Why sustainability should be one of your DAM KPIs in 2026

In 2026, your DAM can’t just be a better shared drive – it has to pull its weight in your sustainability work too. This post explores why “less clutter, more impact” should be one of your DAM KPIs next year, and how to turn content performance, storage, and delivery into something you can actually measure (and improve).

Less clutter, more impact as a digital strategy

For years, sustainability sat in the “someone else’s problem” corner of the business. Facilities. Fleet. Packaging. Supply chain.

Meanwhile, digital quietly grew into its own part of the climate equation. Depending on whose numbers you use, the IT that powers our online services now accounts for an estimated 2–3% of global greenhouse gas emissions  on par with the airline industry. (We have written a blog about this - check here ››)

Data centres, CDNs, storage, and endlessly growing content libraries all carry a carbon cost. And regulators have noticed: under frameworks like CSRD, Scope 3 and digital emissions are moving from “nice to know” to must report. 

At the same time, the DAM industry is starting to look in the mirror. DAM is often marketed as the greener alternative – fewer shoots, more reuse, one central source of truth – but there’s still very little standardisation around how we prove those claims, or what “sustainable DAM” actually means.

2026 is the year to change that at your organisation.

Not by writing another ESG statement. But by doing something very operational and very measurable:

Make sustainability one of your DAM KPIs.
And tie it directly to content performance: less clutter, more impact.

Why digital content has a footprint at all

Before talking KPIs, it’s worth stating the obvious: digital isn’t “weightless”.

Your content leaves a footprint through:

• Storage – every asset you keep online lives on hardware in a data centre that consumes energy to power and cool.

• Delivery – every time an image, video or PDF is loaded, it travels through networks and CDNs, consuming bandwidth and energy. Heavier assets = more energy. 

• Duplication – each extra copy of the same thing (in another tool, another drive, another “temporary” folder) multiplies that impact. 

The good news: everything that reduces digital waste also tends to:

• Improve user experience (faster sites, cleaner portals). 

• Reduce costs (storage, CDN, licences).

• Make content operations simpler and more reliable.

That’s why sustainability makes sense as a DAM KPI: it’s not a separate project. It’s a way to measure whether your content engine is efficient, or just… hoarding.

2026 trend check: why this is becoming a DAM topic

A few things are converging:

• Digital carbon is moving into scope.
  Enterprises are starting to map the “hidden carbon footprint of digital” – data centres, cloud platforms, websites, SaaS vendors – as part of their broader Scope 3 work. 

• Green IT and digital sustainability tools are maturing.
  Agencies and platform players are rolling out tools to measure and optimise the sustainability of digital platforms – from dedicated “digital platform sustainability” dashboards to carbon calculators from cloud and telco vendors.

• The DAM world is starting to challenge its own greenwashing.
  DAM News recently issued a “Greenwashing DAM” call for contributions, explicitly asking the industry to get more honest and concrete about environmental claims. 

• Sustainable DAM narratives already exist – but often stay generic.
  Vendors talk about “centralising assets, avoiding duplicates, and optimising file sizes” as sustainability wins, which is all true – but rarely translated into KPIs, baselines, and targets. 

The gap: very few organisations are saying,
“In 2026, sustainability is one of our DAM success metrics.”

Let’s fix that.

From “more content” to “less clutter, more impact”

Most DAM KPIs still sound like:

• Number of assets uploaded

• Number of users

• Number of downloads

Those are fine, but they reward volume, not value.

A sustainability KPI shifts the mindset:

• From “how much content do we produce?”

• To “how efficiently do we use, reuse and deliver what we already have?”

That’s where “less clutter, more impact” comes in. Three levers sit directly in the DAM team’s hands:

1. Fewer systems doing the same job
   – retiring redundant content channels in favour of the DAM as a single source of truth. 

2. Fewer, smarter variants
   – using dynamic renditions and media optimisation instead of manually exporting 18 versions of every image or video.

3. More reuse, less “just in case” content
   – actively pruning orphaned, outdated and never-used assets.

All three reduce carbon and improve content performance.

A concrete 2026 goal: retire at least one duplicated content channel

Let’s start with something very tangible:

In 2026, retire at least one duplicated content channel and consolidate it into the DAM.

Almost every enterprise has “shadow DAMs”:

• A “brand library” in SharePoint

• A giant image folder on a file server

• A partner portal running on a legacy CMS with its own asset store

• Marketing’s Dropbox from 2018 that never really went away

Each of those:

• Stores duplicates of assets you already have in the DAM

• Creates extra CDN / bandwidth load when those assets are served

• Generates more confusion and manual work

You don’t need to kill them all in one year. But choosing one channel to migrate and then decommission is realistic – and powerful.

It gives you a KPI like:

Number of redundant content repositories decommissioned in 2026: 1+

…with clear benefits you can point to: less storage, fewer licences, fewer “where is the right logo?” questions.

What to actually measure: DAM + sustainability KPIs for 2026

Here are some metrics you can adopt or adapt. You don’t need all of them; pick a small set that your team can realistically track.

1. Assets used vs assets stored

Why it matters:
If 80% of your assets are never used, you’re paying to store and maintain a lot of waste.

KPI idea:

• % of assets used at least once in the last 12 / 24 months

• % of total storage accounted for by used assets

Goal for 2026:
👉 Establish a baseline, then set a target to increase the used share and reduce the long-term cold-storage of never-used content.

2. Orphaned and duplicate assets

Why it matters:
Duplicates and near-duplicates multiply storage and confusion.

KPI ideas:

• Number of unused assets (no usage, no relations, no clear owner)

• Number of variant files per core asset for key content types

Goal for 2026:
👉 Reduce unused assets by X%.
👉 Reduce average variants per asset for target collections (e.g. product images) by moving to on-the-fly renditions where possible.

3. Content delivery weight and optimisation

Why it matters:
Heavy assets cost more to deliver and make websites and portals slower. Image optimisation and modern formats can cut file size dramatically without hurting quality. 

KPI ideas:

• Average file size for key image types (e.g. homepage hero, PLP thumbnails)

• % of images served in optimised formats (WebP/AVIF or similar)

• GB of CDN traffic per 1,000 page views for major sites/portals

Goal for 2026:
👉 Reduce average key asset weight by X%.
👉 Increase share of optimised formats to Y%.
👉 Reduce CDN GB / 1,000 page views for at least one major site.

4. Redundant repositories and channels

Why it matters:
Every extra asset store is another source of truth, another bill, another surface for emissions.

KPI ideas:

• Number of repositories with overlapping content roles (DAM + X + Y)

• Number of repositories decommissioned

Goal for 2026 (your explicit one):
👉 Decommission at least one duplicated content channel and move its use cases fully into DAM.

5. Green hosting and vendor transparency (where possible)

Why it matters:
A big chunk of your digital footprint depends on where and how your platforms are hosted. Many vendors now publish or provide access to carbon data for their services. 

KPI ideas:

• % of DAM-related workloads running on data centres powered by renewable energy / green cloud

• Availability of vendor-provided carbon data for your DAM/CDN stack (Y/N)

Goal for 2026:
👉 At minimum: know the answer.
👉 Better: set a target (e.g. “by 2027, 100% of DAM hosting on providers with published renewable energy commitments”).

A simple 2026 roadmap: how to get started

Here’s a pragmatic way to weave sustainability into your DAM plans next year.

Q1: Baseline and focus

• Export usage stats from your DAM:

  • assets added, assets downloaded, dead weight (old, unused assets).

• Identify your heaviest channels: main website, ecommerce, key portals.

• Map your content repositories: all the places where assets live outside the DAM.

Pick:

1. One content channel to consolidate into DAM.

2. One collection or asset type (e.g. ecommerce product images) to optimise.

3. 3–5 KPIs from the list above.

Q2: Clean up and consolidate

• Run a content clean-up inside the DAM: find obvious duplicates, outdated campaigns, unused assets.

• Plan migration for your chosen redundant repository → DAM, including redirects, permissions, and training.

• Agree governance: who owns sustainability-related DAM KPIs internally (often a mix of DAM admin + digital + sustainability lead).

Q3: Optimise delivery

• Introduce or expand media optimisation: automated renditions, modern formats, maximum file size for certain types of assets.

• Work with web/ecom teams to track page weight and CDN usage before/after.

• Document performance wins alongside carbon and cost benefits.

Q4: Report, reflect, raise the bar

• Report your KPIs:

  • How many assets vs used assets?

  • How many duplicate repositories retired?

  • How much did CDN traffic per 1,000 views change?

• Share the story internally as both a sustainability and efficiency win.

• Decide: which repositories, collections, or channels join the programme in 2027?

The point isn’t perfection. It’s direction.

No single DAM feature will “offset” your digital footprint. And adding a green leaf icon to your UI definitely won’t.

But you do control some important levers:

• How many copies of the same content you keep.

• How heavy your most important assets are.

• How many parallel repositories you run.

• Whether you treat sustainability as an actual success metric for your content engine.

So as you plan 2026, try adding one simple line to your DAM objectives:

“Make sustainability a core DAM KPI.
In 2026, we will retire at least one duplicated content channel
and reduce digital clutter in favour of less – but better – content.”

That’s not just good for the planet.
It’s good for your users, your teams, and your budget too.

How we’re thinking about this at QBank

At QBank, sustainability is firmly on our roadmap. A lot of the work we do with customers already points in this direction:

• One central asset library to reduce duplicate storage across tools and channels.

• Adaptive metadata to make content easier to find and reuse instead of recreating it from scratch.

• QBank Media Optimizer (QMO) to serve optimised, dynamic renditions of assets via CDN rather than exporting and storing endless manual variants.

We’re not claiming to have solved digital sustainability – no one has. But we are actively exploring how DAM, QMO and smarter metadata can help organisations reduce digital waste and deliver faster, more consistent content experiences at the same time.

If you’re curious about what this could look like for your organisation in 2026, we’d be happy to talk and explore it together.