The Entire Communications Industry, in Less than 200 Pages

Posted At : February 21, 2008 11:28 AM | Posted By : Matt
Related Categories: BizToolkit, JJHill Library, HillSearch

The 2007 Digital Economy Fact Book (pdf) is a tightwad researcher’s dream: In-depth, statistic-heavy, well-cited, and freely-available online. One could hardly ask for more.

This report covers so much ground that any sentences I try to write about it are positively littered with commas and semicolons, and quickly become confusingly long. So instead, I’ll just list out some of the topics covered to give a feel for the extent of the info available here. Bet you can't get to page 188 without learning something new...


Growth of the Internet (page 1)

  • Demographics of internet users
  • Internet activities performed
  • World usage statistics by country
  • Top browsers and search engines
Hardware Sector (page 15)
  • Adoption and penetration rates of new technologies and tools
  • Semiconductor sales and forecasts
  • Sales/market share of PCs, cell phones, smartphones/PDAs, data storage devices, gaming hardware, televisions, MP3 players, and software
Communications (page 37)
  • Telephone subscribership
  • Broadband adoption
  • Wireless industry
  • VOIP, Email/IM, RFID
  • Third Generation Technology
  • Spectrum (I don’t know what these last two things are either)
Digital media (page 63)
  • Television
  • Internet video
  • Cell phone content
  • Music
  • Radio
  • Gaming
  • Online news and classifieds
  • Blogging, podcasting, and tagging
  • Social networking
Electronic commerce (page 83)
  • B2C and B2B e-commerce
  • Internet advertising
  • Online finance
  • Online travel
  • Online health care
Threats to the Digital Economy (page 97)
  • Malicious software
  • Spam
  • Phishing
  • Identity theft
  • Piracy
Worldwide Digital Economy (page 109)
  • Funding for new ideas
  • Mergers and acquisitions
  • IT spending
  • IT employment
  • Outsourcing and offshoring
  • International digital economies

(Source: The best blog/research source on the Internet, Docuticker)

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Jill Walker Rettberg's Gravatar Wow, lots of great stats! It's worth noting though that the book is published by the Progress and Freedom Foundation, which according to their mission statement is for traditional copyright in digital media, against government regulation of any digital media, and sponsored by almost every big name in traditional media I can think of.

Doesn't necessarily make the statistics bad, but it's worth keeping in mind that this is published with a clear agenda.
# Posted By Jill Walker Rettberg | 2/28/08 5:02 AM
Matt's Gravatar Jill makes a great point. Organizations putting content out onto the Internet for free generally have some sort of motive for doing so. Whether that motive is profit through the sale of advertising at their site, to draw attention to a product/service for sale, or to push some sort of ideological/organizational agenda – there’s usually some sort of ulterior motive. This is a clear challenge in Internet research, and an important issue to keep an eye out for. That’s why I was excited that this report cited its sources so well. The presentation of the material is perhaps agenda-based (and we may not agree with that agenda, in fact we may strongly disagree with it), but the numbers can be checked.
I think this topic merits its own post - stay tuned...
Matt.
# Posted By Matt | 2/28/08 9:26 AM
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