DMI
Revealing Digital Media Index (DMI) Data
With the deepening global economic recession starting in the first quarter of 2009 and triggered by the collapse of many financial giants in the US, the DMI or Digital Media Index has been trailed by finance analysts at Strategy Analytics as growing at a mere 0.9% rate compared to the same period last year.
DMI Measures Quarterly Growth
Strategy Analytics uses data on revenue growth of some of the leading companies in the digital media industries traversing across advertising, games, music, video, social media as well as content delivery and plots the growth trends on a quarterly and annual basis compared to the previous period last year. These data make up its Digital Media Index which in the first quarter of the year saw minimal but encouraging growth expansion for both leaders and key digital media players in Asia, Europe and the US.
The first quarter of 2009 global Digital Media Index (DMI) revealed 0.9% growth which is dramatically down from the 3.4% registered in the preceding fourth quarter of 2008. While the growth is minimal, it still augurs well for digital media companies thriving in a global recession that is seeing fewer consumers purchasing activity compared with previous quarters. On a year on year basis, the DMI shows a revenue growth of 3.6% compared to last year’s high of 29%. It is clear that the prolonged economic slowdown has adversely affected the digital media industry with slower revenue growth.
Conclusion
A deeper analysis of the growth slowdown at the company level reveals that most digital media companies have averaged a lot better revenue growth than companies that are more focused in online and traditional advertising of digital services. The obvious conclusion here is that the digital media companies have thrived successfully on the online advertising model enjoying the ease of internet traffic. Further analysis show that consumer-paid models have more resiliency in a recession.
