***SIMBA Online Conference '96
by Jonathan Sunberg
On Sept. 8-10, SIMBA held their second annual conference on the online
information services industry and delivered a message to the online
community: the business professional is ready to spend billions on online
services. Steve Case, CEO of AOL, was quick to point out, though, that the
business market and consumer market are getting increasingly difficult to
decipher.
Lorraine Sileo, Senior Analyst at SIMBA, noted that of the 76.3 million
white collar workers in the US only 10 million use the Internet (19%
penetration) and only 4 million use proprietary services (5.4%).
Therefore, growth was the key subject for all the speakers. Sileo
estimates that business use will double to 20 million users by the year
2000.
Karen Burka, Editorial Director of SIMBA, went even further and broke up
the market into 7 segments (with coinciding business use percentage). The
following is a list of the segments and their 1995 and 2000 dollar
estimates:
1995 2000
Brokerage (42%) $7.4 Billion $12.8 Billion
Credit (15%) $2.6 Billion $3.6 Billion
Financial News (14%) $2.6 Billion $4.2 Billion
Marketing Information (9.4%) $1.6 Billion $2.9 Billion
Professional Services (6.2%) $1.1 Billion $1.8 Billion
Legal, Tax, & Public Records (5%) $.91 Billion $1.3 Billion
Vertical Market Services (1.1%) $.19 Billion $.5 Billion
Wave Issue 9608 9/13/96 Article 3-01