Definition of ‘Content Debt’
Content debt is the sum of resources required to maintain one or more content assets over time. It’s typically expressed as an annualised time or monetary cost, such as 30 hours per annum or $2,100 per annum.
Content debt can be calculated by aggregating the resources required to review, update and/or retire all relevant content assets. It’s required to calculate your content hygiene budget, and can also be useful for comparing the true cost of different content strategies. Certain content assets, such as time-bound and ephemeral assets, may have little to no associated content debt.
Treat ‘content debt’ as a common noun phrase.
‘Content Debt’ Example
VP of Marketing: “How much will it cost to produce 30 blog posts?”
Content Strategist: “We can expect each blog post to cost an average of $250 to write. Briefing and keyword/user research adds an additional $90 per post. Based on historical averages, editing costs $200 per post. We then have design and development costs, which, on average, come to $55 per post. Each post also comes with an average content debt of $30 per year.
“That’s an average of $625 per post, which, with an overrun margin of 15%, comes to $719 per post for a total of $21,570. We’ll then need to service our content debt, which will come to $1,035 per year.”
Variations
N/A
Conflicting Definitions of ‘Content Debt’
Some sources define content debt as the cost of failing to maintain assets (rather than the cost of maintaining them), such as the opportunity cost when poor information architecture means content can’t be found by users.