Web conferencing technology/service vendors, this is for you. Nobody really knows the true size of the market and how widespread the use of our medium is. Asking the clients about their usage won't ever get us a large enough response rate to get valid totals. So let's do a little group estimation amongst ourselves. I have put together a short (but difficult!) online survey. I'm asking each of the web conferencing technology vendors to go through and give best guesses and estimates of usage averages and totals that they see with their clients.
Click here to participate:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=pLzmzAXzKdzcU5zOVJqDcQ_3d_3d
I will consolidate the results and make them available to everybody. The last page of the survey lets you enter your email address for a private response and I'll also post key figures online. Of course, results will be cumulative only, and your responses won't be identified by your name or company.
It is fine for multiple people in the same company to fill out the survey. I ask you to identify what company you work for and what client geography you are making estimates for. That way, we can get some local expertise from the giants like Microsoft and WebEx by people who might know one geography but not their worldwide total. And I can do some averaging and internal validation by comparing responses from different people in the same company.
I know that many vendors don't or can't track exact client usage figures. Don't let that stop you. Answer the statistics that you have a good feel for and skip the others. Informed guesses are okay. We know this won't give us exact stats that will stand up in court, but a large canvassing of the industry will give us all a better picture of what is going on than we have now.
I have broken the statistic questions into three groups. Structured events, collaborative meetings, and on-demand recordings.
Take the survey today. And feel free to forward this to your colleagues who might have information and insights as well.
PS: I'm cross-posting this on Webinar Wire to hit the largest audience of vendors possible. Between these two blogs, I think just about every web conferencing vendor should see the note.
