Content is an “item” on a Web site that doesn’t necessarily have to be sold, thrown out or returned for some reason to a manufacturer.

An item in a store must eventually go. It has to be sold because it occupies valuable space. If it doesn’t sell, the story naturally puts the item on sale and often keeps lowering the price until it is sold. Good retailers usually make sure they have the right items within their inventory and have a decent track record of selling them, even though they don’t always get the price they want.

Web site content can sit there for a long time, even years, collecting page views and costing virtually nothing to occupy space on a server. Experienced Web managers know that accumulated content has value, and sometimes that content can be years old and still deliver, even though the traffic is small.

It doesn’t matter that that article got 10 page views last month. What matters is that those 100,000 articles collected during a five-year period each averaged 10 page views last month, which totalled 1 million page views, or three ad units per page, or a total of 3 million ad impressions at X cpm.

In addition to killing old articles because of the impression that they don’t get enough audience, there is another danger. It is moving a site to a new architecture or content management system and wiping out five years of accumulated content. As a result, the site unique visitors, visits, page views, ad inventory and even revenue will take a hit.

So any good content management plan should establish an architecture that structures and effectively archives old content. Any good technology plan for moving a site to a new CMS should include a plan for keeping the old content. Age has its benefits, even with content.