Last week, for the O’Dwyer’s series of webinars, Tony Cheevers interviewed Dylan Tweney about a survey of content creators that we did together. You can download Dylan’s whitepaper here.
Several findings from this survey struck me as surprising.
The dominance of very short content is striking. With 80% of respondents creating content under 1,000 words, it’s remarkable how the content landscape has shifted toward brevity. I’d expected the 1,000-3,000 range (13%) to be much larger, but content creators are far more likely to write short-form social media content (69%) than long-form social media content (39%), for instance.
Collaboration is nearly universal. Almost all (93%) content creators collaborate daily or weekly, and 86% say their work is collaborative overall. The stereotype of writing is that it is a solitary profession, but content creation is clearly a group activity. Seven out of 10 content pros work with non-writers regularly.
Despite this, the revision process is surprisingly streamlined. I would have expected more back-and-forth in collaborative work, but 62% report content typically requires only 0-2 revisions before approval. Combined with 60% of projects being completed within a week, this suggests teams have developed efficient workflows despite collaboration challenges.
Collaboration challenges often stem from organizational dynamics rather than technical or creative issues. In open-ended responses, many content creators highlighted the difficulty of achieving consensus among team members or collaborators with differing opinions, priorities, and levels of expertise. Challenges included reconciling conflicting ideas, aligning on project goals, and ensuring roles and responsibilities are clear. “Finding middle ground can be difficult given we all have a different approach to engaging with the content but if you focus on the objective we all come together regardless of how we get there.” –Individual contributor, Agency, Pennsylvania. “Getting regular, timely input and edits.” –Director, For-profit company, Texas.
Project management tools are barely used. Despite widespread collaboration, only 26% use Microsoft Project, 12% use Asana, and 11% use Monday.com. Most people are still organizing collaborative projects with Google Docs (64%) and Microsoft Word (51%). This seems like a major missed opportunity to me but may be because of the shortness of and speed with which so much content is being written. (No, I didn’t use project management software either when writing this post.)
AI adoption appears more tactical than transformative. While 89% use AI tools, the applications are focused on editing (48%) and research (46%) rather than strategy. Given the many instances of inaccurate content from generative AI, I hope these creators have a diligent fact-checking process!
Overall, the survey paints a picture of an industry that’s become highly collaborative but is still using surprisingly basic tools to manage that collaboration.
In partnership with Tweney Media, Researchscape conducted an online survey of 169 professionals who work with content as part of their job, predominately from the US (95%). We collected responses from March 10 to April 4, 2025. You can download Dylan’s whitepaper or watch the webinar recording.
Author Notes:
Jeffrey Henning
