A David Outperforming Two Goliaths: Factiva, Lexis, Silobreaker
July 24, 2008
A thoughtful reader sent me a screen shot of a Compete.com report. This is the metrics company that says, “Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch.” As you may know, I don’t get too excited by third party analytics. The data have to show me a big jump, or most of the market shares information is a statistical fuzz ball. When I saw this chart, I took notice.
The time period is a 12 month span, ending on June 30, 2008. The companies on the chart are Dow Jones’s “other” online service, Dow Jones Factiva. You can read more about this outfit here. This online service is so adept that it’s Google ad today (July 24, 2008) returns a 404 error or “File Not Found”. I clicked on the ad eight or nine times to see if was traditional media latency or just carelessness. Answer: carelessness.
The second company’s data charted by Compare is Lexis Nexis, one of the two monopolies in legal information. I love the Lexis tag line: “Lead with Confidence. Work with Confidence. Grow with Confidence.” Unfortunately this Compare.com chart shows Lexis following, not something to inspire confidence or trigger growth. Lexis Nexis sells online information to lawyers, but not surprisingly, lawyers have been finding out that their clients expect the legal eagles to use publicly accessible services, not the high priced services. Accordingly, Lexis Nexis has been working overtime to make Lexis spin more money. Nexis, has been paddling upstream for years, and the brand has less visibility than the hair product (Nexxis) in my opinion. Lexis tried to get the hair product company to change its name. Didn’t work. Tough to confuse a sagging online service with shampoo and conditioners in my opinion.
Now, the third company is co-founded by the former McKinsey manager and intelligence officer, Mats Bjore, and the CEO Kristofer Mansson. His company, Silobreaker, is the one with the soaring line of the chart. When a third party generates an upward curve that rises steeply, I take notice. The absolute numbers are less important than the third party’s sampling process notes a significant change. You can read my interview with Mr. Bjore here.
What’s this chart tell me?
First, Silobreaker is gaining attention at the expense of Factiva and LexisNexis. You can see that in the up and down red and green lines.
Second, Silobreaker’s upward ascent tells me that the company is getting new customers, not just sucking oxygen from the bigger guys’ base.
Third, whatever goosed Silobreaker to rapid growth took place early in 2008, and the momentum appears to be holding up. There will be a tail off in the summer when information junkies head for the beach or a trout stream.
But the useful piece of data is that the combined “people” score for Silobreaker.com is only slightly less than the combined “people” score of Factiva.com and Nexis.com.
Silobreaker may be a David. The two Goliaths owned by traditional media companies and a track record of throwing money and people at a “problem” are not out of the game. But if I were the product manager for either of these two companies, I would be considering one of these actions:
[a] Killing Silobreaker.com with a price war or carpet bomb marketing campaign
[b] Polishing my résumé because I am getting humiliated by a company in Sweden, which has a GDP smaller than my employer’s annual revenue
[c] Buying Silobreaker.com and taking credit for the company’s rapid growth, nifty technology, and developers
[d] Deleting my Silobreaker.com bookmark and pretending that the company does not exist.
Since I worked for the world’s smartest publisher, William Ziff, I would go for [c]. Why pretend that a giant traditional publishing company can make a product people want, that’s sexy, and has lift. Buy it, issue a news release, and collect that bonus.
Will Factiva and Lexis wake up? I will keep you posted.
Stephen Arnold, July 24, 2008
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2 Responses to “A David Outperforming Two Goliaths: Factiva, Lexis, Silobreaker”
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Hi Stephen, I like the name of your blog. It speaks to what’s driving my company’s business, namely research tools that get beyond search and into analysis of documents. One of our first products is http://www.illumin8.com, a tool directed at R&D researchers who need to find solutions to problems and explore technology spaces.
[…] some information about Silobreaker’s new services. I have written about Silobreaker before here and interviewed one of the company’s founders, Mats Bjore here. In the course of my chatting […]