Web Development Market - It's Time To Become Transparent!

    This article, last week I published on Roy.ru, hoping to convince participants and rating developers that everyone will benefit from transparency in our industry. The reason was the beginning of the traditional Tagline rating and revitalization on the CMSmagazine rating.
    Unfortunately, the organizers of the ratings and the main market players chose to remain silent.
    Therefore, I decided to bring this discussion to Habr. I think it’s a big plus that there is no Alter Ego, and the specifics of the voting allows you to find out the opinion of the community and the audience much more. I understand that there are many regional representatives, freelancers and specialists of narrow profiles in our industry, for whom these ratings are indifferent or cause negative emotions. Therefore, I invite all of you to look at this article from the point of view of the development of the entire industry. We, as one of the participants in these ratings, are interested in their objectivity and honesty. We believe that high-quality ratings will make our market transparent to potential customers, and this will significantly affect the development of our entire industry.

    I believe that both ratings can get along well and complement each other.

    CMSmagazine - The Best Tagline Voting Tool!


    Tagline - annual ranking. Each year, market participants are invited to vote for the top ten (most famous) in his opinion web development companies. That is, for those who have achieved the best results this year. And based on these data a rating is compiled. The last time we were informed that more than 600 companies participated in this vote.

    I can confidently say that we always had problems voting on the Tagline, since we did not know who to vote for. How to determine who achieved what this year?As a rule, all studio representatives vote for the same companies: either they remember about whom, or they look at the previous rating and simply copy it when voting. In this regard, after the publication of the results, there were constant disputes that someone had long been making websites or re-qualifying for other services. As a result, the organizers gave us ready-made results that did not reflect the results of work for a particular year.

    Now is another matter! Voters got an excellent tool to quickly assess who and what they achieved this year. What do you think this tool is? Of course, CMSmagazine rating! Very comfortably! You look, who and what has done this year. You can sort by TIC, by the number of works, by year, i.e. as you want. You choose a company, go into its work, see their number, you can sort it by year, see what the studio did in 2008. You can see what the rating participants did a year ago. If you wish, the site you are interested in can be opened and viewed at work. In an hour or two the whole picture is there! I don’t care that someone does not participate in the CMSmagazine rating, someone does not publish all the works. This is their problem. Some publish only work significant to them, while others publish everything in a row. Over the past six months, almost all studios that previously considered themselves above this rating have appeared there. Some not only publish their work there, but are ready to post even those who have long remade their sites.
    It is very convenient to see who and what has done this year from previous leaders. It is no less interesting to see their work for 2007. Yes, we do not see Lebedev and Aktis there. Those who want, out of respect for them, can go to their sites and see what they have done. I haven’t entered yet, but I think that everything is in order with them. All the others who have something to show are already there.
    So it turns out that today for the Dear professional community, which will participate in the vote on the Tagline, the best tool for choosing the most worthy companies for 2008 is the CMSmagazine rating. CMSmagazine can also be used by experts if they have no other priorities than objectivity.

    Pros and cons of existing ratings.


    From the participant’s point of view, I believe that today the main competitive advantages of CMSmagazine over the Tagline are the correct priorities in organizing the rating:
    1. Objectivity.
    2. Transparency
    3. Democracy.
    For me, as a participant in a rating interested in a fair game, these factors are the most important! According to the information provided by Tagline about the changes in the rating rules, it is not yet clear that this year the situation will fundamentally change.

    You can argue for a long time about the criteria for rating CMSmagazine, whether they are right or wrong, but it is impossible to accuse them of bias and bias. Each participant enters all the information about himself independently, and his place completely depends on his work and their quantity.

    From the perspective of a potential customer, CMSmagazine provides not only a list of companies, but also provides a convenient opportunity to see the created sites for each rating participant. Unfortunately, Tagline provides a bare list of companies that a potential customer must believe based on the authority of the industry community.

    Tagline is the first rating, it has more experience and today it is more popular and famous, but it has a serious competitor with a lot of advantages that you just need to be able to convey to our potential customers.

    I want to believe that the Tagline group will take into account the criticism that was last year when they were accused of non-transparency of the voting results, bias to individual participants and one developer of the popular CMS. To do this, it is enough to post the results of voting and information from the participants in the public domain, which will affect the correction factors. I understand that this is the number of employees, turnovers, prizes in contests, maybe something else. You can immediately warn participants that this data will be open, otherwise last year Tagline representatives referred to their confidentiality. It’s ugly when the Tagline receives data from market participants, and only a limited number of participants have access to it!

    Unfortunately, we have not yet been fully explained to us how points will be calculated according to which places in the ranking will be distributed. I wonder when they will do it. Before the start of voting or after the results are received? In the interest of the rating, do this before the start of voting!

    There is a significant advantage of Tagline over CMSmagazine - it is a turnover rating. Like it not, but they did it first.

    Rating by turnover (revenue) - there is no other alternative!


    Last year at Roy.ru the need to create a turnover rating was discussed. As a result, two ratings were held simultaneously, by Tagline and Roy.ru. Yuri Sinodov did not publish his data, but it is not too late to do it now. At least it would be correct to do with those who sent this data.

    The tagline published a turnover rating, and we saw 42 participants there. I think, despite the fact that the turnover indicated by the top ten is very doubtful, this rating is the best and most useful of all that Tagline made. Many thanks to them for the first step towards creating a transparent and civilized market. Now it needs to be developed and improved.
    I want to give two quotes here from the comments of Sergey Ryzhikov, CEO of 1C-Bitrix, to the article “Fun Starts” roem.ru/2009/03/19/vasiliev19032009

    First:
    “I’m sorry that this year the market will not get what adequate. Your comments indicate that everyone has long needed a good market calculation. But I am sure that the criteria can only be turnover, profit, number of projects, number of employees. From these numbers you can make the main rating. Well, the popularity rating of studios among studios may be some additional ”

    Second:
    “Moreover, I believe that the rating should include IHD, and integrators, and web developers and studios ... in general, everyone who makes Internet projects. And including optimizers of all kinds should be in the ranking. Then we can talk with you about the market and market analysis.

    And the rating is not the answer to the question of who should go to the client. This is information to the client for thought. ”


    Golden words, very reasonable, special weight to all that is said gives that they were written by one of the most authoritative participants in our market.

    The beginning is already there, let us develop and improve it. We saw that the developers are ready to provide this data. Let not all, but this is only the beginning! Do we have a doubt in their reliability? Excellent, given last year’s experience, let's do it so that the turnover (revenue) should be confirmed by official accounting documents.
    For example:
    1. Those who work under the simplified taxation system must provide a copy of the “Tax return for tax paid in connection with the application of the simplified taxation system”.
    2. Those who work in the regular taxation system must provide a copy of Form No. 2. Profit and loss statement. If someone does not want to show profit and loss, he can paint over this data.

    Afraid no one will come? Will not confirm? And do not be afraid who has something to show, they will send and confirm. And it’s okay that this data will be lower than our expectations. I do not know the names of the companies in the lower part of the Tagline rating by turnover, which sent their data in 2008. But to me their momentum seems real. And well done guys that they were not shy about their numbers.
    All the talk that someone makes websites for black money, through garbage cans, through barter or does charity work, is talk in favor of those studios who have nothing to show. Now almost any customers demand to carry out everything in white, and if someone else conducts something differently, then this does not change the whole picture.

    Now no one really understands even approximately the size of the market. How much is he? 100 million or 500 million dollars? How much does it grow or fall?
    Imagine how great it would be to compare the turnover for an individual company for this year and last. We will immediately see the dynamics of who is developing and how. We will see the dynamics of the market, although so far only among those companies that have disclosed their data, but this is already something. You can compare your growth with the growth of the industry. I assure you that in a year we will have data on all significant market players, well, except for one or two. There will be investors who can see promising companies and want to invest money in them. And if this doesn’t interest many people now, take your time, you don’t know what your goals and objectives will be in three, five years. The arrival of investors in our market will give an additional impetus to the development of the industry, and therefore increase the value of your companies.

    I fully support Sergey Ryzhikov that you don’t need to now detail the turnover. This will cause only additional controversy and add complexity. It will be very difficult to confirm these figures. For many companies, all work can be done with contracts alone. What difference does it make how much they have earned on website development, support, advertising, integration or “school portals”. The main thing is that there is a single indicator by which everything is measured.
    Do not worry that IMHO VI, IBS or LLC Promotion will stand high there. The client himself will figure out whose turnover reflects.

    If one of the IMHO VI divisions makes websites, let them be in the rating and do not care that they indicate other types of income. It's okay that someone made one project and earned more on it than someone on 100 projects. There is also nothing wrong with the fact that “Promotion” sold 1000 Bitrix implementations, but all of their work is very small. Everyone earns as he can. The customer himself will figure out what they specialize in, look at the work, their number, what they did, talk with their managers. And in order for the customer not to spend much time, he needs to have additional information for him along with the rating on the rating site. He was interested in some company in the ranking, here he can see all of her works, see by years, read her description, etc. Over time, everything will fall into place. The turnover rating will be overgrown with additional information. There will be opportunities to sort by different criteria, as now on CMSmagazine. The booming studio specialization will be one step away.
    I am sure that when the ratings begin to collect this data, there will still be a lot of nuances that no one even thinks about now.

    Today the question is no longer relevant, is a turnover rating necessary? We already have it 2008.tagline.ru/rezultati/oborot.html

    Question of the year: How to make Tagline and CMSmagazine understandable, transparent and useful for our potential customers and investors?

    I think that for this, in 2009 it is necessary to do:
    CMSmagazine does not need to launch a turnover rating without detailing, prescribe the conditions for adding work by companies, strengthen control over work in the portfolio of rating participants, and make the logic of working with its rating more understandable for potential customers.
    The tagline urgently needs to become as transparent as possible, to make the main ranking in terms of turnover, thereby emphasizing objectivity. Work on new additional functionality, making the rating more democratic with the ability to discuss and speak out to the rating participants.


    Dear Sirs, My goal of publishing this article is to make our ratings as transparent, objective and honest as possible, our entire industry will benefit from this. Hope you have the same goals.

    I wish you all good luck!
    Lerner Eugene
    03/25/09

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