This was amazing to me for several reasons: first, we tightened our
phrasing of the question. In the first study, we asked respondents if their
sites were "financially rewarding now" as criterion for success. In the
second, we asked if they were "profitable now" and we included the option
"not profitable, but reduces expenses" for the FedEx's of the world to
indicate that their websites were used to cut customer service costs rather
than to generate revenues. (Both times we allowed "not financially
rewarding/profitable, but good pr" as an alternative, to differentiate the
Stoli's who find the web a great image booster, from our "successful
marketer" category.)
The second reason I did not expect to see the percentage of successful
marketers rise was because the total number of online marketers has tripled
since our first study. That means that most of those we surveyed have sites
less than six months old -- yet they claim to be profitable.
We were suspicious enough of our results that we did some additional
analysis to make sure that we weren't receiving a biased sample (even
though 970 responded to the survey from our population of 2500). We looked
at the differences between the earliest returns, which should constitute
those most likely to be biased, and the late ones, which should to be most
like non-respondents, to see whether successful marketers were more likely
to answer our questionnaire. This analysis showed a small trend in the
*opposite* direction -- that the late respondents were actually slightly
MORE likely to be profitable, indicating that, if anything, 31% is a
conservative figure!
I'll try to share a few more stats from our upcoming "Trends in the WWW
Marketplace" as they become available.
----
This week's sponsor:
Marketing to Women Online Conference &lt;<a href="<a href="http://www.kelseygroup.com/kelsey">http://www.kelseygroup.com/kelsey</a>">http://www.kelseygroup.com/kelsey</a>&gt;
Talk with Dave Taylor, Tuesday, Oct. 17, at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern
over the Internet using GlobalStage/GlobalChat software. See
&lt;<a href="<a href="http://www.popco.com/hyper/internet-marketing/chat.html">http://www.popco.com/hyper/internet-marketing/chat.html</a>">http://www.popco.com/hyper/internet-marketing/chat.html</a>&gt; for details
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