Who's Outsourcing Content? - A Junta42 Annual Report

Who’s Outsourcing Content? – A Junta42 Annual Report

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: October 29, 2009

We just delivered the Junta42 annual report email to the Junta42 content marketing vendors and I thought I would share it with the community.

As you’ll see in the email, these are high-level numbers. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be putting together a “State of Content Marketing Outsourcing” (better title to come) that will take the mounds of data we have on content marketing projects and put it together in a handy report. If there is anything specific you’d like to see, please let me know.

>>>>Start of Email

Hi John:

First off, I wanted to thank you for your ongoing support of Junta42. It’s people like yourself that have made our little experiment a content marketing success.

We launched Junta42 in beta July of 2008, and officially launched
the matching service in October of the same year. The entire team here
at Junta42 felt it was a good time to update our expert content vendors
(such as yourself) on what has happened over the past 12 months. So,
here goes (NOTE: We’ll be putting a more detailed report to go out to
the community in the next few weeks).

Project Statistics

Over the past 16 months we have seen:

455 total projects
204 approved projects (13 repeat customers)
An average of 13.6 approved projects per month
An average of 3 approved projects per week
685 total leads distributed to our content vendors
170 total certified content vendors in the Junta42 system

We have worked hard over the past year to approve only
legitimate projects with real content budgets. Unfortunately some have
not been so promising. We are continuing to refine our approval
process and are seeing major improvements in this area.

Types of Clients

We have had literally every type of client imaginable use the
Junta42 service, from solopreneurs to large associations to
multi-billion dollar businesses. Just to give you a feel, here are some
of the brands that have used the Junta42 matching service:

Xerox
Home Depot
Deluxe
Minco
SAE International
Mettler-Toledo
Euro RSCG
US Government
Syntel
PKF North America
Norandex
Conergy
First Midwest Bank
Honda
Oldcastle Architectural
RIM (makers of Blackberry smartphones)
Citrix Online
WMH Tool Group
United Methodist Communications

I’d love to say that all
these projects closed, but many of these content projects were put on
hold due to the economic conditions. From our records, a good number
of these projects are still in internal discussion. That said, a few of
the closed projects we are able to disclose include:

RIM (makers of Blackberry smartphones) – Email Newsletter project to Future US
First Midwest Bank – Custom Magazine project to Imagination
SAE International – Website project to Hanley Wood Marketing
United Methodist Communications – Email Newsletter project to Wise Group
Optimum Marketing Solutions – Website Content project to Spotted Wombat
ACS Creative – Blogging project to Significant Info

As we get more approvals to share closed projects, we’ll be sure to pass them on.

Types of Projects

The biggest request for project type revolves around:

Custom magazines (38 projects)
Blogs/Social Media (23 projects)
Websites/Microsites (22 projects)
White Papers (17 projects)
Email Newsletters (16 projects)
Print Newsletters (15 projects)

The most popular content expertise areas include:

Marketing & Media (21 projects)
Business Services/Financials (20 projects)
Internet/E-commerce (11 projects)
Computer Software (10 projects)
Information Technology (10 projects)
Healthcare/Hospitals (9 projects)
Real Estate (7 projects)

Since our launch, we’ve delivered $11.6 million dollars in leads
to our expert vendors, an average of $80,034.00 per project. Here is
the breakdown of disclosed budgets (in USD):