US research revenue grows 1.7% to $9.5bn

Stripping out inflation, however, Honomichl said the industry was actually down slightly on the year before, at -0.4%. He attributed this to a decline in the amount spent by government on private sector research firms and a continuing shift away from offline methods like focus groups towards online.

Analysing the performance of the top 50 agencies, Honomichl noted that firms specialising in syndicated, long-term research outperformed the wider market. Where Arbitron, comScore, IRI, JD Power, National Research Group, Nielsen, NPD Group and Rentrak collectively grew by 4.1%, the remaining agencies actually saw revenues fall by 0.7%.

The top 10 US agencies are as follows:

_{*Estimated by Top 50 authors **Rate of growth has been adjusted so as not to include revenue gains or losses from acquisitions or divestitures}

The full top 50 is published in the June 2013 edition of the American Marketing Association’s Marketing News magazine.