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CONTENT STRATEGY · 11.08.2026 · 7 MIN READ

What does an in-house content team actually cost?
Most B2B marketing teams cannot answer this question, because the cost is spread across four people’s job descriptions and three budget lines. Here is the calculation, and a tool that does it for you.
THE SHORT VERSION
  • A content function absorbing 40 hours a week of internal time costs roughly 830,000 DKK a year in salary alone, before a single krone of external spend.
  • The number that matters is cost per finished asset — total annual cost divided by what you actually publish.
  • Roughly a third of content hours go to briefing, review and chasing rather than to making anything.
  • Cost per asset is driven by whether production is systematised, not by whether it sits in-house or outside.
Ask a Nordic B2B marketing lead what their content costs and you will usually get the external number: the freelance videographer, the editing subscription, the agency retainer. It is the number that sits in a budget line, so it is the number that gets managed.
It is also, in almost every case we have looked at, the smaller half.
The larger half is internal time, and it is invisible for a structural reason: nobody’s job title is “content.” It is the Head of Marketing doing three hours of scripting on a Tuesday. It is the Content and Comms Lead on a 30-hour contract who also owns copy, ads, organic, email, sales collateral and press releases. None of that reaches a budget line, so none of it gets counted. And a cost you do not count is a cost you cannot argue about.
The calculator below counts it. It takes four inputs and gives you three numbers. No email needed to see them.
Content cost calculator

Four questions. Your numbers stay in your browser.

Total annual cost
1.078.000 kr
Cost per finished asset
11.229 kr
Hours lost to coordination
552 hrs
Your cost per finished asset is high.
At 11.229 kr per asset you are paying fixed setup costs repeatedly instead of spreading them across a batch. The teams that fix this lock one format and produce it in blocks. Roughly 1.1 full-time equivalents sit inside that number.

Want the benchmark behind these numbers? We are publishing the Nordic B2B Content Benchmark Report, built on 500+ production briefs from Nordic scaleups. Cadence, formats, distribution and what the strongest content programmes have in common.

Internal cost assumes 46 working weeks a year. Coordination estimate assumes 30% of content hours go to briefing, review and chasing, the share Nordic B2B teams report in our quarterly reviews. This calculator measures cost and capacity only. It makes no claims about pipeline, leads or return on investment.

Why cost per asset is the number that matters
Total annual cost is the number that gets a reaction. Cost per finished asset is the number that changes a decision.
The reason is that total cost is not comparable to anything. A million kroner sounds like a lot or a little depending entirely on what it bought, and without a denominator there is no way to settle the argument. Cost per asset supplies the denominator. It lets you compare this year to last year, your team to a benchmark, and your current setup to any alternative on equal terms.
It also tends to be the number that surprises people. Teams who are proud of a lean budget often discover they are producing so little that each asset carries an enormous share of fixed cost. Teams who feel over-budget sometimes find their unit economics are fine and their real problem is that one person is carrying all of it.
The three costs almost nobody counts
1. The coordination tax
Across quarterly reviews with Nordic B2B teams, the same pattern shows up: a large share of content hours never touches the content. It goes to writing briefs, explaining the product for the fourth time, chasing feedback, rescheduling a shoot around a founder’s calendar, and re-briefing a freelancer who has forgotten how the last one went.
One member described the whole cycle running through a single person: reaching out to guests, organising with them, booking the space, running pre-interviews, doing the interviews, then all the editing. Their conclusion was not that the work was bad. It was that everything’s super slow.
A team spending 40 hours a week on content loses roughly 550 hours a year to this. That is a third of a full-time role, and it never appears on any invoice.
2. The single point of failure
In most Nordic B2B scaleups, content sits with one person, and that person is rarely a CMO. The actual job titles we see are Head of Marketing, Content and Comms Lead, Global Brand and Comms Manager, Campaign Project Manager. Frequently part-time. Almost always carrying several other functions.
The financial exposure here is not the salary. It is that when that person leaves, goes on parental leave, or simply runs out of capacity, output stops entirely, and the institutional knowledge of how your product should be explained on camera leaves with them. There is no line item for that until the quarter it happens.
3. Setup cost paid over and over
Every production has fixed costs that do not scale with output: getting the crew up to speed on the product, lighting the space, briefing, sound checks, wardrobe, the first twenty minutes of anyone being awkward on camera. Those costs are identical whether you leave with one finished video or twenty.
This is the single biggest driver of a bad cost per asset, and it is why the teams with the strongest unit economics in our data are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones who batch.
What 500+ production briefs suggest about doing this well
We looked at over 500 production briefs logged by Nordic B2B and D2C brands over twelve months, alongside 600+ shooting sessions and 1,700+ studio hours since 2023. A few patterns hold consistently among the teams whose output compounds rather than stalling.
They settle on one format and run it. Teams typically experiment with two to four formats in their first year, then concentrate into one or two. Counter-intuitively, this is when volume climbs. Variety is expensive, repetition is cheap. Faces in conversation (podcast, interviews, talking heads, face-to-camera) accounts for 41% of all briefs, and it is the format B2B teams settle into most often.
They batch. One member records five podcast episodes in a single week rather than scattering them across a quarter. Another produces 20+ finished videos in a single shoot day by working through languages in sequence. The setup cost is paid once and divided across everything that comes out of the room.
It’s way easier to book 5 episodes in a week and get it done.
Nordic B2B SaaS member, quarterly review
They stop re-briefing. Among mature B2B teams, the most common brief is a version of “same as last time.” That sounds like a lack of ambition. It is actually the sound of a system working, and it is where the coordination tax finally starts falling.
They extract more from each session. A three-hour shoot should not produce a three-hour video. It should produce the long-form piece, the clips, the stills, and the assets for three other channels. This is the most commonly requested and least systematically executed thing in our entire dataset.
So is in-house cheaper than outsourcing?
It is the wrong question, and the calculator is designed to show you why.
Nothing in the maths above cares who holds the camera. What drives cost per asset is whether production is systematised: one settled format, batched sessions, multiple deliverables per shoot, and a crew that already knows your product well enough that you stop supervising. A well-run in-house team beats a badly-run agency arrangement comfortably, and the reverse is equally true.
What in-house structurally struggles with is fixed cost against variable output. Salaries run every month; production does not. What external arrangements structurally struggle with is memory, because every project gets briefed from scratch and product fluency is rebuilt each time. Whichever way you go, the cost per asset is set by how much of that friction you have designed out.
Run your numbers above. If you want to see them against what Nordic B2B teams at your stage actually spend and produce, the benchmark report is the next thing to read.
Frequently asked questions
What does an in-house content team cost per year?+

For a Nordic B2B scaleup, a content function absorbing 40 hours a week of internal time at a loaded rate of 450 DKK per hour costs roughly 830,000 DKK in salary alone, before any freelancer, agency, editing or translation spend. Add a typical 250,000 DKK external budget and the true figure passes 1,000,000 DKK. Most teams never calculate this because the cost is spread across several people's job descriptions rather than sitting in one budget line.

What is a good cost per finished content asset?+

There is no universal benchmark, but the useful bands are these. Above roughly 8,000 DKK per finished asset, you are paying fixed setup costs repeatedly rather than amortising them across a batch. Between 3,000 and 8,000 DKK, you have volume but not yet a system, and this is the range where small teams burn out. Below roughly 3,000 DKK the economics work, and the binding constraint becomes the people carrying the workload rather than the budget.

How do you calculate the true cost of content production?+

Multiply the hours your team spends on content each week by 46 working weeks, then by a loaded internal hourly cost that includes salary, pension, holiday and overhead. Add all external spend: freelancers, agencies, editing, translation, studio hire and equipment. Divide the total by the number of finished assets you actually publish in a year. The last step is the one most teams skip, and it is the one that produces a comparable number.

Is it cheaper to produce content in-house or outsource it?+

Neither is reliably cheaper on its own. What determines cost per asset is not who holds the camera but whether production is systematised: one settled format, batched shoot days, and multiple deliverables extracted from a single session. In-house teams tend to be expensive because they produce low volume against fixed salary cost, and because coordination overhead is invisible. Outsourced arrangements become expensive when each project is briefed from scratch.

How much time do marketing teams lose to briefing and coordination?+

In quarterly reviews with Nordic B2B members, teams consistently report that roughly a third of content hours go to briefing, review cycles, scheduling and chasing rather than to making anything. For a team spending 40 hours a week on content, that is about 550 hours a year, or a third of a full-time role, spent on coordination alone.

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