it on a schedule.
A gated PDF. Anything that requires an email before the price is visible adds a step at the exact moment the buyer is deciding whether to bother. Publish the page, keep the file for people who ask.
If you are on the other side of this exchange and trying to evaluate publishers rather than attract them, our link building checklist and backlink exchange platforms cover what to look for, and software listing sites and SaaS directories cover the placements that need no kit at all.
How we measured this
We started from the 222 sites in our guest posting dataset, each with a live submission URL recorded in August 2026. On 1 September 2026 we fetched every URL, removed script and style blocks, flattened the remaining markup to text and tested each page for seven patterns covering audience figures, fees, contact addresses, word counts, link attributes, turnaround statements and bio requirements.
221 pages returned readable content. One did not respond and is reported as could not be checked rather than counted as an absence. Pattern matching detects whether a page mentions something, not whether the mention is prominent or useful, so these figures are the ceiling on disclosure rather than the floor. The true share of pages that make a price easy to find is lower than 36 percent, not higher.
FAQ
What should a media kit include?
Seven things: who the audience is with a number attached, what you sell and what it costs, your link and disclosure policy, the editorial rules a submission has to meet, an author bio requirement if you have one, a named contact, and a response time. We scored 221 live publisher pages against that list in September 2026 and the median page carried only 2 of the 7.
Should a media kit show your prices?
Yes, if you want to cut the number of emails per deal. Of the 221 pages we read, 36 percent mentioned a fee or price and 24 percent stated an audience number. Only 12 pages did both of those and gave a contact address. A page that states neither forces the buyer to open a conversation just to find out whether you are in budget.
What is the difference between a media kit and a write for us page?
A write for us page sells the opportunity to contribute and is written for a writer. A media kit sells access to an audience and is written for a buyer with a budget. The overlap is the editorial rules. The parts that only belong in a media kit are the audience numbers, the rate card and the link policy.
How long should a media kit be?
One page or one screen. The seven sections each compress to a line or two, and the six pages in our sample that carried six or seven of the signals did it inside a normal page rather than a slide deck. Length is not what makes a kit convincing. Stating a number is.
Should a media kit be a PDF or a web page?
A web page, with a PDF only if a buyer asks. Every one of the 221 pages we read was a live URL, which is what made them findable and quotable in the first place. A PDF behind an email gate cannot be read by a buyer comparing ten sites in an afternoon, and it cannot be indexed.
Does a media kit need traffic numbers if the traffic is small?
State something specific rather than nothing. Three quarters of the pages we read gave no audience figure at all, so a small but stated number is already more than most competitors offer. If monthly visitors are modest, use the number that flatters the buyer instead: newsletter subscribers, average time on page, or the niche the readership sits in.