400 digital signage software companies, and counting …

July 20, 2010 by Dave Haynes

James van Etten does the Clippings industry intelligence newsletter that rounds  up industry news overnight and drops it into 1,000s of email inboxes. At least I think he still does. I have not received one in months.

Whatever the case, he issued a report today looking at the rankings of software companies, based on Google Page Rank and Alexa Traffic Rank. These rankings are somewhat flawed and of limited meaning when compared to the real numbers that matter – the ones with currency signs in front of them. But it is still interesting.

What really strikes me, though, is that when I copy/paste that list into Excel to get a count, I get more than 400 rows. There are some duplicates in the list, but there are also some big names like Cisco, LG and NEC missing. So if that balances out, then there are now more than 400 companies selling digital signage software.

Holy crap.

That’s arguably about 375 too many, and even if you argue the industry will contract by a half over the next 2-3 years, that’s 200 companies.

The weirdest thing is that I still comes across new companies who blithely ignore all that and set up to build and peddle yet another variation on basically the same thing.