Marketing, Not Content, is King

For the last few years we’ve been hearing that content is king on the Web, leading one to think that the main cost of running a content site is the content itself. Not so — according to Forrester Research, content is second in the cost hierarchy, after sales and marketing.

The real problem for content sites is attracting viewers to their material. This is why web sites are having to spend more and more on sales and marketing costs. The cost of a typical content site has risen, according to Forrester’s figures, by more than 300 percent in the past two years. Currently typical costs are about $3.1 million, the research firm said, and will double to $6.3 million by 2000.

Forrester based these figures on interviews with managers of 38 content sites and on detailed cost information for a number of sites, ranging from sites with fewer than a million page views per month to some with more than 10 million.

While revenues will rise over the next couple of years, Bill Bass, director of media technology said, costs will rise just as fast, so the operators will in a sense be stuck on a treadmill. Eventually, he said, Web traffic will reach the point where revenues start to pull ahead of costs, and content sites will start making money.

Forrester Research is at http://www.forrester.com on the Web.

(Contact: Forrester Research, 617-497-7090, fax 617-868-0577)