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50 Crucial Content Facts to Make Your Content Make a Difference Now
A collection of revealing content statistics and quotes to shape your content approach.
Content Consumption
As of October 2023, 4.95 billion people in the world have at least one social media account – over 60% of the global population.
— Internet and Social Media Users Worldwide as of October 2023
Source: Social Media Fact Sheet
54% of consumers claim to know when they are reading content written by AI, 26% claim to not know, and 20% say they are unsure.
— Consumers Are Concerned About Misinformation from Artificial Intelligence
Eight in ten Americans go online every day, including 28% who go online almost constantly, 45% who say they’re online several times a day, and 9% who go online roughly once a day.
— Pew Research
Nearly all (95%) American teenagers ages 13 to 17 report using TikTok, with 16% saying they use it almost constantly.
— Pew Research
54% of all web traffic came through a mobile phone as of September 2023.
— Desktop vs. Mobile Market Share
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
The majority of online video is now watched on a smartphone, and mobile is forecast to account for 72% of the growth in spending on online video advertising.
— Mobile Will Drive 72% of Growth in Online Video Ad Spend3
Source: Video Fact Sheet
Fake news concerns are at an all-time high with 76% of global participants reporting I worry about false information or fake news being used as a weapon.
— Edelman Trust Barometer
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
35% of millennials report that they listen to a podcast on their mobile at least once a month.
— Millennials: Examining the Attitudes and Digital Behaviors
The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day is forecast to grow to over 376 billion by year-end 2025.
— Email Statistics Report
Source: Email Fact Sheet
Social media is by far the most used daily news platform among U.S. Millennials, and the same is true of Gen Z. By comparison, adults over 65 years old mostly use network news to keep up to date.
— Pew Research
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
Content Operations
As you plan your content operations, consider establishing a center of content excellence. A center of content excellence (CCE) is a hub (virtual or physical) that concentrates expertise and resources to achieve world-class content capability. A CCE brings together people, tools, knowledge, and other kinds of resources around content, focusing and directing them to maximize value.
CMOs have devoted a quarter of their budget to marketing technology for the past six years to build their capability to execute. Yet, 61% of CMOs report they still can’t execute their strategies because they lack in-house capabilities.
Source: 5 Signs Your Marketing Technology Problem Is a Content Problem
100% of organizations that report being extremely successful report having a clear content vision, that has been clearly communicated.
— What Makes Content Operations Successful?
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
There are five levels of Content Operations:
1. Chaotic, 2. Piloting, 3. Scaling, 4. Sustaining, and 5. Thriving.
Overall, we’re seeing less maturity since our 2021 report. The number of organizations at levels 1 and 2 has increased slightly, with a 2% uptick at level 1 and a 10% jump at level 2. But, far fewer organizations operate at level 4.
— What Is the State of Content Operations Now?
Between 2021 and 2023, the rate of organizations using AI in content operations grew 66%, with the most common applications being composing, measuring, and producing content.
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
Organizations that report being very successful with content are more likely to be at a higher content operations maturity level. None of the organizations that perceived their content operations as extremely successful were in levels 1 or 2.
Source: 5 Secrets of Successful Content Operations Webinar Recording
“Content is critical to an impactful B2B experience, so a simple content vision can help all of the teams involved in creating, delivering, promoting and / or governing content stay aligned during the complexity of execution.”
— Ben Quigley, The Home Depot
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
Many companies have already adopted AI with 1 in 4 adopting AI to compensate for labor shortages and 26% using AI for marketing and sales.
Source: Artificial Intelligence + Content: Understanding the Potential + the Pitfalls
“To scale operations for your content marketing program use data to optimize your content planning and production.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: Introduction to Content Marketing Course, LinkedIn Learning
With a clear content vision, everyone within your organization is working with the same goal in mind. Your content vision establishes what long-term success looks like, and provides an answer to any questions about what your strategy is aiming to support.
— Content Leadership + Operations Certification
Source: Content Science Academy
Content Intelligence + Effectiveness
78% of mature organizations regularly evaluate content impact and success, compared to only 29% of organizations at levels 1-3. The majority are using at least six types of data to measure success.
The majority of mature organizations use a center of excellence concept including community of practice, governance committees, or council meetings to keep content operations aligned.
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
“Instead of assuming a content strategy is static, a modern view is content strategy will evolve. Deciding when to change the content strategy and how requires reliable content intelligence. It’s like being a geologist who knows earthquakes will happen but needs data from a system of sensors to identify when they’re happening and how severe they are to figure out a response.
The good news is establishing a system of content intelligence is much easier than setting up an earthquake detection system.
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: Modern Content Strategy: Letting Go of Unified, Leaning into Integrated
“It will be important to ensure content is instrumented for measurement (of effectiveness, not just consumption) and that processes are in place to eliminate content that is ineffective and prioritize maintenance and expansion of content that is highly effective, as identified by these metrics and analytics. Quality is always a priority. But in a world where AI and LLMs are potentially being trained on our content, we have to double down on ensuring what we publish is right.”
—Toni Mantych, ServiceNow
Source: 2024 Content Predictions and Plans
Successful organizations use a variety of data to measure content effectiveness. It’s not just about analytics or whether your stakeholders are happy. What we found is that the more successful and the more mature content operations are using 30% more types of data.
Getting relevant members of your team access to the data they need to understand the impact of content (and its drivers) help your organization better evaluate and optimize content effectiveness.
— Content Leadership + Operations Certification
Source: Content Science Academy
“We are in level-up mode. We see a lot of opportunity to fine tune our offerings, learning from our analytics and layering on the creative talents of our team. Ultimately, we want to optimize the experience our audiences have with our content—whether we are sharing public health knowledge or providing information about our School. Every year brings new tools and opportunities to learn, experiment, and finesse.”
— Lymari Morales, Johns Hopkins
“100% of extremely successful organizations report evaluating content effectiveness or impact regularly.”
– Christopher Jones, PhD, LCSW, Content Science
Source: 5 Secrets of Successful Content Operations Webinar Recording
[Using ContentWRX data] we found people who reported that content was easy to find were significantly more likely to report that it was accurate, relevant, and useful than people who experienced difficulty (but eventually found the content they needed)—86.2% versus 39.4%.
Source: The Content Advantage
“Channel analytics can give you more specific details than web analytics about who your [content] audience is. For example, Facebook Audience Manager and Twitter Audience Insights can tell you demographics, interests and more.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: Introduction to Content Marketing Course, LinkedIn Learning
Content Channels
“Many customers do not necessarily want to make a call, or go to a store, or schedule a meeting if they can efficiently help themselves. Recent research finds 81% of customers want more self-service options, and 45% of customers are more likely to use self-service options now than they were before the pandemic.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: 5 Signs Your Customer Experience Problem Is Really a Content Problem
When it comes to email marketing, companies make an average of $36 for every U.S. dollar they spend on email marketing. Among many industries, the retail, ecommerce, and consumer goods business had the highest return on investment (ROI), at $45.
— Email Marketing Return on Investment
Source: Email Fact Sheet
The global conversion rate—people who visit websites to convert (buy a product, for example)—still hovers around 2 to 4 percent. That rate range has not changed since 2003.
— Monetate Ecommerce Quarterly Index
Source: The Content Advantage
The social networks with the most monthly Gen Z users are Snapchat (44.5 million), TikTok (41.4 million), and Instagram (37.3 million).
– Statista
Through an API, a headless CMS actually has multiple heads, each one dedicated to a specific format like web pages, smart watches, Alexa voice ads, etc. By choosing which head you want, authors and developers can select their favorite tools independently of each other to create, format, and publish content how they see fit.
Source: What Is a Headless CMS?
The U.S. ad industry has lost “approximately 50% to 60% of the signal fidelity from third-party identifiers” because of changes to Apple and Firefox’s browser.
Ongoing signal loss and the evolution of state-level privacy legislation will likely further challenge match rates—putting additional pressure on the DCR marketplace to improve.
— IAB State of Data 2022-23
Source: Content Marketing Fact Sheet
In March of 2023, the largest share of e-commerce shoppers in the United States consisted of adults aged 18 to 24 (46.9 percent). Adults between the ages of 25 and 34 made up almost 32 percent of the e-commerce shopper mobile audience in the country.
— Distribution of Mobile E-commerce Shoppers
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
A recommendation from a creator that you like goes a long way. 61% of consumers trust the product recommendations they get from influencers. Meanwhile, only 38% trust branded social media content.
— Matter Survey
Source: Influencer Marketing Fact Sheet
“Which came first, the conspiracy theory or the extreme political view? It’s hard to say, but we do know that political extremism, especially the far right, is continuing in the U.S. and arising in France, Brazil, Israel, and democracies around the world.
Far-right activity continues to surface in extreme actions such as mass shootings, fabricating evidence to support claims of election fraud, storming capitols, repeals of abortion rights, not taking vaccines or wearing masks, chaos at Twitter / X, bots spreading conspiracy theories and hate, and intensification of hacktivism. And that’s only a few examples.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
AI recommendations from accounts users don’t follow comprise 15% of Facebook feed content.
— Meta Q2 2022 Earnings
Source: Social Media Fact Sheet
Content Automation + Personalization
In marketing, personalization is when a company or organization tailors messages and content experiences to be more relevant, useful, and meaningful to their customers–while keeping those customers’ data secure and privacy respected.
Source: 5 Signs Your Marketing Technology Problem Is Actually a Content Problem
“With the end of third-party cookies on the horizon, 68% of marketers have a fully defined strategy to shift toward first-party data.”
— Salesforce: State of Marketing, 8th Edition
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
Writing assistant tools have always automated checking content for alignment with style and grammar. Now, these tools are incorporating AI to help identify more opportunities to improve content quality and compliance with standards, legal requirements, sophisticated brand voice, and much more—at scale.
Source: Artificial Intelligence + Content: Understanding the Potential + the Pitfalls
29% of organizations are using AI or machine learning in some capacity related to content. This continues to grow and is up from 22% in our 2021 study and 15% in our 2017 study.
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
Without an end-to-end content approach, you will find it’s increasingly difficult if not impossible to deliver personalized, on-brand content experiences that meet or exceed performance expectations.
“There’s a lot of opportunity for innovative technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to be a part of the equation. We do have to recognize both the benefits and risks. Leveraging the benefits of AI will be an important part of the solution. For example, there’s much potential for AI to accelerate the timely and efficient curation of evidence.”
— Christopher Jones, PhD, LCSW, Content Science
Almost half of organizations are trying to offer personalized content experiences. 58% of organizations that offer personalized content experiences report using business criteria such as previous content viewed. 55% report using behavior criteria.
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
“Artificial intelligence is living up to its potential for content.These tools can accelerate creating content at a high level of quality. I think of it as these tools take you to 80% complete, leaving you with about 20% to do…usually final polishing or refinement.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
If brands fail to offer a personalized experience, 45% of consumers say they’re likely to take their business elsewhere.
— The State of Personalization
92% of businesses are using AI in some capacity to provide content personalization.
– The State of Personalization Report
“There’s a real opportunity cost to not being able to iteratively improve content. There’s also a real opportunity cost with not being able to innovate. You’re really going to be hampered in your ability to innovate if you’re bogged down in maintenance.”
– Colleen Jones, Content Insiders Podcast
Source: Content Technology Fact Sheet
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