Search and aggregators set to dominate

Search giants Google and Yahoo, which discover and aggregate content, are forecast to dominate the information industry in the coming years and influence the futures of information professionals, scientific publishers and the state of the news industry. The Information Industry Outlook report from analyst Outsell predicts the entire industry will be worth $448bn by 2010.

The information industry was driven by search, aggregation and syndication (SAS) in 2006, with healthy advertising and traffic revenues. Business growth in the SAS market was four times that of all other sectors. The SAS market was worth $33bn in 2006 and Outsell chief analyst Leigh Watson Healy, author of the report, predicted it would hit $74.7bn by 2010 and “account for nearly 17% of all revenues in the worldwide information industry”.

The top 10 SAS players grew by 39.5% in 2006, with Google proving a particularly mighty force.

Growth means the SAS sector is dominating the entire information industry. This impact is felt most keenly at scientific, technical and medical (STM) providers. Outsell predicted that Google Scholar “will have increasing impact”.

STM and legal information providers will achieve growth of $20.9bn between 2007 and 2010, according to Outsell, before experiencing a gradual slowdown. Growth in the sector will be driven not so much by the information, as its integration into workflow, “granting the flexibility to bypass shrinking library budgets,” Watson Healy said. The STM market is dominated by Elsevier, followed by Thomson Scientific, Wolters Kluwer and Springer.

Outsell described the news and publishing industry as being “in the most uncomfortable place in its history” due to the high cost of traditional printed newspapers and magazines and slow conversion to online.Watson Healy said 2008 would be “the year of the wiki”, with Web 2.0 technology replacing complex portals and knowledge management, and that a “critical mass of information professionals would take charge of wikis, blogs or other 2.0 technologies on behalf of their organisations”.

She added that the sector had to cut costs and “actively explore areas of service that can be contracted out, outsourced, sent offshore, or dropped altogether.”