HotTopics: Financial Performance Scorecard, Full Year 2004: Google And Yahoo! Grab Growth As Outsell 100 Peaks

Authors: Chuck Richard, Vice President & Lead Analyst; Ned May, Director & Lead Analyst

The Outsell 100(SM) representative portfolio of information companies has now completed a three-year run in which it effectively doubled its total growth rate each year

- a "triple-double"

- reaching 13.8 percent revenue growth for the full year 2004. That performance has been juiced up by the extreme growth rates of Google and Yahoo!, but even with those juggernauts taken out of the equation, the remaining companies still achieved "triple-double" growth on their own. This HotTopics, based on the full year performance of the Outsell 100 companies in 2004, is chock-full of the kind of industry financial benchmarks that any information and content software company should be paying attention to, including: quarterly revenue growth rates; growth distribution in the industry; growth distribution by industry segment; and trends in market cap multiples. It also identifies four "rising stars" (InfoSpace, Jupitermedia, A.D.A.M., and Laureate) and four "sinking stones" (LookSmart, NDCHealth, The New York Times Co., and ProQuest), and the characteristics that make winners and losers in today's industry. It also includes a full table of Outsell 100 companies and their performance metrics. The HotTopics closes with a review of essential actions for any company wishing to enhance its performance against these industry benchmarks.