The thesis
Content behaves like a portfolio of depreciating assets. Treat it like one.
An article published two years ago that still brings in forty qualified visits a month is not an expense from 2024. It is a producing asset with a maintenance cost, a decay curve and a residual value. Most organisations have never calculated any of the three.
The consequences are predictable. Budgets go entirely to new production while the existing portfolio quietly decays. Nobody knows which pieces produce and which merely exist, so nothing is ever retired. And when the finance director asks what content returns, marketing produces an impressions figure, which persuades nobody and deserves not to.
We apply straightforward asset management to the problem: inventory the portfolio, measure contribution, model decay, calculate maintenance cost against residual value, and produce a schedule of what to refresh, what to consolidate and what to remove.
It is not glamorous work. It is, in our experience, the single highest-return analytical exercise available to a marketing function that already publishes at volume.
- Inventory — every asset, its cost, its age and its current contribution
- Contribution — attributed pipeline, validated against holdout testing
- Decay — the rate at which each content class loses value untreated
- Disposition — refresh, consolidate, retire, with the expected return of each