Introduction
From our Content Matters 2024 Report we learned that quality content remains one of the top priorities for marketing and media leaders. This is because there is a close connection between quality content and revenue. Well-targeted and engaging content is more likely to result in better brand awareness and sales, but this is easier said than done. Quality content is only as good as the people employed to execute it, and the first challenge any content-focused company will face is finding and retaining the best talent for the job.
A positive work atmosphere, good employment conditions, and engaging tasks are all important elements of a fulfilling and attractive working environment. But ultimately the number one means of attracting top talent is salary.
However, the content ecosystem has become more complex since our last survey in 2023. The labor market continues to tighten, leaving a greater pool of talent for employers to choose from and less choice and bargaining power for employees regarding salary.
Furthermore, AI entered the scene late in 2022 and, by the end of 2023, had demonstrated its potential applications for content creation and optimization. Since then, AI has continued to develop rapidly in the content space. AI-generated text, images, and videos are getting better and more complex by the day, and AI has already been applied to some of the more advanced CMS tools on the market. Content creation in 2024 looks a lot different from how it did a year ago, and it has now become clear that people working with content will need to keep up with the times to remain competitive in the job market.
In this 2024 Content Matters Salary report, we surveyed 774 North American marketing and media leaders in the WordPress VIP community to gain insight into the income expectations of the industry, how salary impacts how we work, and vice versa. We take a deep dive into how salaries have been affected by these changes and pinpoint what skills and characteristics are attracting the best salaries at content-focused businesses.
About the survey
Content creation is an integral part of almost any business in any industry, so we surveyed professionals across all industries, including media, the public sector, retail, technology, and education. Accordingly, our Content Matters 2024 survey gathered responses from all industries and seniority levels to create a snapshot of marketing and media leaders.
In 2024, a third of the respondents earned $80k* a year or less, and a further 31% earned between $81k and $120k, leaving just over a quarter (27%) earning $121k or more. Compared to our 2023 results, the share of respondents with higher incomes has slipped slightly, with the largest category of respondents in 2023 being those who earned between $81k and$120k. This year our biggest cohort is people earning $80k or less.
*All dollar amounts are in USD.
Salary highlights
An increase in respondents in the lower income range is a concerning trend that could point to a drop in salaries overall and an increase in hiring for entry-level positions.
Bigger companies = bigger salaries. Respondents who work in large teams and companies tended to have higher wages.
It pays to be in the know. Technical know-how and awareness of your company’s content strategy correlate with higher wages.
The salary gap between large and small companies is closing. However, this is due to decreasing salaries at larger companies, which creates more competition for higher-paid positions.
AI is here to stay. Those learning to embrace this technology are already getting ahead in the job market.
A good salary requires more than excelling at creating quality content. Respondents who understand content strategy and have a competent knowledge of content tools are better positioned to earn more.
Salaries by company size
Bigger companies mean bigger budgets for hiring and attracting talent. This is reflected in our breakdown of salary by company size:
42% of respondents from companies with 200 or fewer employees were earning under $80k a year, whereas this share drops to about 20% in medium and large companies with 201 or more employees.
Similarly, larger companies are more likely to have bigger teams, complex projects, and a broader customer base, all requiring employees with greater technical skills and responsibilities that warrant a higher wage. We therefore see a larger proportion of responses in the higher wage ranges for medium and large companies. While the opportunities to earn $161k or more appear to be much fewer in small companies, the chances of finding a position in this range are quite similar in both medium and large companies.
Compared to 2023’s results, the pay gap between large and small companies is closing, but unfortunately, this is due to average wages decreasing at large companies. In 2023, 71% of respondents in large companies earned $121k or more, but in 2024 this share dropped to less than half. Now the largest share of jobs at large companies are concentrated in the $81k to $120k range.
Salaries by seniority level
How company size affects wages becomes even more apparent when we look at salaries by seniority level.
As can be expected, a higher proportion of VPs and directors earn an annual salary of more than $160k, managers mostly occupy the $81k to $120k salary range, and individual contributors are predominantly at the lower end of the scale.
However, our C-level respondent sample bucked this trend, almost half indicating that they were earning $80k a year or less and a third earning between $81k and $120k.
This counterintuitive result is influenced by responses from C-level respondents at companies with 200 or fewer employees. More than any other seniority level, C-level incomes are highly sensitive to company size. At small companies, as many as 50% of the C-level respondents were earning $80k or less and only 6% were earning $200k or more. At large companies more than a third of C-levels were earning more than $200K and just 14% under $80k.
Compared to 2023, all seniority levels saw a notable drop in salaries, with a growing share of respondents who found themselves earning less than $120k a year.
Only VPs/directors managed to maintain similar salary levels compared to 2023, with almost half earning above $121k in 2024.
Salary range by seniority level (all company sizes)
Salary range by seniority level in medium to large companies
* C-level results are to be treated with caution due to the small sample size
Salaries by content team size
It’s not just larger companies that tend to have higher wages—there is also a correlation between the size of the content team and wages.
Almost half of our respondents at companies with fewer than five content employees were earning $80k or less, and only 17% were earning $120k or more.
Here, we see a familiar trend: as teams get bigger, so do the salaries.
This is largely due to the growth potential larger organizations can offer employees. Larger organizations have a more complex hierarchy of teams and workflows, and content departments of 200 or more employees therefore offer more opportunities to manage more people and complex projects than a team of one to five employees can.
Salaries by industry and organization type
Although content creation is a core output of the media and publishing industry, the survey revealed that this sector also has the largest proportion of lower-paid, content-focused positions.
As much as 44% of the respondents in media and publishing were earning a salary under $80k, in contrast to technology, with only 17% of respondents in this salary category.
The more specialized nature of content creation in the technology and consumer goods sectors is perhaps responsible for the generally higher wages in these sectors. In the upper salary categories, only about 10% of respondents from media, publishing, and services industries earned $161k or more, whereas consumer goods and technology doubled this share at 25% and 20%, respectively.
Regarding the type of organization, there was a slight tendency for businesses operating as both B2C and B2B to offer higher wages. However, non-profit companies stood out by offering the lowest range of wages, with 43% earning less than $80k.
The largest drop in salaries from 2023 to 2024 can be seen in the media and publishing industry. In 2023, only around a quarter of the respondents were earning under 80k, but in 2024, the share almost doubled to 44%.
Salary range by industry
The connection between salary and AI spending
Having a bigger budget to spend on AI appears to correlate to higher wages for employees.
Companies with an AI budget of $1k or less had a notably larger cohort of employees earning under $80k a year. Businesses that were spending between $1k and $10k on AI placed about half of their roles in the $81k to $120k salary range. Following this trend, companies spending more than $10k recorded recorded a higher proportion of employees earning in the upper salary ranges of $161k or more.
This is also good news for anyone worried that AI will replace them or that it has devalued their work. Companies investing in AI are also investing in human staff. This is further evidence that AI is enhancing jobs in content creation jobs, not replacing them. But it’s also a wake-up call that job seekers should move with the times or risk being left behind.
Our Content Matters 2024 Report revealed that AI was recognized as a tool to bridge resource gaps by 41% of the respondents and that almost half were already using AI tools to create content. While this indicates that there is a willingness to integrate AI in daily operations, it’s evident that AI is not being used wholesale across content-producing organizations. This suggests that we are still in an AI early adopter phase, and those who can recognize its applications early will have a leg up on the competition.
The connection between having a data-driven content strategy and salary
Having a data-driven strategy or starting to implement one is clearly an advantage regarding salary:
42% of respondents who said their company did not have a data-driven strategy were earning $80k or less annually, and a full 80% were earning under $120k. Respondents who said their company had a data-driven strategy or was getting there were almost twice as likely to be earning $121k or higher.
It also pays to be aware of your company’s data strategy. More than half of those who answered “I don’t know” to this question were in the lowest wage category. This lack of awareness is a two-pronged issue that may indicate that an organization has not adequately communicated its content strategy or that employees lack the resources to engage with the organization’s strategic direction.
This is where an understanding of analytics tools like Parse.ly is vital to get ahead. Simply creating good content is no longer enough; “good content” also requires an understanding of your audience and how distribution strategies fit with organizational goals.
The connection between salaries and working in content or IT
As website-centricity becomes a focus for organizations in lieu of platform instability, Google algorithm updates, and AI-generated content, it pays to have skills in IT.
40% of respondents who work in IT were earning $121k or more a year, compared to just 25% of those working in content.
In an increasingly technical and competitive job market, employers know that they need people with skills in IT to navigate the future of experience creation and measurement. Therefore, skills in IT are a valuable way to distinguish oneself from the competition and offer an anchor point for salary negotiations.
The connection between CMS, analytics tool usage, and income
The value of having technical skills and experience with analytics tools is also evident when respondents were questioned about their CMS and analytics tool usage.
Those who know what tool they are using are much more likely to have a greater salary than those who do not.
This hints at the likelihood that those who are more acutely aware of the tools their organization uses are more likely to have the technical skills to negotiate a higher wage. Interestingly, WordPress VIP users were significantly more likely to earn higher salaries. In fact, we found more than a third of the respondents earning more than $120k are using WordPress VIP, compared to 27% using another CMS and 25% who don’t know.
The connection between recognition of challenges and salary
Overall, salary did not play a significant role in how respondents perceived challenges facing their organization. This suggests that although our Content Matters 2024 Report found that issues like budget constraints, SEO changes, and senior leadership understanding the value of content were more acute for managers, there is a reasonable consensus about organizational challenges across pay levels. Most results by salary range were within only a few percentage points of the average, but there were outliers.
Keeping up with trends was a much more prominent issue for employees earning $80k or less, of which 36% recognized this as an issue compared to the survey average of 29%.
On the other hand, SEO changes were of greater concern for high earners in the $121k to $200k salary bracket.
This comes at a critical time when Google is making changes to the algorithm in relation to AI, creating further uncertainty for SEO and making SEO-related jobs even more lucrative and crucial to the success of an organization.
Interestingly, on the issue of senior leadership understanding the value of content, we find that this is only seen as a challenge by 16% of respondents earning $80k or less. However, 31% of respondents on a salary indicative of a senior leadership position ($161k to $200k) felt that getting senior leadership to understand the value of content was an issue.
This points to an awareness among higher earners that content is indeed a valuable part of their business, but that they need to measure its impact and share this knowledge with their peers. Using analytics tools that track performance and facilitate insights-sharing across the organization would offer a powerful solution to this challenge.
Conclusion
A competitive labor market and uncertainty regarding AI’s place in content creation are emerging as top challenges currently facing organizations that produce content. Nevertheless, these challenges also present opportunities for skilled employees looking to stand out from the crowd. The results of our survey have clearly shown that bringing technical skills and new tools and technologies to the table attracts greater salaries. This trend is likely to continue.
Top findings:
- AI is here to stay. Those who embrace it are gaining a competitive edge in the jobs market and with companies that are also embracing AI (and coincidentally paying their employees more).
- The salary gap between large and small companies is closing—mainly because wages are decreasing at large companies.
- It pays to be aware of your company’s content strategy and to seek out companies with a data-driven strategy. These companies are paying better wages and have a greater demand for skilled people.
Methodology
This salary report is a breakaway study from the 2024 Content Matters survey, which was conducted between Jan. 5 and Feb. 6, 2024. Our salary analysis focuses on the 744 responses from North American marketing and media leaders.