HN Explorer

Ask HN: How to determine market size?

10 points by zachallaun ↗ HN
What are some methods for determining the size of a specific market? For instance, I am attempting to determine the number of individuals who visit gaming resource sites (think: gamespot, ign, etc.) each month.

While I am familiar with sites such as alexa and quantcast that show traffic on an individual basis, I cannot find a method of conducting more broad analysis.

Any ideas?

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] thread
kerryfalk
There really isn't any magic to it. To get the data someone has to do the Primary Research (Grunt Work). It's either in a report that an agency has put together which you can purchase (Good ones are expensive), or you open up the marketers best friend, Excel, and start collecting data.

Last year my co-founder and I spent a good month basically doing data entry trying to quantify our target market. I'm very confident that no one knows as much about it as we do now. It's hard work, but it's worth it.

Just keep your scope and data points the same across everything you're quantifying otherwise the data is useless. Check the same months in the same years, use the same tool (Compete, Alexa, etc. all report different numbers, we stick with Compete which generally underreports actual traffic but it's consistent).

curt
What's the purpose of the analysis? The one thing I have learned through my years of helping start-ups and small businesses is that making detailed plans is a waste of time. Once you start selling a product and talking to the customer you end up changing course and most of the hard work goes out the window.

My advise, just get a general idea in this case just make a few assumptions. Get the number of total unique users across all sites for a given month, then divide that number by how many sites you think the average gamer frequents. That should give you a pretty damn good estimate. The most important thing is TALK TO THE CUSTOMER, research and stats hold nothing compared to understanding your customer.

zachallaun
The purpose of the analysis is less to create incredibly specific revenue plans and more to, as you suggested, get an estimate of the size of the market we're dealing with.

I will definitely use your method for estimating the size. I just feel, however, that there's a tool out there that lets me analyze unique traffic to a range of sites instead of only a single one.

WillyF
You can use Google's AdWords tool to look for keywords and how monthly searches they get.

You can also use Facebook's ad platform to see how many people fit specific targeting parameters.

These aren't perfect tools, but if you use them in conjunction with other tools you could find some pretty useful market size information.