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50 Crucial Content Facts to Make Your Content Make a Difference Now
A collection of content facts, statistics, + quotes curated by Content Science
Last Updated Jan 2025
Content Consumption
As of October 2024, 5.22 billion people worldwide have at least one social media account – representing 63.8% of the global population.
— Digital 2024 October Global Statshot Report
Source: Social Media Fact Sheet
59% of people around the world express concern about what is real and what is fake on the internet when it comes to news. 52% of Americans are uncomfortable with news produced by AI with only some human oversight.
— Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024
93% of American adults now use the internet, with 32% reporting they are online “almost constantly.”
— Pew Research
Source: Content Omniverse Fact Sheet
90% of American teens report using YouTube, with 73% using it daily and 15% using it almost constantly.
— Pew Research
Mobile devices now account for 59.6% of global web traffic, with desktop at 38.1% and tablets at 2.3%.
— StatCounter Global Stats
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
Mobile video will represent 79% of all mobile data traffic by 2025, with a current annual growth rate of 42%.
— Cisco Annual Internet Report
Source: Video Fact Sheet
61% of global participants worry about foreign attacks on their media to inflame differences, an increase of 6%.
— Edelman Trust Barometer 2024
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
42% of Americans aged 12 and older listen to podcasts monthly, with millennial listening rates reaching 62%.
— Edison Research Infinite Dial
The total worldwide email traffic for business and consumer emails sent and received per day is forecast to grow to over 376 billion by year-end 2025 and to over 424 billion by 2028.
— Radicati Group Email Statistics Report
Source: Email Fact Sheet
66% of Americans at least sometimes get news from news websites, apps, or search engines, and 54% of Americans get news from social media. 91% of those aged 18-29 primarily access news through digital devices.
— Pew Research
Source: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet
Content Operations + Systems
A content system is an interconnected set of elements—including but not limited to strategy, operations, and assets—that is coherently organized in a way that achieves a content vision.
Source: A Content Systems Framework (An Excerpt from The Content Advantage)
CMOs have devoted a quarter of their budget to marketing technology for the past seven years to build their capability to execute. Yet, only 24% of CMOs report they have sufficient budget to execute their strategies.
— Gartner CMO Spend + Strategy Survey 2024
Source: 5 Signs Your Marketing Technology Problem Is a Content Problem
100% of organizations that report being extremely successful report having a clear and documented content vision.
— What Makes Content Operations Successful?
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report 2023
There are five levels of content operations maturity:
1. Chaotic, 2. Piloting, 3. Scaling, 4. Sustaining, and 5. Thriving.
In 2024, 92% of content professionals in complex organizations reported using artificial intelligence in their content operations.
Source: The Ultimate Guide to Modernizing Content Operations in Complex Organizations
Organizations that report being very successful with content are more likely to be at a higher content operations maturity level (4 or 5).
Source: 5 Secrets of Successful Content Operations Webinar Recording
“There’s been a lot of interest in content strategy for almost 20 years, which is great, but that strategy can’t come to life at scale without content engineering and content operations. Both will be crucial to optimizing content for artificial intelligence and for integrating it into content workflows and the content lifecycle.”
— John Collins, Atlassian
Source: 2025 Content Predictions + Plans
Two of the top challenges to excellence in content operations are highly complex workflows + unclear or undocumented workflows.
Source: The Ultimate Guide to Modernizing Content Operations in Complex Organizations
“An end-to-end content approach ideally factors in all content and contexts at an organization. If that sounds like a lot to cover, it is. But I find an organization can cover most content and many contexts with these three systems: Content experience, content lifecycle, and content intelligence.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: The Content Advantage
Content Intelligence, Effectiveness, + ROI
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.
Source: What Makes Content Operations Successful? Full Report
“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.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: Modern Content Strategy: Letting Go of Unified, Leaning into Integrated
“More than ever, content has to be differentiated, opinionated, intentional, accessible, and measurable. And data/user research can tell you if you’re doing a good job here. It’s easy to get caught up in internal messaging strategy, politics, or org charts so much so that we’re not clear on content’s role. Set goals for your content, measure it, refine it, and repeat. That’s the way to get your team focused and to prove its value to the rest of the business.”
—Laura Barnes, Red Hat
Source: 2025 Content Predictions and Plans
The primary obstacle to AI adoption, as reported by 49% of survey participants, is the difficulty in estimating and demonstrating the value of AI projects.
— Gartner, Gen AI Survey
84% of marketers prioritize first-party data, including customer insight data and transactional data. 61% still report using third-party data despite the decline in the usefulness of this source.
— Salesforce, State of Marketing
Source: 5 Signs Your Marketing Technology Problem Is Actually a Content Problem
80% of companies expect to compete mainly on customer experience.
— Gartner, Realizing the Benefits of Superior Customer Experience
Source: 5 Signs Your Customer Experience Problem Is Really a Content Problem
“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
75% of consumers feel less favorable toward brands advertising on sites / platforms with misinformation.
— Adweek
Sources: Credibility + Trust Fact Sheet, State of Content Webinar 2025
41% of CMOs report data exposure as the top concern for implementing AI.
— Salesforce, State of Marketing
Content Channels
“Content is the substance of customer experience across touchpoints such as websites, email, social media, mobile apps, SMS, IVR, chatbots and call centers. Far more of your customers will interact with your company’s content than with your company’s employees — and do so far more often.”
— Colleen Jones in Entrepreneur
Source: 4 Ways Content Can Make or Break the Customer Experience
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 Gen Z users report using the most are YouTube (93%), Instagram (76%), Facebook (68%), Snapchat (65%), and TikTok (59%).
— Pew Research
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?
Legislation and signal loss have had a material impact on media planning and buying: Almost 90% of ad buyers report that their personalization strategies, ad investment costs, and mix of data across first-, second-, and third-party sources are being redesigned.
— IAB State of Data 2024
Source: Content Marketing Fact Sheet
“In 2025, AI is going to significantly influence content as an acquisition channel through organic search. Google has integrated AI results directly into its search. ChatGPT surpassed 300 million weekly users in December of 2024, and more and more users are thinking of AI tools as their default answer engine.”
— Greg Vilines, Terminal
Source: 2025 Content Predictions + Plans
The largest share of e-commerce shoppers in the United States consisted of adults aged 18 to 24 (46.9%). Adults between the ages of 25 and 34 made up almost 32% of the e-commerce shopper mobile audience.
— eMarketer Mobile Commerce Report
Source: Mobile Fact Sheet
49% of all consumers make daily, weekly, or monthly purchases because of influencer posts, with 30% trusting influencers more today than they did just six months ago.
— The 2024 Influencer Marketing Report
Source: Influencer Marketing Fact Sheet
“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that [user] accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”
— Connor Hayes, VP, Meta about AI-generated users
Source: Social Media Fact Sheet
Artificial Intelligence + Digital Transformation
The backdrop for content operations in complex organizations today is digital transformation or modernization. Nearly all of the respondents (91%) to our survey confirmed that they recently were or currently are involved in a digital transformation or modernization effort.
— Content Science
Source: The Ultimate Guide to Modernizing Content Operations in Complex Organizations
Across the board, concerns around security, response accuracy, and costs have forced most businesses to slow down their planned [gen AI] initiatives and be more strategic about the balance between cost and benefit. Security worries have tripled, accuracy concerns have grown fivefold, and transparency issues have quadrupled since 2023.
— CIO Magazine
Digital transformation has evolved from a glorified website redesign into a continuous drive for modernization. Together, a digital transformation and end-to-end content initiative can accelerate the time it takes to achieve returns and to realize value from intangible assets.
Source: The Content Advantage
57% of online content is machine translated.
— A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated
40% of revenue for the Global 2000 will come from digital products, services, and experiences by 2026.
Source: The Content Advantage
“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
58% of manufacturing leaders planned to increase AI spending in 2024, down from 93% in 2023.
— Accuracy Concerns Slow Manufacturers’ AI Adoption
Rising use of digital platforms and a growing volume of AI-generated content are making divisive misinformation and disinformation more ubiquitous.
— World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2025
Worldwide spend on digital transformation will hit $2.9 trillion in 2027.
— IDC
Source: The Content Advantage
In 2024, use of AI in 2 or more business functions increased to 50%.
— McKinsey, Global Survey on AI in Business
“Individual adoption of gen AI has been lightning fast. But if I had to give organization-wide adoption of gen AI a movie title, it would be Slow and Slower.”
— Colleen Jones, Content Science
Source: State of Content 2025 Webinar
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