Original Data Studies the Trade Press Will Cite

A data study earns citation when it is the only place a number exists. Across the last eleven studies we ran for food, travel and games clients, the median was 34 referring domains in the first ninety days, and the two that returned almost nothing failed for the same reason: the finding was interesting to the client and not to a newsroom. We settle that question before you pay for fieldwork, not after. What we build: One study a quarter, at most. It opens with a week of desk work reading what the trade press in your category has already published on the topic, looking for the number editors keep approximating because nobody has measured it. For a hospitality group that turned out to be the real no-show rate on Friday dinner bookings by city. For a studio it was how long a mobile title holds its players after its last content update. The question comes out of that week and you approve it before anything is fielded. The fieldwork: Panel work runs through Dynata or Prolific at n=1,000 to 1,500, screened and weighted to CBS marginals for age, region and education whenever the claim is national. Where your own product data answers the question better than a panel can, we use that instead, aggregated, with a disclosure line about sample composition that we draft and your counsel signs off. Public sources we work from routinely: CBS StatLine, Eurostat, RIVM, NBTC visitor figures, and Steam and App Store metadata pulled through their own APIs. What ships: A methodology page on your domain carrying the questionnaire, the weighting scheme and the raw CSV under CC BY 4.0. A chart set as SVG with PNG fallbacks, sized for a newsroom CMS rather than a slide. A press page whose headline number sits above the fold in a form a subeditor can lift without rewriting. Then an embargoed run to a named list: for food through Misset Horeca, FoodNavigator and the FD; for travel through Skift, PhocusWire and TravMagazine; for games through GamesIndustry.biz, Eurogamer and Tweakers. Each pitch is written for the person receiving it. Not included: We do not build calculators, quizzes or interactive maps as link bait. We do not scrape a competitor's site and call the output a study. We do not field under n=800 and describe the result as national, and we will not write the phrase 'X percent of Dutch consumers' over a convenience sample. Outreach to general SEO blogs and roundup sites is outside this work entirely. If link volume from anywhere is the goal, a link-building firm will do it for a fraction of this and you should use one. Who this is not for: Companies who need the answer to come out a particular way. We field the question honestly and sometimes the honest answer is unflattering. One travel client learned their category's satisfaction gap was narrowest exactly where they had been claiming an advantage, and we published it, because a study you edit for comfort is worth nothing the first time a journalist checks it. If the finding has to support a launch narrative that is already written, write the narrative and skip the study. What you decide: Which of the two or three candidate questions we bring back is worth fielding, whether your first-party data goes in, and whether you can live with a result you did not order. The methodology, the sample design, the pitch list and the timing are ours.