Content Publishing Cadence Benchmarks: How Often Companies Actually Publish

In The Manifest's April 2018 survey of 501 U.S. digital marketers, 51% of businesses doing content marketing said they published content daily. That is a content marketing publishing frequency number, and it covers content in general, not the number of new blog posts a company puts out. The difference matters a lot once you start comparing your own calendar to a figure you found online.

This piece goes through the published surveys we could verify, says who measured what and when, and is plain about the places where the data runs out. The short version is that there is good older data on company size, some useful recent data on individual bloggers, and no current survey we could verify that reports blog cadence for each industry on its own.

What the surveys are actually measuring

Before any numbers, it helps to separate a few terms, because most confusing benchmarks come from mixing them up.

• Company-wide content frequency is how often a company publishes anything in its content program. A company can publish content every day without publishing a blog post every day.
• New-content frequency is how often an organization says it publishes new content that supports its content marketing, which is the wording the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs used in their questionnaire.
• Blogging frequency is how often a person or team publishes blog posts specifically. Only this one should be called a blog benchmark.
• A frequency distribution is the share of respondents who picked each category, such as daily or weekly. It is not an average number of posts.

The categories matter too. "Multiple times per month" does not tell you an exact count, and "daily" does not say whether someone means business days, calendar days, or several posts in one day. We keep each survey's own wording below so we do not add precision that was never there.

How does content marketing publishing frequency differ by company size?

The clearest company-size comparison we found comes from The Manifest, in a report by Kristen Herhold published April 18, 2018. It asked 501 U.S. digital marketers at companies with more than 100 employees about their content marketing, and broke the daily-publishing answer out by employee count.

Across the whole sample, 51% reported daily publishing, 31% reported weekly publishing, and 2% reported publishing less than monthly. Larger companies in this survey were more likely to say they published daily.

There are some limits to keep in mind when you read that table.

• The question covered content marketing in general, so it does not tell you how many new blog posts any of these companies published.
• Respondents were mostly from B2C companies (73% B2C and 27% B2B).
• Companies with 100 or fewer employees were left out, so this survey says nothing about small businesses.
• The total sample was 501, but we could not confirm how many people answered each size band, or whether everyone answered the cadence question.
• The survey does not say why larger companies reported daily publishing more often, so it would be a stretch to read a staffing requirement into it.

It is also from 2018, so it works as a historical content publishing cadence benchmark and nothing more. It is a useful look at how company size and content frequency related at that time, and it should not be quoted as a 2026 figure.

How often did organizations publish new content?

The most explicit new-content question we found was asked by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. Their 2015 report on B2C content marketing in North America was based on fieldwork in July and August 2014, and it asked: "How often does your organization publish new content that supports its content marketing program?"

The report covered 307 North American B2C respondents, and 235 of them said their organizations used content marketing. Here is the distribution it gave for B2C respondents.

The report's own summary is that 48% of B2C marketers published daily or multiple times per week. The same report put the comparable share of B2B marketers at 42%.

A few notes on reading this one. The report was labeled 2015, but the answers were collected in 2014, so the data is older than the date on the cover. The survey measured the content marketing program, so it is not a blog-only number. We kept "unsure" in the table instead of spreading those respondents across the other categories. And B2B and B2C describe who a company sells to, not which industry it is in, so the 42% and 48% should not be treated as industry benchmarks.

The report also includes company-size categories in its methodology, but it does not give publishing frequency broken out by those categories, so we are not going to guess at one.

What do recent blogging surveys say?

For blog posting frequency statistics closer to today, the best source we found is Orbit Media's annual blogger survey, written up by Andy Crestodina. The 2025 edition collected responses in August 2025 from 808 content marketers, using a one-page survey with 24 questions and no incentive for respondents. In the reviewed write-up, 25% of respondents were in the "several per month" category. Orbit does not turn that label into an exact number of posts, and we are not going to either.

Orbit is open about who answered. Recruitment drew heavily on the author's network and the wider marketing community, and the respondents skewed toward LinkedIn users, B2B marketers, and people based in the U.S. It is also a survey of bloggers as individuals, not of companies as groups. MarketingProfs published a summary of the same research, with the same August 2025 collection period and 808-person sample, so it counts as one survey and not two.

Orbit has since published a 2026 edition, headed "What 1,042 Content Marketers Told Us About What Works." That page reports that the share of bloggers publishing two to six times per week fell from 28% in 2014 to 12% in 2022. This is a trend in what survey respondents say about their own blogging, and it points toward less frequent publishing over those years. A few things hold it back from being more than that:

• The 12% figure is a 2022 number. It is not a statement about 2026.
• We could not confirm the sample sizes behind the 2014 and 2022 endpoints.
• An annual survey series does not follow the same people or companies over time.
• The 1,042 in the 2026 headline is that edition's sample, not the sample for the older endpoints.

Databox's "27 Blogging Statistics for 2026" article says almost 40% of companies surveyed published new blog pieces weekly. That is closer to a blog-only company statistic than anything above, but we could not confirm the exact percentage, the number of people who answered that question, or when the survey was run. Databox mentions more than 1,500 responses across its many blogging surveys, and that total is not the sample behind this one finding. We would not lean on it for a decision, and we mention it so you know where it comes from if you run into it.

How often do companies in your industry publish blog content?

The surveys we reviewed do not establish a reliable, current blog publishing frequency for each industry. That is a limit of the evidence we could assemble and not proof that such a survey does not exist somewhere. If you work in technology, manufacturing, financial services, or professional services, we did not find a verified, sector-specific distribution of new blog posts to hand you.

Here is what we can say for each comparison group.

We left the industry rows empty on purpose. Filling them with a number from a competitor's blog, an illustrative example, or an estimate would not be a survey result, and it would be easy for it to travel further than it should.

Why the numbers seem to disagree

When you put these figures next to each other, they can look like they contradict each other. Daily publishing at 51% sounds nothing like "several per month" at 25%. They can both be true, because they measure different things.

The Manifest asked marketers at larger companies about content publishing across the company. Orbit asked individual bloggers about their own blogging. A company can publish content frequently while one person on the team writes blog posts a few times a month.

A few other differences are worth keeping in mind when you read any content publishing cadence benchmark:

• Who answered. The Manifest left out companies with 100 or fewer employees and was mostly B2C. Orbit skews B2B and comes from a marketing network. Neither one is a census of all companies.
• When it was collected. CMI's 2015 report used 2014 answers, and Orbit's 2025 survey used August 2025 answers. A page title that says "2026" does not mean every statistic on the page was collected that year.
• How it was reported. These are self-reported answers, not audited counts of what each company's site actually published.
• How categories work. Labels like "daily" and "several per month" cannot be turned into a real average without making assumptions, so we have not calculated a mean, a median, or a yearly total for any of them.

How to compare your own cadence with these numbers

A benchmark is only helpful if you compare it with the same kind of thing. A short way to check is to ask three questions about any figure before you use it.

1. What was counted? Blog posts, all content, or something else. If it was all content, count all of your content when you compare, including whatever you publish outside the blog.
2. Who was asked? Individuals or companies, and of what size and type. A survey of larger B2C companies is a poor yardstick for a five-person B2B team.
3. When was it collected? If the answer is several years ago, treat the figure as history and not as today's norm.

The most helpful way to use these surveys is to find the one that describes people like you, note its year and its categories, and see where you land. You can keep your own record the same way, writing down what you published each month under the same definitions each time. Then a number you read next year can be compared with your own history on equal terms.

Questions that sit next to this one have their own pieces. Refresh timing for pages you have already published is covered in how often to refresh content, and a schedule that fits a small team is covered in a realistic content cadence for busy teams. If you want a goal-based view, see how often you should blog by goal. Agencies can look at setting cadence across a client roster. If you are asking what publishing buys you, there is a piece on how many blog posts before results, and published organic traffic benchmarks cover the traffic side.

Many people who search "how often should you blog" hope for one number, and none of this gives you one. What respondents reported doing is not evidence about what works for your industry or what causes better rankings, leads, or AI citations. These surveys are descriptive, and that is a reason to use them as context and not as a target.

If you are working out how to plan and schedule what you publish, DeepSmith's Content Studio has a 7-day free trial, and Planned Content lets you give each idea a date.