Do Market Research Firms Give Anything Away for Free?
Many market research firms do post one or two free reports each month, usually broad in scope but on a popular topic. In addition, some have a free alerting service that will notify you of new reports matching your interest profile criteria and provide brief summaries of the reports. Both Frost & Sullivan and Forrester offer this feature. Others, such as Datamonitor, even allow you to search across summaries of all their reports and, in some cases, to view tables of contents. Most post some discrete statistical data on their home page. Take a look at AC Nielsens site [http://www.acnielsen.com] for some great statistics on advertising spending on the Internet. If you take the time to explore the Web sites, you can often glean some quick, timely intelligence. But if you find something you like, grab it; the free content changes quickly. The firms are still defining their own models for free versus pay content. The vote is still heavily weighted in favor of pay, but there are some nice su
