One in five online retail companies spends more than $2 million (€2.4 million) annually on managing website content, suggesting that content is indeed king.

According to a survey of retail companies by industry analyst Forrester Research, 48 per cent of respondents had budgets of more than $1 million for content management.

Some 49 per cent also stated that the amount of content on their websites would jump by 50 to 100 per cent over the coming year, said senior Forrester analyst Mr Andrew Parker, in Dublin recently for consultants Cambridge Technology Partners.

Content management software - either packaged programmes or software developed in-house by organisations - is becoming a necessity, as organisations grapple with vast numbers of Web pages, he said.

Large portal sites such as Yahoo had "in the region of 340 million pages", media companies averaged 4.4 million pages, while the typical clicks-and-mortar company Forrester surveyed had 77,000 pages.

Yet, most companies still rely on non-automated management of content. A number of employees whose sole job is managing website content look after sites, creating what Mr Parker called a "Webmaster bottleneck". The overload of information means that sites cannot handle the existing bulk of new information, or expand. Without the ability to manage large amounts of changing information, sites also cannot adequately support e-commerce transactions, he said.

Because of such "content hypergrowth, businesses face an explosion of content issues which they need to order and control", he said.

Content management software offers support for publishing new pages, integrating new content with old and for designing and personalising pages.

While a range of companies have developed content management packages, 88 per cent of retail companies said they used a home-grown program for controlling website content, Mr Parker said. Of those, 57 per cent said they did not plan to replace those systems with packaged software.

Retailers said the most effective type of content in terms of gaining sales or "clickthrough" to other areas of the site were retailer or third-party developed content about products or "lifestyle" information.