LeverMap
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When does content pay for itself?
How many months a piece of content needs to earn back its production cost, and what the programme returns over asset life.
Your numbers
Starting numbers: A business publishing a handful of pieces a month and waiting for search traffic to compound. Change anything below.
Everything it takes to research, write and publish one article.
Traffic a typical piece brings in each month once it ranks.
Share of readers who leave you a way to contact them.
Share of monthly traffic a piece loses as it ages.
How much you publish.
Share of leads that turn into paying customers.
What one customer is worth to you after the cost of serving them.
What this also assumes (1)
Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Months until one piece pays for itself
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How it's computed
About this calculator
Content payback measures how many months a published piece needs to earn back what it cost to produce. The model collapses the whole funnel into gross profit per visit, applies a decay rate as the piece ages down the rankings, and works out both the payback per piece and the point where the programme as a whole turns profitable. It also shows the break-even traffic level: the first-month visits a piece must earn to ever repay itself. The gap between that floor and your actual traffic is the programme's margin of safety.
Pull the cost, traffic, conversion, and decay levers to match your own programme and watch payback stretch or shrink. The chain shows every step of the calculation. When the numbers look like yours, save the model to stress-test scenarios, set thresholds, and share it with whoever signs off the content budget.
Every number on this page is computed live by the LeverMap engine.