In episode 66 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Kaitlyn Heath and Sarah O’Keefe discuss measuring content value based on accounting principles.

Related links:

* Content accounting: Calculating value of content in the enterprise 

Twitter handles:

* @sarahokeefe
* @kheathScript

Transcript:
Kaitlyn Heath:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize and distribute content in an efficient way. In part one of the content accounting podcast, we talk about measuring content value based on accounting principles. Hi, I’m Kaitlyn Heath.
Sarah O’Keefe:     And I’m Sarah O’Keefe.
KH:     And today we’re going to look at measuring your company’s content value. So I want to start by identifying what type of content we’re talking about when we’re talking about content value.
SO:     Well in my mind we’re talking about customer facing content, whether it’s technical product content, high-value content, like technical reports or membership information that you present to your customers and or marketing and sales content.
KH:     So what type of value does this content generally have for your company?
SO:     Well, that is the question.
KH:     That is the question.
SO:     And it actually… it turns out to be a really hard question because there have been actually a lot of attempts at this. How do we calculate content value? And you’ll see a lot of stuff around, “Oh well we got this many impressions,” or “Our tweet got this many retweets,” or “We got this many hits on our website,” or “This many people click the yes this piece of technical information in my knowledge base was helpful,” right? But value, what’s the value of that content? We have some ideas about metrics.
KH:     Right, so user feedback type of stuff.
SO:     Yeah, or sheer volume, the volume of people that are looking at something. And so-
KH:     But does that necessarily translate to value?
SO:     …right. We don’t really know. And so that was… I wrote this white paper talking about the concept of content accounting and I’m not the first one to kind of touch on this. There’ve been a couple of other papers out there where people have tried to kind of address content value, but in this specific white paper, what I did was I tried to take accounting itself as a framework for thinking about content. So for those of you that are not accountants, which I suppose is…
KH:     Not me.
SO:     …perhaps a lot of our listening audience, you’re probably familiar with the idea of a profit and loss statement and maybe less familiar with the concept of a balance sheet. But those are kind of the two basic documents that you see in accounting used to calculate the value of things, the value of a company the… What the performance of your company really. So I thought, “Well, all right, can we do content based accounting? Can we do accounting that uses a profit and loss, a P&L, and also a balance sheet but looks at content related aspects to try and figure out how to value information.”
KH:     Right, so what might that look like? What does this profit and loss sheet look like for content accounting?
SO:     So a P&L for content accounting. If you’re somebody like Netflix, then it’s pretty straight forward, right? Because as Netflix, you know that you have your streaming income and you know that...