If you want to know what it costs to publish each individual article on your website, this article will explain how to do the calculations. It can be hard to estimate your total publishing costs because there are several steps involved in the process of creating an article and distributing it.
I often use a batch process as well, which means I research groups of topics, obtain groups of photos, and write groups of articles at the same time instead of doing each step separately for each article. It’s faster that way and I know other writers who do the same thing. That makes it harder to allocate costs to an article, but if you know how much time you spend on each task you can estimate the cost to create a single article.
The first step is creating a table that lists every task in the publishing process and the amount of time you spent on that task. For example, if you worked on several tasks to publish a batch of 10 articles your time spent on each task might look like this:
Research | Writing | Editing | Uploading | Fact Checking | Distributing | |
Batch 1 | 40 | 20 | 10 | 5 | 5 | 10 |
If you have workers helping you, multiply the amount of hours spent on each task by the worker’s pay rate to calculate the cost of each step. If you’re doing the work yourself, set a pay rate based on what you’d earn if you were doing another job.
Here’s a table that demonstrates how to determine the cost of each step in the process when you have workers who earn different pay rates:
Research | Writing | Editing | Uploading | Fact Checking | Distributing | |
Cost Per Hour | $20.00 | $30.00 | $30.00 | $20.00 | $20.00 | $40.00 |
Batch 1 | $800.00 | $600.00 | $300.00 | $100.00 | $100.00 | $400.00 |
You might want to consider splitting research up into multiple categories here because this category could include keyword research, travel expenses, photography, and even things like library fees. But in this example I’ll just combine all of the research costs into a single category.
Also, if you’re not paying workers by the hour, you don’t need to track their time to calculate expenses this way. Just use the total compensation you paid them for their work on the project instead.
Then you just have to add up the costs of producing the batch of articles and divide them by the number of articles you published to estimate the cost of creating each individual article.
Production Costs | Total Articles | |
Batch 1 | $2,300.00 | 10 |
The calculations show that the cost of publishing each article, including every step involved in the publishing process, is $230. This is an estimate. For a B2B SaaS startup this cost might be a lot higher and for another publisher it might be a lot lower.
Some of these costs might not apply to every publisher either. For example, a publisher might not need to handle distribution if it’s creating content for a company that has another agency handling that task. I created this paper as a guide for niche site owners who are managing their own sites.
This guide is also meant to help you estimate your operating costs so it doesn’t consider fixed costs, administrative costs, or other expenses. These expenses include bills like rent for an office, the costs of software and computers, and managers’ salaries. I might write another article about those topics later.
But a publisher also needs to earn enough revenue to cover these expenses and that might require them to generate twice as much revenue per article. For example, the publisher might need to earn $460 per article to break even after considering these additional costs.
I’ll explain how to calculate revenue in another article. Again, the point of this article is to show you how to estimate the total cost of publishing a single article.