We Analyzed 3.6 Billion Articles. Here’s What We Learned About Evergreen Content

We analyzed 3.6 billion articles to better understand evergreen content.

Specifically, we looked at a number of different factors (including content formats and promotional channels) that may lead to a higher chance of publishing evergreen content.

With the help of our data partner BuzzSumo, we learned a lot about why certain content continues to get shares and links over time.

Let’s get right into the data.

Here’s a Quick Summary of Our Key Findings:

1. List posts and how-to posts are the two “most evergreen” content formats. Presentations and press releases tend to be the least evergreen.

2. Podcast episodes very rarely get shared over time. In fact, podcasts are 4.28x less likely to be evergreen compared to a list post.

3. Content that’s heavily shared on Reddit has a high likelihood of becoming evergreen.

4. Articles with lots of engagement on Twitter very rarely end up receiving shares and links over the long term.

5. Posts that include “2020” or “2021” in their title tend to be highly evergreen. This shows that content with recent information is more likely to receive shares.

6. Content types with the highest proportion of evergreen content include “best of” lists, guides, data-driven research and industry reports.

7. Among publishers that we analyzed, Social Media Examiner, HBR and Mindful tend to publish the highest amount of evergreen content.

8. Verticals that tend to publish evergreen content most regularly include digital marketing, health, and technology.

9. Industries with relatively low amounts of evergreen articles include SEO, business, and fashion.

How-to Post and Lists Have a High Likelihood of Becoming Evergreen

First, we wanted to analyze the impact of content format on an article’s ability to become evergreen.

While the topic of a piece is obviously a key element of a piece’s interest over time, we hypothesized that the format might play a role as well.

Here’s what we found:

As you can see, list posts are (by far) the content format that tends to become evergreen most often. Followed by how-to posts, “what” posts and “why” posts.

This is in-line with our previous research, which found that list posts tended to get a high amount of shares overall.

To calculate how evergreen a piece of content was, we used BuzzSumo’s “Evergreen” metric.

This metric looks at shares and links that occur 30 days after an article was first published.

For example, this list post from Healthline has an extremely high Evergreen score: