Why content costs what it costs

When we look at what our own clarifying questions were about, content is the second largest category: 1,247 of 6,894, or 18.1%, behind only brand assets. It is also, in our experience, the most common single reason a technically finished website sits unlaunched for weeks — the build is done and the words are not.

Part of why this happens is that content is consistently underestimated, because the visible part of it — someone typing — is the cheapest part.

Where the money actually goes

The second row is where budgets die. A writer who cannot reach the person who actually knows the answer either waits, which costs schedule, or invents, which costs credibility. Content about a specialist subject written without access to a specialist reads exactly like what it is, and no amount of revision fixes it because the missing ingredient is information rather than craft.

The problem with per-word pricing

Almost all content is priced per word, because it is measurable and comparable. It also creates a direct incentive to write more words, which is precisely the opposite of what makes a page useful.

The tell is the article that takes four hundred words to reach the answer that a reader wanted in the first paragraph. That structure exists because length was the unit of value, and it performs badly for the same reason it was written: nobody stayed to reach the point.

Pricing per piece, with a brief that defines what the piece must accomplish, aligns the incentives better. The constraint becomes whether the reader got the answer, not whether the file hit a count.

The most expensive content

Content that gets written twice. It happens for a small number of predictable reasons, and all of them are decided before anybody writes anything:

• Nobody agreed who the reader is, so the draft is pitched at the wrong level and the fix is a rewrite rather than an edit.
• Nobody agreed what the piece is for. Informing, ranking and selling produce three different articles from the same brief.
• The approver was not involved in the brief, and sees the work for the first time as a finished draft.
• Tone was described rather than shown. Professional but friendly means something different to everyone who has ever said it.

The fourth is the easiest to fix and the most often skipped. Show two examples of published writing you like and one you do not, with a sentence each on why. That does more than any adjective, and it takes ten minutes.

How much content do you actually need

Less than most content plans assume. A site with fifteen pages that each answer a real question thoroughly outperforms one with sixty thin pages, and it is cheaper to produce and far cheaper to maintain — every page is a thing that will eventually be out of date and need revisiting.

The useful discipline is to write down the question each page answers before commissioning it. Pages that cannot be reduced to a question somebody actually asks are the ones that end up as filler, and they are also the first ones a reader bounces from.