What a content programme actually costs

The standard content business case projects sessions. It is the wrong unit, and presenting it invites exactly the response it always gets — that traffic is not revenue, which is true.

Paid media does not have this problem because its numbers arrive in the language finance already uses. Spend, cost per acquisition, payback. When content is presented in sessions and paid is presented in acquisition cost, the comparison is not close, and content loses to a channel it may well beat on a two-year view.

The fix is not better forecasting. It is converting the same forecast into the same units: what does a customer acquired through content cost, and how long before the programme repays what it cost to make?

A defensible model needs four numbers, and being honest about two of them is what separates a credible case from an ignored one.

An article does not earn its target traffic in its first month. It climbs — slowly at first, then more steadily — over a period that is rarely under six months for anything competitive. That curve is the whole reason content's payback looks different from paid media's.

The error is multiplying maturity traffic by the number of months. That treats every month as though the content were already ranking, and it understates payback by roughly half the ramp period. The correct approach sums value across the climb: month one contributes a fraction of maturity, month two slightly more, and so on until it levels off.

In practice, break-even tends to land shortly after maturity for a well-scoped programme. That is a satisfying result to present, because it is intuitive — the programme repays itself about when it starts performing — and because it is not the wildly favourable number that makes people suspicious.

Content is routinely modelled as a one-off cost, and it is not. Rankings erode as competitors publish, information dates, and search intent shifts. A page left untouched for three years loses ground, and the traffic line in your forecast does not.

Charging an annual refresh cost — a share of original production, per year — changes the shape of the case materially. It lowers the return, lengthens payback slightly, and makes the whole model credible. A finance team that has seen a content case with no ongoing cost has seen a model that assumes the asset maintains itself, and they are right to discount everything else on the page.

It also changes what you should commission. If refresh is a real budget line, the case for fewer, better pieces gets stronger — a large volume of thin content is not just weaker on ranking, it is more expensive to keep alive.

When the arithmetic is done properly, content usually looks good on a two-year horizon and poor on a one-quarter horizon. That is not a flaw in the model; it is an accurate description of the channel.

The most effective way to present it is to concede the point before it is raised. Paid media will beat this in quarter one and it will not be close. Content's cost stops while media spend does not, so somewhere in year two the ranking flips, and after that the gap widens every month you keep not spending on media.

That framing turns the decision into the one it actually is — whether the business can fund a channel that pays back over eighteen months — rather than an argument about whether content works. Companies with tight cash have a legitimate reason to say no to that, and it is a better conversation than debating traffic forecasts nobody believes.