What breaks when content functions scale

Content functions can work intuitively on a small scale. With a strong editorial team, a few trusted writers, and an understanding of the voice, there is usually enough discipline to keep the calendar moving.

But some businesses aren’t built that way. For media organizations, large affiliate networks, entertainment properties, sports brands, and other content-led businesses, publishing in triple-digit volumes per day makes sense.

In some cases, it is necessary for survival because content is a business model rather than a marketing function, as is the case in many B2B organizations.

At that scale, content strategies don’t stop because of content. Often, they break down because economics, planning, and planning judgment stop talking.

Not all content categories can support that scale

That B2B distinction is important. If you’re selling a niche manufacturing ERP, you don’t need that scale of content. It is not enough to publish. You will be burning money and operating outside the market.

Some categories have the depth and audience interest needed to maintain hundreds of articles daily. Sports are an obvious example. There are games, trades, injuries, replays, rankings, interviews, opinions, commentators, storylines, and the list goes on.

A business like The Athletic can support significant publishing volume because the audience demand is real, while the revenue model includes subscriptions, direct sales, program display, affiliate revenue, and other under-the-hood sources.

In Q2 2025, Athletic generated $54 million in revenue, according to its last independent financial report. Of that, 64% comes from subscriptions, 26% comes from advertising, and 10% comes from affiliate and licensing revenue.

When most of the revenue comes from people who choose to pay enthusiastically, the quality of the programming is no longer a judgment call. It is a very important commercial requirement. Economics, planning, and planning judgment are forced to speak the same language.

Some models are very fragile. A very clear example is when monetization is driven primarily by a fixed display measured by RPM (say, more than 70% of revenue), content rewritten from existing coverage or produced close to short-term search and social opportunities, where margins require high productivity and very low production costs.

The formula is simple:

• Revenue = (Pageviews ÷ 1,000) × RPM
• Profit = ((Pageviews ÷ 1,000) × RPM) − Cost of Production

So if a website gets 4,000 page views per article at $16 RPM, it generates $64 in revenue.

Eliminate production costs. Margins are getting smaller quickly.

In order to make a meaningful profit, an organization has no choice but to publish hundreds of articles a day while doing everything it can to maintain quality, availability, and audience trust.

This is where these content strategies break down.

A content model that breaks under its own weight

More content can look like more income. But the spreadsheet tells only a small part of the story.

The numbers don’t reflect the quality of the planning, whether it’s producing less work to feed the machine, or making money decisions that are unwittingly weakening assets.

The data points where that drift begins. Points taken within CMS include:

• Content types.
• Sections.
• Markers.
• Author and editor attribution.

Reference sessions, page views, page views per session, session duration, RPM, source/average, and other metrics.

That allows analysts to examine content types by source, category, and tag, while providing visibility into top performers, opportunities to optimize the ad stack by content type, and more.

Here are some simple examples that highlight what it looks like in practice:

• The analyst runs a pivot table on the entertainment site and sees the top page views from Google Discover for each article within the content list in the television category tagged to a particular show. Since traffic equals more income, the end result is writing more listings for that show.
• The reviewer notes that RPM is lower in features than listings, although the average word count is the same. The reason is that the ad stack offers a program display after each image, and features have four times fewer images than listings. Since images drive up RPM, the end result is to increase the number of images in features or reduce the number of features published in favor of more listings.

Just simple stuff on top. However, this is where judgment becomes the difference between a healthy operation and a quiet one.

Systems that prevent failure

Evaluating these past jobs for 100 writers is mainly a question of whether the business has the systems, data, and judgment needed so that the work does not fall below its volume.

It is worth noting that 100 writers are rarely 100 writers. In most of these businesses, they are 100 writers in a dozen locations, which is actually more than 1,000 writers if you count the full history.

Independent publishers don’t achieve that scale because the infrastructure requires a level of investment that they may not have access to.

That infrastructure includes clearly defined communication structures for editors, project management ownership, and comprehensive guidelines covering writing, linking, graphics, social, and CMS use.

Without them, standards can unexpectedly degrade across structures, and planners lose the ability to identify why or quickly direct people to resources when putting out fires.

On the data side, granularity is required. Without consistent tagging and categorization built into the CMS from the start, statistics can be very difficult to implement.

Performance needs to be impacted at all levels, rolled into the P&L of each location, and rolled back into the conglomerate.

Technical infrastructure is also important, often in ways that planning teams would not expect.

If you think about how you get images on Google Discover, for example, it requires CDN delivery within certain guidelines. That is more of an engineering problem than a planning one. User roles and permissions across CMS and revenue dashboards are another example, along with the development resources needed to implement the CMS architecture required for data capture and early reporting.

Proprietary systems can also be beneficial depending on the scale of the business. If you’re a rollup with a dozen properties running on one or two CMS templates, it’s very easy to do a batch configuration or speed up the integration of newly acquired properties.

Channel distribution is also non-stop. The value of the platform to publishers is changing. Consider when Facebook stopped sharing news links in Canada. It changes the economics of whether the field is worth developing. Consistent monitoring and evaluation should be built in.

It is judgment that keeps us from falling

The above systems create favorable conditions, but do not guarantee sound judgment.

Let’s revisit one of the examples above:

• The ad stack offers a program display after each image. Editing guidelines require one photo per listing. This generates a higher RPM for all Google Discover traffic listings with less than 20 entries per 1,000 words than a well-designed feature.

If you’re only looking at a spreadsheet, you’ll want to make the most of it. That’s tempting, especially if employers are promoting target RPMs or times per article as KPIs are tied to bonus compensation.

However, content that is thin in volume is not suitable for the visualization of organisms. If readers and search engines encounter too low quality output, the traffic disappears.

You can actually prepare for a short-term harvest, reinforce that behavior with employee bonuses, and damage assets in the process.

Or another example:

• The editor realizes that updating the timestamp of a publication introduces temporary traffic conflicts. The end result is extracting timestamp updates from hundreds of pages.

The problem is that doing it at scale without strict planning and strict guidelines can create mistrust. That is a judgment call.

The three things that require intensity, economic logic, infrastructure and systems, and the decision not to sacrifice long-term benefits for short-term gains.

While that sounds like common sense, these responsibilities are often handled by different people who don’t speak the same language.

Finding a way to close that gap is the most important challenge in the performance of measured content. Various revenue streams like Athletic help enforce that alignment.

Otherwise, your content strategy will fail if you exceed 100 authors. And the above examples are two of hundreds of cases where the spreadsheet points one way, and the right decision points another.

Get it right, and you can reach 1,000 writers.