EContent Magazine has just published its annual EContent 100, their listing of the most important companies in the content industry.
The list is always interesting and brings a blend of content and technology companies. In past years, the magazine provided a brief blurb on each of the 100. This year, they’ve made a change. Rather than a short description of each, they’ve created their 20/20 list, providing more detailed analyses of the twenty companies that provoked “the most banter” among their panelists. I was thrilled to see that Alacra was on that list, along with companies as diverse as Feedburner, Groxis, Mark Logic, Factiva and Apple.
Perhaps it’s my darker side showing through, but one thing I like to do is to see which companies have dropped from the list. Thirty-eight companies included in the 2005 list did not make their top 100 list this year. Some, like Delicious, Intelliseek, QPass and Hummingbird were dropped simply because they were acquired and are no longer stand-alone businesses. Others were “one-hit wonders”, showing up on the list for the first time in 2005 only to disappear a year later. For example Active Navigation, Metatorial Consulting and Texterity all appeared for the first time last year, only to drop off this year. Perhaps they were “on the bubble” in 2005 and were edged out by more intriguing offerings in 2006. Some decisions seem arbitrary. Two of the leading consulting firms in this space, Shore Communications and Outsell, were included in the 2005 list but excluded this year. This year, the classification and taxonomy entries shrunk, with my alma mater ClearForest and Recommind among those dropping off.
Those who dropped off can take solace in that it does not doom you to irrelevance. This year’s dropped company list includes companies that dominate their industries such as Bloomberg, the Associated Press and Dow Jones. Past year’s “dropped lists” have included companies such as Yahoo.
Here’s the full list of companies dropped from their list in 2006:
- Active Navigation, Ltd.
- Associated Press
- Blinkx
- Bloomberg
- ClearForest
- CM Professionals
- Day Software
- Del.icio.us (acquired by Yahoo)
- Dow Jones
- eMeta (acquired by Macrovision, who are on the 2006 list)
- HighWire Press
- Hummingbird (acquired by OpenText)
- Ingenta
- Intelliseek (acquired by Nielsen/Buzz Metrics)
- Mediasurface
- Metatorial Consulting
- Mirror Image Internet
- Moreover Technologies
- NTTDoCoMo
- NXTbook Media
- Outsell, Inc.
- PTC
- Qpass (acquired by Amdocs)
- Recommind
- RLG
- Sealed Media (acquired by Stellent, subsequently acquired by Oracle)
- Serena Software
- Shore Communications
- Step Two Designs
- 10-K Wizard
- Texterity
- Thunderstone Software
- Verity
- WebEx Communications
- WebSide Story
- Welchman Consulting
- Xrefer
- Zinio Systems
All in all, the eContent 100 is an interesting snapshot of the content industry. And while no list or ranking can please everyone, Michele Manafy and the eContent team do a great job overall.
Hi Barry,
Good post on the EContent 100. You're right: it would be a difficult list for anyone to assemble.
At NXTbook, we were told that the reason we were excluded was because those voting decided to eliminate all companies in the digital edition space (Zinio and Texterity are two of our main competitors).
Obviously, this decision was disappointing to us because it didn't seem to be based on anything other than an arbitrary opinion. If one looks at the Alexa ratings of digital edition providers, they'd see that while one company has fallen somewhat dramatically in '06, most of the companies in the category have seen steady growth and at NXTbook we can verify that 2006 was an incredible year of growth for us in terms of traffic.
In our business, traffic is tied to revenue, and our 2006 revenue and profit are leaps and bounds higher than 2005 and because we don't have any VC funding, the profits are the sort that make our owners happy.
Probably most frustrating, though, is that in the previous year we've done all sorts of things that make our technology better for users and publishers... we're using permalinks and RSS feeds to make it easier for magazine publishers to have their digital edition content shared online and we now have the ability to provide advertisers with automated click-through data... very cool and relevant features that didn't exist anywhere in the industry during the two years we made the list.
So while we're disappointed that EContent doesn't think we "matter" as much in '06, we're thrilled that our customers and readers feel otherwise.
Posted by: Marcus | November 16, 2006 at 02:59 PM
Author's note: The editors of EContent let me know that they decided to drop consultants as a group from the list, so the omission of Shore and Outsell was purely a result of that. Perhaps an idea for EContent might be to do a separate list/rank in another issue of content industry thought leaders, focusing on consultants, media, etc. I'd certainly nominate both John Blossom and Anthea Stratigos to that list.
--Barry
Posted by: Barry Graubart | November 17, 2006 at 10:22 PM