The problem: these figures are used by companies to justify strategies to investors and the press. Yet nobody asks whether they’re valid. For fun, I decided to hunt down an Internet ad forecast from years ago to see how the gurus did. Sure enough, Jupiter projected in August 1999 robust Internet ad growth, enough to reach $11.5 billion in 2003. Guess where it ended up? $7.3 billion, according to the IAB.
Brian was smart enough to pick a time (1999) when, given the dot com collapse, it’s a pretty sure bet that five year forecasts would be wrong. I wonder, however, how wrong they’ve been over time? It’d be really interesting to see a scorecard of sorts, a spreadsheet of two columns, with forecasted and actual numbers over the past ten years. Anyone seen this?
If there isn’t one, shall we make it?