10.19.07

It’s difficult to be an analyst

Posted in Uncategorized at 7:38 pm by David Kellogg

Imagine you are an analyst, you know, those financial types with the predictions. You have a 4 pm deadline to produce a report, but you failed to do any work. What do you do? Just wing it.

According to CNET through Datamonitor,

Social-networking sites will enlist 230 million active members by the end of the year and will keep attracting new users until at least 2009, according to an analyst report. But investors are still wary–and for good reason, as long-term growth is by no means certain.

But it already is the end of the year! What a prediction. This takes an analyst to predict? And now directly from the report.

This value chain will continue crystallizing, until each element required to design, build, maintain, operate and exist in a social network can be supplied separately.

Global social networking will grow and then plateau by 2012.

It is not clear how these geniuses happen upon these numbers. So I sought to find out.

Datamonitor Europe
Charles House
108-110 Finchley Road
London

Dear Sir or Madam,
I recently read an article in CNET describing your research about social networks. Do you simply make up your predictions, or is it from painstaking research? How many hours did Ri Pierce-Grove Technology spend on research?

a) 100
b) 1
c) 0

Can you enlighten me on his research methods? Are there any predictions that you made in the past that surprisingly came true? Please hurry back, because I do not have time for serious research for my blog.

Sincerely,
David Kellogg

I have not yet seen a response. Those doing serious journalism certainly do not have time to check facts or question authority. Instead, they shuffle stories from business press releases in order to sell reports (It’s $1895. Buy Now.). I for one call them on it. It would be far more interesting if an analyst pointed out in 2003 that social networking sites had potential to attract a large audience. Instead, they opt for making predictions in late October about what will happen in two months. Good work, Mr. Ri Pierce-Grove Technology.

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