Knowledge

Collated Company And Industry Data Tidbits As A Sellable Product

As a blogger who frequently searches online for information regarding a company and an industry’s financial outlook, I can fully attest that even though there is an unimaginable amount of websites and data online, information on them is still very uncommon.

For information that is very uncommon even online, the demand for them is very high. All you need to do for example is type in Google the name of an industry let say: “logistics industry” followed by the words: “market size”.

The search results would be numerous and would come from diverse sources like government statistics, online business journals and paid industry reporting websites. In the latter, you need to pay for additional information if you want more.

Now, let’s Google “mousepad industry market size” and you would get a disappointing result from Google. The search results point to industry reporting websites who hide the data and won’t give information unless of course you pay. Of course, there’s nothing illegal with this.

Of course, the industry reporting websites need to make money for providing business information. Nobody would prepare a tedious industry report for free. No one works for free in this world.

But the problem for the many who require this information that only reporting websites possess is that the information they require could be expensive to get. A mousepad maker might be a small company with limited funds and have no budget for such expensive reports.

Another party who may need the information could be college and high school students who are studying entreprenuership and may want to know if manufacturing mousepads are a viable business.

If you go over the pricing plans of these industry reporting website businesses, their reports starts from a couple of hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars each. Their pricing plans can be varied like single customer or corporate, but still, they are expensive.

Of course industry reporting websites are targeting corporations and high income businesspeople. We can’t blame them for this but as you can see an unmet need exists: Cheap industry report information.

Another thing you would notice when you get business or industry information online is that there is no single common figure for many of their financial data. For an example, let’s go back to Googling: “logistics industry market size”.

If you scroll alone the search results you would find that the financial figure for the market size is different for each article. The amounts may vary by a few million to hundreds of millions. Some of the disparities are even in the billions.

So who do you believe? Seriously, I don’t know who to believe. Even the websites of government agencies conflict with the data of industry journal websites, industry reports websites and so on.

So what do I do? In light of what financial data I usually see online regarding industry financial statistics I just get the most common figure from the numerous online articles I find. I usually do not accept outlier financial data information.
This is the reason why I told you that getting industry financial information is a big time waster for me. Is there a solution to the problem? I don’t think so. So we have another need here: A reliable business information.

Government industry data is the de facto standard when it comes to reliable industry statistics. The US government for example not only collates data from their own country but other countries as well.

But the government cannot collate everything. Even the mighty US government doesn’t have an inexhaustible amount of resources to collate the statistics of everything not even of the different industries who financially support the different economies of the world.

The same is true for industry associations. Not all industry associations have the resources to collate all statistical data about their industry. Maybe an industry is too small to have enough resources to study itself.

And so, we come to another need: Missing information on a specific industry. But is there a demand for it? Let’s take for example the question: “How many ramen shops are there in Sydney?” or “How many ramen shops are there in Bangkok?”

If you Googled it, you wouldn’t get the answers. Is this information worth money? I wouldn’t know. But a global ramen company might want to expand internationally and would be interested in this information.

Google and all the other search engines have been around for more than decades now and are being refined continuously. If you want to find something out, you can definitely get information about it by simply using any search engine.

But as I have highlighted, not every information can be supplied by search engines. There are still questions and information which hadn’t been collated by search engines. Not that they are not trying.

The simple fact is that search engines still miss out or are unable to process our information query based on their algorithms or based on the existing global information online. For example, I sometimes find the industry financial information in forum or chat websites.

At first, I theorized that search engines can’t still process many of the data in forum or chat websites or maybe its not programmed in their algorithm. But sometimes search engines do find industry financial information when I queried it.

All I’m saying is that search engines can’t find everything for us yet for some reason or another. Sometimes we have to really make an exhaustive search of the contents of a website to be able to get our answer.

If you’re a regular viewer or reader of my blog website, you may have noticed that sometimes I would link an article on a website and specifically state where the information can be found. For example, I could state that it can be found in: “Paragraph 3, sentence 4”.

Although Google for example has the capability of searching a specific websites pages and actually highlighting the required paragraph and sentences you need, it can’t still do this for all the questions, queries, or information asked of it.

Who knows, one day Google and all the other websites would be fully capable to answer all our questions, queries and information, but for now, we still need to do our own searching for ourselves depending on our needs.

And this gave me an idea. What about if I collated all these information tidbits scattered online that the search engines are still having a hard time to index and analyze? It could be as simple as analyzing a paragraph in an online article to know the answer.

1. Cheap Industry reports: Google and the other search engines already provide many of these information we need. However, the more detailed information we need are still locked behind expensive online industry reporting website.

The price of the detailed and even basic information we need usually begin at a couple of hundred dollars up to a couple of thousand of dollars. This is a price not many can afford or are willing to pay.

2. A reliable Industry Information: Often financial industry information is varied for the different suppliers of this information. The question of who and what financial figure to believe becomes a dilemma.

3. Missing Information On A Specific Question: Although search engines have continuously improved over the years, there are still questions, queries and information they can’t provide. There are still times when one still has to do the hard work of answering their own questions.

As you can see, I have given a lengthy emphasis on the problems people still face while using search engines. As you can see, if you can solve or provide alternative solutions to these needs or problems, you would have just created an online business that few people yet offer.

In case you’re wondering, not all books, magazine, journals and all sorts of printed media can be found online. Here is an interesting article from Internet Archive Blogs with the title: “Most 20th Century Books Unavailable to Internet Users – We Can Fix That”.

If you’ve read the article or even if you’ve just read the title you would already realize the big problem we have globally: We are not preserving and making available online important old and even current media content.

For example, I have been searching online for an old American History book that I read when I was just pre-teen. The illustrations and other images on the book are very pleasing and I think are important. I even think the historical black and white pictures on it have commercial value.

This is the reason why I don’t throw away my old books especially those that come with plenty of illustrations. Maybe I’m in possession of the last copy of a certain book which is not being published anymore and is out of copyright date.

As can be seen, not every forms of media can be provided by search engines. We are not even talking of the huge numbers of media content that remains unpublished even today. Maybe you could get these information via swap meets, flea sales, estate sales and so on.

Let’s go back to finding out how many ramen shops are in a certain city or country. We can’t get the answer online for Sydney or Bangkok but we can get the answer for Tokyo. In case you’re wondering, there are 20,000 ramen shops in Tokyo.

If you would do a further search online, you would soon realize that there is no list of the number of ramen shops in the world per city or even country except I think for Japan who is reported to have 10,000 ramen shops nationally.

I can already imagine a website article and even a book which is not being offered by anyone else. And could I make money off it? Who knows? Maybe if you connect with the right information buyers you would get money.

And this is what you can do when you come across a question, query or information which cannot be answered by search engines. Look for the answer yourself and make it a habit to record unindexed or hard to find information online.

In fact, IBISWorld a popular industry reporting website is already offering information regarding the ramen industry in the US. I believe they have no data on other countries like Japan. If you’re a Japanese for example, you can make your own industry report and sell it.

The different paid industry reporting website analyze industries and businesses but whose analyzing them? I’m sure a lot of corporations and research professionals want to know who to trust among them.

One of the first things you can really do with relative ease is to make an analysis of the different financial figures being given by these industry reporting websites and compare them. All you need for example to do is to make a table of the figures and maybe get the average figure.

In due time, even if you’re not an expert in statistics you would already know the reporting pattern of this industry reporting websites. Which ones tend to be similar in reporting? Which ones are frequent outliers?

This would help your viewers and readers to decide on which industry website to use and trust. This would also enable your viewers and readers to get a clearer financial estimate of a particular industry. Remember that corporations pay good money for these information.

You can even supply your viewers and readers with industry financial information they cannot find online. Maybe the results are offline in printed media or by oral conversations which you happen to come across.

Industry financial informations are much sought after information as most business require them to strategize and even their standing in their industry. Industry Reporting websites are growing in numbers because of this big demand.

However, there is a big problem regarding the , price reliability and trust in the information being provided online even by the so called paid experts which are the industry reporting websites. This is your opportunity to provide your more reliable and hard to find information.

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