Reportlinker's blog : Web 3.0, Vertical Search, Information Industry and Market Research News - Tag - market research

Who produces and publishes open access content ?

Nicolas — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 14:03:00 +0200

As explained last week, we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Show in December. We will present you what are the so called “open access market research reports” and who is publishing them.

Nowadays, large Anglo Saxon and American groups such as Dun and Bradstreet, Factiva or Thomson Corp dominate the business information market. These players were born during the first wave of industry information providers. Launched in the early 80’s, they focus on financial and economic information aggregation. Their database, accessible by subscription, mainly targets Fortune 1000 and multinational corporations.

Beside these giants around which the information industry gets structured, the market is completely atomised. His peculiarity is the large number of private publishers. This is especially true on the market research segment. Most famous ones are Datamonitor or Euromonitor. These last distribute reports sold from € 1500 to 3000. Outsell estimates companies will spend more than € 12 Billion in 2010 in market research reports purchasing. This market grows by 11% a year in average.

These publishers’ global offer is estimated to 150 000 documents. Specialized in distance selling, they make a great usage of opportunities offered by Internet Search Engine for their document promotion. They also distribute their content trough market research aggregator, such as Reportlinker.com in Europe or Marketresearch.com in the USA. This last, worldwide leader, references approximately 100 000 documents.

But the Internet is full of treasures. Apart form these reports, many free market research reports are published on the Internet, by public organisations such as Embassies, Ministries or Trade Unions. We estimate than 10 million of these free reports are available online today.

Definition : What do we call Open Access Content dedicated to business research ?

Wikipedia defines the “Open access (OA) as immediate, free and unrestricted online access to digital (…) material, primarily peer-reviewed research articles in journals.”

OA content business research can be described as:

Information published for free on the Internet
Information giving insight into markets or industries, countries or companies
Information that has been structured and documented : source, date, author….

We can divide the Open Access Business Information into two categories :

1/Public Domain Information

The public domain information are the so called “Public Sector Information” (PSI).
Definition of “public sector body” given in the Mepsir report (June 2006) : The definition of “public sector body” is taken from Directive 92/50/EEC as “State, regional or local authorities, bodies governed by public law, associations formed by one or more of such authorities or bodies governed by public law” where “Body governed by public law” means “Any body that is established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character, and having legal personality and financed, for the most part, by the State, or regional or local authorities, or other bodies governed by public law; or subject to management supervision by those bodies; or having an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, regional or local authorities or by other bodies governed by public law”.

2/Private Papers

The private paper can also be defined as …..all the other documents !!
Business information published by private companies to promote their services companies or know-how (Analyst research reports, Annual Reports…)

Which kind of open access content can you find on the Internet ?

Ubiquick estimates that more than 10 Million free industry reports are available on the Internet. Obviously, and for commercial reasons, most of them are published by organisation financed by States. But publishing information on a sector can also be a promotional tool for many private companies.

Type and Source for Open Access Industry Information

1/ Type

Annual Reports
Press Releases (?)
White Papers
Investment reports
Country reports
Economic indicators
Trade Statistics
Patent and trademarks information

2/ Source

Embassy
National Institute
Competition Commission
Ministry
Local representation of state / federation
Trade Union
Customs
National and Central Bank
International Institutions
Stock exchange
Consulting firm
Banks
Chamber of Commerce

Summary : Type of public domain information by sources

July : More articles on Reportlinker success

Nicolas — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:19:00 +0200

You will find here two more articles on our new service. The the enclosed and written in French, give a detailled presentation of our company, our boss and the award we just get. The second one is an article from 01.net, written by Bertrand Braux. Betrand explains here how our technology is working, and gives more informations about our market research search engine added value. You can also access here some statistics about public domain reports available. Click here to read it (in French once more !)

10 years of market research aggregation : Competitive Landscape

Nicolas — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 18:45:00 +0200

Just type a query on Google....

The competitive landscape of aggregator is at the same time simple to understand, and complex to define. The internal competition is really fierce, as you will see if you type a query on any general search engine.

Just try to type “China "Retail Industry" "market research” on Google for example.

If we analyse the results, we can see that aggregators also face the competition of :

publishers, their providers who also directly sell online. In that example, Plunkettresearch ranks first.

the other aggregators

Larger aggregators, with broad scope of industries covered (allbizreport.com in that example)

industry focused aggregators (Just-food.com in that example). These aggregators are focused on a single industry. Most of the time, they also provide access to industry news, organize summit and promote major events.

Main aggregators are summarized in the following table.

Consulting firm

There is a huge difference between the expected results of an Ad Hoc research and an off-the shelves report, a difference of prices also. Ready-to-use reports are sold between 1500 and 5000 €, when a Ad Hoc research prices can be 10 times more expensive. But to provide their clients with the latest updated information, they are using multiclients reports to illustrate their work ! In our example, we made a screen shot from Google contextual ads.

Governments and public sources, such as University (Washington University in that example), giving free access to their own publications

At last, a large number of products can also satisfy client’s need for information (workshop, conference, press clipping...)

Who are the leading aggregators ??

As you can see in the previous table, less than 10 companies now manage one or more market research aggregators.

1/ The technology companies

Let’s first introduce us !! Ubiquick is a market leader in real-time web mining software. Our technologies enable you to connect, collect, and organise information from virtually any sources (web, intranet, application). We deliver these technologies through built-in online services, or as a licensed software. I let you guess what are our main force ! We sell reports through :

Plusdetudes.com, French speaking catalog
Allbizreport.com, English speaking market research catalog
But also Reportlinker.com, which is the first website offering access at the same time to public and private reports

The Alacra Store is an e-commerce website offering consumers access to select reports from a host of Alacra premium databases. Searching the Alacra Store is free. You register to purchase and download reports with a credit card. Types of business information available include company fundamentals and financials, credit research, earnings estimates, economic data, filings, market and investment research and news. The Alacra company coverage includes more than 45,000 global public companies, 20,000 private issuers of public debt and 350,000 global private companies with more than $20 million in revenue or 200 employees.

The Alacra Store is a service of Alacra, Inc. Alacra is a leading global provider of business and financial information and solutions. A privately heldcompany founded in 1996, Alacra is headquartered in New York City. The company provides a diverse portfolio of authoritative databases along with proprietary solutions that enable clients to quickly find, analyze, package and present mission-critical business information.

Last interesting stuff : Alacrawiki a guide to business information companies, publishers and databases. Anyone can contribute, but you must create an account in order to do so.

2/ The service companies

Bharat Book Bureau facilitate and support all business information needs by providing the relevant information materials generated and published by global agencies on Core Industry (Automotive, Insurance, Banking and Finance, Shipping and Marine, Metals and Minerals, Oils and Gas etc.), Country Information, Technical and Management subjects, both in print and electronic format. These include Reports, Newsletters, Country and Company profile etc.

Bharat Book Bureau also propose ad hoc research to companies that did not find the information theyr are looking for in their database.

Dynamic technologies GmbH is the operator of reports-research.com, markt-studie.de and studio-mercado.es. Few information are available on this company. Basically, we can consider them as being really opportunist, as they open portal in language in which nobody was involved yet (German, Spanish). They also offer consulting services.

Global Information, Inc. (GII), which was established in 1984, has since emerged as the leading aggregator for market research products in the Eastern hemisphere. Based in the Greater Tokyo Area, GII has opened offices in Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Brussels, and the United States. The company provides continuous 24 hour service around the globe.

MarketResearch.com defined himself as the leading provider of global market intelligence products and services. This aggregator probably provides the broadest catalog with over 100,000 private research reports (well, don’t forget that Reportlinker.com offers the access to 1,2 M public reports). They grow last years in taking over two competitors, firstly Mindbranch in 2003, and TBI Profound this year. The company, that we can consider as an industry shaper, also publish reports through different branches, such as Kalorama or Packaged Facts, that they both acquired in 1998, or SBI.

Research and Markets are another source for international market research and market data. They currently hold over 80,000 major research publications from most of the leading publishers, consultants and analysts. Based in Ireland, and created in 2002, this company has been quickly growing thanks to good knowledge in the SEO field.

Informa takes Datamonitor over

Nicolas — Fri, 18 May 2007 17:36:00 +0200

The market research industry is quickly changing ( and consolidating) this last weeks !

Two weeks after aggregators, (We made a post recently regarding the acquisition of Profound - TBI by Marketresearch), two publishers are making the headlines today.

Informa takes Datamonitor over, for the humble sum of $ 1 billion ! Whouou!!! Well, we can consider that Datamonitor business model is stable, that a important part of their revenues are based on subscription (if anyone can give us more information about that, we would really appreciate !!)

Synergy must be really significant between these two organisations to reach such a price. Here are two of them that seems obvious to me : - Both of them are targeting Fortunes 500 companies - They are not covering the same industries

If you are publishing or distributing industry reports, keep a eye on our blog ! We will keep you informed about next operations. And do you know what ? I bet this will involve web 3.0 information specialists, such as Reportlinker….