Do you know how much your content costs?: December 02, 2002 issue of New Thinking

December 02, 2002 New Thinking:
Do you know how much your content costs?

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December 02, 2002

Do you know how much your content costs?

By Gerry McGovern

The creation of content is a significant and increasing cost for many organizations. However, few managers know how much they are spending on content. If you're not measuring the cost of content, you can't evaluate the return on investment it creates. If you can't measure content, you can't manage it.

Let's say you send 40 emails a day and spend an average of 3 minutes on each one. That's 120 minutes. Let's say your total cost of employment is USD100 per hour. That's a total cost per day of USD200. For a 230 day working year, that's USD46,000.

Let's say there are 1,000 people in your organization with the same email habits and cost of employment. That's USD46 million a year your organization spends on sending emails. What value do you get for that USD46 million spend?

There are 31 billion emails sent everyday. In a couple of years, there will be 60 billion. For many organizations, email is reaching a crisis point. More and more pointless emails are being sent, wasting the time of the sender and receiver.

This is an unmanageable and highly unproductive situation. Again and again, I come across situations where staff are ignoring emails (particularly internal ones).

That report sitting on your desk, how much did it cost to create? A short report could easily eat up 10 hours of time. Complex reports can eat up hundreds of hours. That presentation you gave last week, how much did it cost to put together?

It's not good enough to say that the cost of content is too difficult to measure. Not measuring the cost of content has lead to a situation where many people treat content in a casual and unprofessional manner. This is one reason why so much poor quality content is being created.

I heard a speaker at a conference recently say that there are 800,000 pages on the Microsoft.com website that have never been accessed. Do you think that Microsoft would produce 800,000 copies of Windows 95 that will never be sold?

If public websites are bad, intranets are horrendous. All the time, I come across big, murky swamps, where dead, rotting documents pollute the atmosphere. Staff avoid the intranet like a plague, knowing that to go there is a guaranteed waste of time.

Time is our most valuable resource. Why do we waste it so casually by creating content that nobody will ever read?

Let's say that half of the emails you send everyday are unnecessary. That's USD100 wasted. Would it be acceptable to waste USD100 every day on unnecessary taxis, business lunches, stationary?

Of course, the cost of content is not a single-sided equation. There is also the receiver's cost of reading (or deleting) the content. So, people who create unnecessary content are not just wasting their own time; they're wasting everybody else's as well. (The worst offenders are those who 'cc' or send group emails.)

Measure the cost of your content and you will be in for a big shock. Yes, it does cost you that much every year!

As you're poring over those scary figures, remember the golden rule of content: less is more.

And think about this: If you halved the amount of content you could halve your costs and double your productivity.

Remember, there's no such thing as free content.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Thinking should come before communication
Previous issue: Intranet communications versus traditional communications

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Gerry McGovern's books are recommended reading at the following universities

Augustana College, United States
Brandeis University, United States
Drury University, United States
Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Indiana University, United States
Monash University, Australia
Northeastern University, United States
University of Applied Sciences, Germany
University of Regina, Canada
University of Teesside, UK
Manchester Metropolitan University

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