Content marketers often face the dilemma of trading off publishing frequency for content quality. And vice-versa. Cases have been made on either side, including stakes planted in the middle ground of compromise. The compromise argument typically boils down to very sound advice: publish within the limits of what your team is capable of.

Annual self-reports from bloggers indicate that those publishing more often are more likely to report strong results. But beyond self-reporting, what does the data say? Once again, I collaborated with our in-house guru on all things data related (note: all errors in this post are solely attributable to me) to investigate just this question:

If marketers increase their rate of content creation and publication, would this generate a higher number of views?

Here’s a look at what we found.

Data Science Lesson One: More Content ≠ More Views

Consider the graph below. Without looking too closely, we can see at a quick glance that the dots look random. They’re supposed to. The horizontal (x) axis shows the number of content items created in a given month by a content marketer. The vertical (y) axis shows the total number of views of content in that month, for all items in that content marketer’s Uberflip Hub.

The data doesn’t point to a pattern.

Instead, we see a scattershot of unique content items created in a given month in relation to the number of views for that marketer’s library of content. If the number of content items created and the number of views for that content were correlated, you would see the points line up in a diagonal line ascending left to right.

Simply put, we found no significant correlation between an increase in content created and an increase in views. The data indicates that this assumption just doesn’t hold up. Frequent content generation doesn’t get you more.

Data Science Lesson Two: Doubling Content Creation is Pointless

In addition, we ran a secondary analysis where we took other factors into consideration about content marketers and their content.* What we found is that, despite a 100% increase in the number of content items generated, you would see, on average, a mere 5% to 6% increase in the number of views. Even if you double down on your content generation efforts in a month, your results will show only a small increase in views at best.

Summing-up Why Frequent Content Generation Isn’t Worth it

From this analysis, we can recap a few key takeaways:

1. Exponential increases in the amount of content you create will result in a smaller payoff than you’d think. This doesn’t mean you should give up on content creation entirely. 
2. Look at how how you manage, present, and distribute the content you have, rather than investing undue amounts of effort on creation.
3. To increase viewership and engagement of your content, focus on the content experience.

For more data-driven tips on owning the journey in content marketing, complete the interactive assessment, Are You a Marketing Tourist, or Explorer? and receive Uberflip’s field guide to becoming an even better content marketer.

* We found that a 100% increase in the number of items generated, is associated, on average, with a 5-6% percent increase in the number of views, after controlling for customer-fixed effects and time-fixed effects. The increase in views could be up to 9% if we control only for customer-fixed effects. We run a Poisson regression and estimate standard errors using a robust technique from Cameron, Gelbach, & Miller (2011). This estimation takes time correlation into account, as well as heteroskedasticity.