Surveying Canada’s Digital Media Ecosystem

In 2008, Canada’s digital media industry, comprised of approximately 3,000 interactive digital media companies, generated approximately $3.8 billion dollars through the hard work of over 50,000 full-time equivalents.

Since then, the landscape of our industry has changed dramatically. Social media has gone mainstream; Twitter and Facebook have become the de-facto tools of choice for communicating with friends, family and colleagues. Marketers have embraced social media as a delivery mechanism for product and service promotion. Brands have slowly started to embrace social media as a tool for listening to customers, improving their public offering, and in some cases, leveraged an engaged audience of millions to drive awareness towards important social causes, such as hunger and poverty.

Similarly, mobile has taken the industry by storm. The iPhone, and most recently the iPad have fundamentally changed the way we share, consume and create content. These devices have shown massive potential in a number of areas; entertainment, business, science and education.

But with everything we know about our industry and where it’s been, we know very little about where it’s headed. Every day, thousands of digital media companies employ many more thousands of professionals with the goal of building next-generation tools that allow us to communicate with one another, be entertained, be educated and educate others. Who are these companies? Where are they located? Are their businesses growing? What types of skillsets are they looking to acquire over the next year?

Given the disparity of available data in this area, we decided to take it upon ourselves to ask these important questions.

That’s why we’re launching the first digital media survey designed to answer these and a few dozen other questions about the state of the Canadian digital landscape, who’s in it, what they’re doing and where they’re located. The data you provide will help us begin to gain a better understanding of the size and scope of the Canadian digital media ecosystem.

And so we ask that you please take a few minutes to complete this year’s survey.

TAKE THE SURVEY

(The French version of the survey is located here.)

Help us spread the word

We need your help in getting this survey out to as many digital agency owners, web startups, and freelancers in order to capture the highest quality data we can muster. We have a number of short term and long term needs; please visit the Actionable Tasks page on our wiki for more information about how you can contribute your gifts to our initiative. Any help you’re able to give in tweeting, posting to your Facebook wall, or blogging about the survey is greatly appreciated!