Brian Dean, the founder of Backlinko and Exploding Topics, recently shared an interesting example of how a very simple piece of content can generate significantly more value than a lengthy, resource-intensive article.
In a post on X, Dean said that the cheapest piece of content he had ever published had been referenced more than 3,000 times — and it cost just $200 to produce.
The page in question was created for Exploding Topics and answered a single question:
How many users does ChatGPT have?
According to Dean, the page has since been cited by major publications including Forbes, HubSpot and Fortune. He also noted that it was, at one point, referenced by the UK government.
Dean contrasted the result with some of the much more extensive guides he has published over the years. Some of those articles took more than 25 hours to create and received little or no citation from other websites.
The difference, he argues, comes down to understanding what people actually need when they are looking for data.
Journalists often need one specific number
Dean’s argument is that journalists are not necessarily searching for broad collections of statistics when writing an article.
Instead, they may be looking for one very specific figure.
A journalist working on an article about ChatGPT, for example, might need to know how many users the platform has. Someone writing about Instagram might need its number of monthly active users. A reporter covering an industry might need the current market size or growth rate.
In those situations, a page answering one precise question can be much more useful than a 5,000-word article containing dozens of loosely related statistics.
That is particularly important when journalists are working under tight deadlines. Rather than reading an extensive guide, they may simply need a credible source for the exact number they are looking for.
This creates an opportunity for publishers to build pages around specific, high-value statistics.
The information does not necessarily have to be original
Another part of Dean’s strategy is that the publisher does not always need to conduct original research to create useful statistical content.
Important figures are often buried inside PDFs, white papers, company presentations, interviews, conference talks and other sources that are difficult to discover.
A publisher can find the original figure, verify where it came from, provide the appropriate attribution and make the information significantly easier to find.
In that situation, the value comes partly from making hard-to-find information accessible.
For a journalist, finding a well-organized page with the exact figure and its original source can save considerable time.
Being early can make a page a reference point
Dean also points to the importance of publishing early.
When a website becomes one of the first credible sources to document an important statistic, it has an opportunity to become the page that other writers discover and reference.
In the case of the ChatGPT users page, Dean said Exploding Topics documented the figures as they became available, including when Sam Altman shared a new user number.
The page was then kept updated as new information emerged.
That creates a potentially valuable cycle: a page attracts citations, those citations increase its visibility, and greater visibility can expose the page to even more journalists and publishers who may reference it.
The maintenance cost can be small
The original page reportedly cost around $200 to produce, according to Dean.
He also said that updating it every few months costs approximately $50.
That makes the economics particularly interesting.
Instead of spending dozens of hours producing another long-form guide, a publisher could potentially create a small collection of highly focused data pages and update them as new information becomes available.
The approach is not necessarily limited to technology companies or websites.
A niche publisher could apply the same concept to almost any industry where people regularly need statistics.
For example, a site could create pages answering questions such as:
- How many people use a particular platform?
- How large is a specific market?
- How many vehicles of a particular type are sold each year?
- What is the average cost of a service?
- How many businesses operate in a particular industry?
- How quickly is a particular market growing?
The strongest opportunities may be statistics that are important enough to be cited but difficult enough to find that there is no obvious page already serving as the definitive reference.
A different way to think about content
The bigger lesson from Dean’s example is not simply that shorter articles are better than long articles.
It is that content should be designed around the job it needs to perform.
A long guide may be valuable for helping a reader understand a complicated topic. But a concise statistical page may be much more effective at attracting citations if it answers a question that journalists and researchers repeatedly need to answer.
For niche site publishers, this could mean looking beyond traditional informational keywords and identifying the specific facts that other websites, journalists and researchers are likely to need.
Sometimes, the opportunity is not to write the most comprehensive article on a subject.
It may be to become the easiest place on the internet to find one important number.
That is the content strategy Brian Dean says produced more than 3,000 references from a page that cost only $200 to create.