Placing Value on Content

It is the action readers take when promoted or prompted that decides the value.

By Roy Beagley 10/10/2012 -02:34 PM

At the 2012 FMA Day annual conference in New York a few weeks ago, there was a great deal of talk about digital. Digital this, and digital that—my mind was awash in facts and figures.

At lunch we discussed the value of a publisher’s “content,” and how exactly do you arrive at that value? I put content into quotations as this word can cover a multitude of things: Web content, magazine content, newsletter content, content, content, content—in the end the word started to sound rather weird.

But, how do you value content and how do you know if you have valued your content correctly?

It would seem reasonable to presume that exclusive content has more value than non-exclusive content—reasonable, but not correct. This article only appears on Audience Development’s website, so it is exclusive, but it has no value unless people actually read it.  On the homepage there could be a news report that is also on many other websites and if that report is viewed more than this article, the report has greater value.

Magazines and newspapers write the same stories—Big Bird is the story du jour—and many people have written about the possible extinction of an extremely large ornithological canary-like creature on PBS. It is all the same story, but each newspaper and magazine that printed the story placed a different value on it.

Is the way the content is presented a factor? Why would a 72 page, four-color magazine be more valuable in a printed format than a digital format? I would venture to suggest the answer is it is not more valuable. Therefore, digital magazines should be priced the same as printed magazines because it is the content people are paying for, not the presentation—isn’t it?

Wel,l if recent results I have encountered are to be believed, you could conclude people ARE paying for the presentation rather than the content. I recently completed a renewal campaign in a market whose readers know everything there is to know about electronic content. This market was salivating for days waiting for the iPhone5 to come out because that is how the market loves to view their content. That is why 90 percent of the readers choosing to renew their subscription with the print edition was very surprising.

At FMA Day, if I had a glass of wine every time I heard  “content is king”, I would have a major liver problem now, but there is no denying content is king because without content we would have nothing to offer. Yet trying to value that content seems to be more problematic than it once was. So, how do you place a value on your content?  Well, I think the answer is to look at your content as a whole and not try to break it down too much.

From what I can gather from talking to industry experts, placing value on content is far from clear and contains a lot of guess work. I suggest you need to calculate what your costs are for maintaining each segment of your digital presence and then calculate your responses as best you can. If you have 50,000 likes on Facebook, how many of those 50,000 actually respond, if you have 1,000 people following you on Twitter, how many of them actually take action when asked to do so?

The better the response, the higher the value of your content. Unfortunately, there are so many variables it is difficult to set standards. It is not the number of Facebook likes you have, or followers on Twitter or connections on LinkedIn that is important. It is the action they take when promoted or prompted that decides the value—and the more you prompt, the better the response.

Roy Beagley is Director of Publishing Services for Tyson Associates Inc. Roy started his career at The Economist and then The Spectator in London. He moved to the United States in 1992 and since then he has worked with Tyson Associates handling many controlled and comsumer publications. He is editor of Circspot.com, a website for circulation and audience development professionals.