Do Not Buy Any Report on The CDN Industry: All Reports Are Innacurate

If you are looking for details on the CDN industry, including marketing sizing, vendors, and trends, do_not_buy any report! I will provide the data to you free of charge. Reports on the market are stealing users’ money by listing “current vendors,” as Limelight, Lumen, StackPath, Verizon, and others that went under years ago, were acquired, or shut down their CDN services. Many also incorrectly list vendors, including Telestream, Citrix, Kaltura, Imperva, Airtel, Brightcove and others that don’t offer any CDN services.

The worst offenders are reports authored and sold by Precedence Research, Grand View Research, Fortune Business Insights, Fact MR, SkyQuest, Avania, IMARC Research, Future Market Insights and Roots Analysis, among others. Many of these reports also misspell vendor names (Cloudfare, Lemelight) or suggest that Verizon is an “emerging market participant” and that Fastly is a “new startup.” The average cost for these reports is $5k, with some costing twice that. Most have no author listed, and those that do list an author also cover markets tied to pharma and automotive. These authors have no understanding of the CDN market.

Many of these reports also suggest that the CDN market is in the tens of billions of dollars today, and some suggest that Netflix and YouTube resell their CDNs to other content owners. Nearly all reports I have seen don’t clearly explain or define how public CDNs disclose their revenue to Wall Street, and they use terms like “video” to describe all delivery revenue, which is inaccurate. See my posts at cdnlist.com and cdnmarket.com for market sizing and vendor list, and please get in touch with me if you need any updated data.

I have not seen a single report on the CDN market, issued by any third-party research firm or Wall Street analyst, that is grounded in facts. If you know of one you think is decent, I am happy to review it and provide my feedback. (dan@danrayburn.com)