Recession bites information industry even harder
Jinfo Blog

8th April 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Even the fastest growing segments can’t escape unscathed as Outsell scales down its information industry growth predictions from its relatively upbeat assessment of last December. Excluding news, growth in 2009 is now projected to be 4.7% (or $391 billion in worldwide revenues) compared with estimates of 8.3% ($400 billion) back then. Its previous report, No Guts, No Glory, pointed out that some information providers, such as those specialising in market research or compliance, were somewhat recession-proof or behaved counter-cyclically in downturns (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e15173). Now its revised offering, What is Good Performance in 2009? (http://digbig.com/4ypcj), reduces its growth projections for non-IT market research from 9.5% to 5%. Outsell did warn in December against the myth that ad spending would fund ‘all things web’, reflecting partly the special challenges faced by news providers – but it also highlighted the news blog the Huffington Post (profiled recently by Penny Crossland at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e18033) as being one to watch. Another was the social networking site LinkedIn – but the new report’s author Anthea Stratigos points out that today’s media woes are brought about not just by the continued downfall in print advertising but also by the barter system propagated by social networking in which people give away information that they used to monetise. Outsell is predicting further information industry decline in 2010, brought about partly by lower renewal rates. But anyone who believes that free information can replace premium subscriptions in tough times probably needs to think again. Associated Press has just launched an industry initiative to ‘protect news content from misappropriation online’ (http://digbig.com/4ypcm) and News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch is growling that dependence on free content is ‘going to have to change’ (http://digbig.com/4ypcn). This isn’t the first warning we’ve had recently about the eventual end of free quality content – see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16896 for instance. Information professionals need to reflect that the free content boom is as unsustainable in the long term as the credit-fuelled consumer boom was – and plan accordingly.

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