When does content pay for itself?
Content loses budget arguments to paid media it would beat over two years, because nobody models the payback period. This does.
Your numbers
Research, writing, editing, design and publishing — fully loaded.
Monthly organic sessions once it has settled at its ranking.
Rarely under six for a competitive term.
Organic content converts well below a product page. Be pessimistic.
Margin, not revenue.
Of production cost, per year. Rankings erode without updating.
For the comparison below.
Break-even month
Month 9
$21,600 of production repaid by cumulative contribution.
Value at maturity
$4,704/mo
$1 per session, across all 12 pieces.
Net after 24 months
$66,192
+306% on production cost.
Content CAC (24 mo)
$44
$30,240 of production and refresh, over 689 conversions.
Your paid CAC
$210
Recurs on every customer, forever.
Break-even lands in month 9 and acquisition costs $44 against $210 on paid — and unlike paid, that cost does not repeat next year. The catch is the 8-month wait, which is why this loses budget arguments to a channel that shows results in a week. It is a cash-flow objection, not an economics one.
Calculated in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing is stored.
The maths, so it isn't a black box.
It integrates across the ramp
An article does not earn its target traffic in month one — it climbs over several months. Cumulative value has to be summed across that climb rather than multiplied by a flat rate. Treating maturity traffic as immediate is the most common modelling error and it understates payback by roughly half the ramp period.
Value per session comes from margin
Sessions multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by contribution per conversion. Using revenue instead of contribution is what produces the wildly optimistic content business cases nobody believes.
Refresh cost is charged, not ignored
Content is not a one-off cost. Rankings erode without updating, so we deduct an annual refresh charge from every month's return and include two years of it in the CAC figure. Leaving it out is what produces the implausible content business cases that finance teams correctly dismiss.
It computes a content CAC you can compare
Total two-year cost — production plus refresh — divided by the customers acquired in that window. This is the only fair way to set content against paid media, and it still usually favours content.
The comparison is deliberately unfair to content
Paid CAC recurs on every customer forever, while content's cost curve flattens. We still compare them inside a fixed twenty-four month window, which handicaps content. If it wins anyway, the case is strong.
Traffic is held flat after maturity, so read it as a ceiling
We apply a refresh cost rather than guessing at a decay rate, and hold sessions flat once mature. If your programme is not actually refreshed, real traffic will fall below this line and the output is optimistic.
Questions about this calculation
Take the actual monthly search volume of the terms you are targeting and apply a realistic click-through rate for the position you can genuinely reach — not position one. For a competitive term where you would land around position five, single-digit percentages of volume is a defensible estimate. The most common failure in content business cases is assuming top-of-page rankings for terms you are not going to win.
Terms used here
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Where we do this work
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