Questions All Analysts and Money Managers Want Akamai To Answer

Aside from the consulting I do, I also work with institutions to provide independent, unbiased, industry specific data on key investment sectors in the online video, telco and wireless industries to institutional money managers.

I do many calls each month with these money managers and probably 50% of the calls I do are in reference to Akamai. That probably does not come as a surprise to anyone considering how hot of a stock Akamai has been and just how many money managers follow them due to their size in the market.

That being said, here are the questions I am asked most frequently that I don't have answers to:

• what percentage of Akamai's revenue comes from audio and video delivery? be it via streaming, downloading, webcasting etc...
• what percentage of traffic delivered over the Akamai network is from audio and video content? again, type of protocol used is not important.
• how many of the 20,000+ servers on the network are dedicated to delivering streaming content and what percentage of them are Flash and Windows Media?

Akamai has said they don't make the answers to these questions public but I think it would only help them if they did. For instance, Akamai is known as being a thought leader in the industry, people think of them that way and everyone knows they have the most market share for the services they offer. However, that being said, there is no data in the market place as to how big the content delivery market really is, what market share percentage a company has and what percentage changes hands each year from one provider to another. Why not make that data available and tell people we have x percentage of the market? Money managers are always asking me, what is the size of the market and how much if it does Akamai have? And my answer is always the same, I have no idea and anyone who throws out numbers is purely guessing.

My point is this. If you do have as much market share as everything thinks, and if you are growing your audio and video delivery business like we all know you are, why not tell people? You would have to think it would make people want to buy even more of your stock if they thought you had x percent but you really had twice that. And it would also give you the ability to be a thought leader in telling people what the size of this market for delivery services really is.

Hopefully, over time this data will be made available. Are there other questions you would add to the list that you would want to see answered?

Comments

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but suspect a porn connection. The less people know, the less damage control for Akamai.

[David Teten]

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[jo]

There are relatively few of their servers handling video streaming - they're dominantly a caching-only network. Also, because they don't permit any proactive deployment of files, only cache based on demand - even for video, the benefit to users other than those with large loads is marginal. People don't know they have very little streaming hardware - that's the reason they don't say. Great for caching for major accounts, highly suspect for smaller accounts and for all but the largest streaming media users.