Free tool
How much does your content
actually cost?
Every article takes 11.5 hours of internal work before anyone writes a word. Strategy, research, briefing, revisions, SEO, QA, formatting, distribution. Adjust the sliders to see your real numbers.
Per article
$575
11.5h x $50
Per month
$2,875
5 articles x $575
Per year
$34,500
Internal labor only. No tools. No writing fees.
That is 33% of a full-time employee
690 hours/year spent on content operations (2,080 hours = 1 FTE)
At your rate, here is what each task costs
$34,500/year in hidden labor
Send this to your team so everyone sees the real number.
Where does this number come from?
We analyzed 8 industry sources to map every task that happens around an article, before and after the writing itself.
11.5h
Internal labor per article
10 tasks your team does even when you outsource the writing: strategy, keyword research, briefing, revisions, SEO optimization, QA, formatting, CMS upload, distribution, and monitoring.
8 sources
Research-backed breakdown
Every hour estimate links to its source: Orbit Media, Ahrefs, Content Marketing Institute, HubSpot, SEMrush, and others. Read the full research.
Why this matters
The bottleneck is not writing
AI made writing faster. But strategy, quality control, optimization, and distribution still take the same time. When teams try to scale content, they hit a wall. Not because they cannot produce more text, but because everything around the text does not scale.
Most budgets miss the biggest line item
Teams budget for tools ($200-500/mo) and writing ($50-500/article). They rarely budget for the internal hours. At 5 articles per month, that is 57.5 hours of work that shows up as "marketing overhead" rather than a content cost.
Doubling output means doubling operations
Going from 5 to 10 articles per month does not just double your writing costs. It doubles the coordination, QA, formatting, and management overhead. Without a system to absorb that, you are hiring before you realize it.
How we calculated the cost per article
We broke the content production process into 10 distinct tasks that happen around every SEO article, from initial topic selection through post-publish monitoring. Each task was benchmarked against industry data from Orbit Media, Content Marketing Institute, Ahrefs, HubSpot, SEMrush, and others.
The 11.5 hours include content strategy and topic selection, keyword research and SERP analysis, writer briefing, feedback and revisions, SEO optimization, quality assurance, CMS formatting, distribution preparation, performance monitoring, and project management overhead. This is the work your team does even when the actual writing is outsourced.
The hourly rate defaults to $50/hr, based on Glassdoor salary data for content marketing managers (median ~$75K/year) with the MIT overhead multiplier of 1.325x for benefits, taxes, workspace, and equipment. Adjust the slider above to match your team's actual rate.
For the full task-by-task breakdown with individual sources, read the complete research methodology.
What if this cost dropped by 80%?
Contentship handles the 11.5-hour operational layer for you. The ROI Calculator shows what that looks like with your specific numbers.