Forum Moderators: phranque
Part of the problem is that most hosting providers are after both the personal users and businesses so there is no distinction between them.
Another part of the problem is that companies which provide services closest to what I want to offer such as Yahoo Geocities, Homestead, and their ilk are very tight lipped about how their business is performing. This is probably due to the fact that there are a lot of free accounts in their systems and that they are working on moving away from that model.
I have had no problem finding stats for photo sharing sites and blog sites, but personal websites are a little more tricky.
Can anyone point me in the direction of information more detailed than "Yahoo attributed 70% of their revenue this quarter to paid services"?
I am having a hard time finding statistics on the number of personal websites out there, how many of them are paid vs free, and what the big customer segments are.
This explains the problem right there.
I doubt you will ever find this unless you do it yourself...
Statistic are biased to a simply fact... their must be a demand on compiling these.
I suppose you could go the ISP's and ask how many subscribers use thiere free web space with their access account... but I really don't see the relevance to the business plan or model.
I know who my core audience is, but I am interested in finding out what their overlap is with the users of the more mainstream build your own site services. That would make me interested in demographics of these users, not statistics as my first post asked for.
I also want to get an idea of the size of the opportunity, not because it affects what I want to do, but because the people I will be asking for investment from will want to know this.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. I have given a good look around and not found much on this yet, and am hoping that someone with a background in this could point me in the right direction.
