Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

We are in the age of web video. So a site must have video, video transcripts, short descriptions and long descriptions of the video. The video must be tagged and easily playable. Some video providers offer time interval tagging like Viddler. Video is your current market trend.

Jim,

The market for websites is huge because developers don't have to have regional or local presence for clients and everyone can have one or more personal websites - figure between 200 to 400 million there. If you focus on businesses, there's 50+ million businesses in the US. Netcraft estimates over 180 million websites in existence globally. See https://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html. If we assume that 10% to 50% are US, then the existing market in the US is 18 million to 90 million. If the market is 200 million to 400 million and growing, then there's a lot of market left unpenetrated. The growth rate, according to the survey is 2.5% per month, or 34% annually. There's your market picture -woo hoo, we're off to "Success-land!"

HOWEVER, the more important factor to take into account in the marketing plan for a web development startup is competition. Today, everyone can be a website developer. College kids are out there offering services for beer money, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo (and others) offers free websites with backend tools that allow anyone who can work Word to make their own website, India is flush with website development companies with relationships throughout the US for sales. MySpace and Facebook offer free sites for online social groups as well. If website development isn't already a commodity product, it will quickly head there. Market strategies for commodities involve one of two possibilities: 1) You need to be the low cost producer and have capacity to handle high volume production and dominate share of market, or 2) You find a niche and based on your core competence and knowledge of the niche market, you fulfill special functions where you have limited competition. I'm assuming that you're probably not starting up a low cost volume leader so you'd probably focus on a niche where you can use your core competencies to develop a unique selling point and a competitive wedge.

If you were to take the niche strategy approach, then your market size would involve an estimate of the number of members of the market segment you would be targeting - based on your ability to differentiate yourself in that niche. If you were, for instance, to target schools in the Dallas area, then you could count the number of schools from something like https://www.schooldigger.com/go/TX/city/Dallas/search.aspx. You could parse this by district and further by which schools have a site already and not. Or by which sites have a unique feature you can offer using your unique selling point that would be of value.

I hope this helps.

Wayde