Aproximación al mercado de la información en España. Proveedores y editores de noticias[Approximate value of the information market in Spain: news providers and suppliers]

It is very difficult to quantify the value of information in general because its value is relative depending on the circumstances of its production, distribution and consumption. The only clear measure for everybody, and the one that is of interest for a country's economy, is the amount of money that will be paid for it, i.e. the market value. Still, market measurement is indirect and many assumptions must be made, due to the complicated segmentation between types of information, products and services, companies, nationalities... Perhaps it is this difficulty that has resulted in very few studies of the information market, even in advanced countries. An important exception is provided by the U.S. consulting firm Outsell Inc., which has spent some years doing research on the world information market. Outsell makes no division by country. Its thematic segmentation approach has been used in this study, and we have chosen the "News suppliers and publishers" segment, to determine what proportion of this segment corresponds to Spain. This paper has to be considered only a first step towards a working methology.