Your published piece costs more than the writing time

A client’s CFO once asked me what a published article cost them. The content lead had a sensible answer for the writer’s fee and a rough one for design, then the room went quiet: nobody had counted the product expert’s review, the two rounds of factual corrections, the week the piece sat in an approval queue, or the person who added metadata and loaded it into the CMS.

The visible work has an owner and a timesheet. The work around it is scattered across calendars, Slack threads, agency invoices and the goodwill of people whose real job is somewhere else, so a team can speed up drafting and still publish at the same rate because the queue after the draft has not moved.

I would measure cost per published piece and keep elapsed time beside it. Those two figures show whether a change has created capacity or simply made the first stage faster.

Amplience modelled the cost of a banner-and-social kit at $1,136, with $550 for design and copy and $586 for briefing, localisation, checks, approvals and handoffs. Its vendor-produced model covers a retail-style asset rather than a B2B article, yet the split gives shape to a cost many teams feel without seeing. Read the full cost breakdown from Amplience.

Your own workflow determines what an article costs. Map it before you decide where to invest, because the creator’s hours can make up only half the cost of getting an asset safely into the market.

I see teams buy a faster drafting tool, report that first drafts now take less time, and still have no more published work by quarter-end. The savings on the task disappear into the operation: the same unclear brief, the same subject-matter expert who reviews when they have a spare hour, the same legal or leadership queue, and the same manual publishing work at the end.

When budgets are tight, “content feels slow” is not much of a case for investment. Show where paid and internal time goes, where work waits, and which constraint stops the next piece from being published.

Start with one asset your team produces regularly: perhaps a monthly B2B article, a product update, or a campaign landing page. Choose a workflow with enough volume that a better process would matter, then track ten recently published pieces if you have them. Five is enough to begin if the team is small.

For each piece, record these fields in one sheet:

1. Intake and briefing: time spent choosing the angle, gathering source material, agreeing the audience and answering questions from the creator.
2. Creation: writer, designer, editor and contractor hours, plus any direct fees.
3. Subject-matter and factual review: each reviewer’s active time, including corrections that come back to the creator.
4. Revision rounds: count them and record the active time for each. A revision round tells you whether the brief, the source material or the decision rights are failing upstream.
5. Approval queue: the date the piece entered approval and the date it cleared. This is elapsed time rather than labour cost, but it belongs on the sheet.
6. Localisation and adaptation: translation, market checks, regional claims, resizing, channel versions and associated fees.
7. Publishing and distribution setup: CMS entry, metadata, links, image preparation, tracking, email or social setup.
8. Post-publication work: the initial performance check and any correction required after publishing.

For labour, use each person’s loaded hourly cost where finance can provide it. If that is too difficult for the first pass, use the same internal planning rate for comparable roles and mark the figure as an estimate. Add contractor and software costs that belong specifically to the asset.

cost per published piece = active internal labour + external fees + asset-specific production costs

Then place two dates beside the total: when the work was approved to start and when it was published. The difference is cycle time, where approval delay appears even when it barely shows up in the labour total.

A seven-day wait for executive sign-off might cost only a few minutes of active chasing, yet it prevents the article from supporting a launch, holds up the next task for the same reviewer, and makes the content calendar look fuller than it is. It is a blockage.