According to a report released this year, the Global Media Asset Management (MAM) Solutions Market is expected to reach USD 12.2 billion by 2027, growing at an impressive CAGR of 23.95% during the forecast period of 2023-2027. This is the result of increasing demand for media asset management solutions from enterprises and more mid-market companies across many industries. While iconik doesn’t conform to MAM traditions—expanding even into markets for digital asset management (DAM), production asset management (PAM), as well as file sharing services like Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive—the data and associated findings in this report supports these market projections with multiple data points confirming an increase in media management adoption across many verticals.

Back in 2017, iconik set out to disrupt the MAM market by creating an affordable, accessible and agile SaaS solution for organizations of every industry and size — the first of its kind. Historic file sharing solutions and hard drive workflows were broken, and a new wave of creatives and organizations with growing media libraries demanded another way to manage their media. Once again, this narrative is reflected in the data we are seeing today. 

TL;DR:

• Iconik data has grown 82% YoY due to growing adoption trends
• The hybrid cloud storage split in iconik is 67% cloud, 33% on-premise as cloud storage becomes more affordable
• The number of industries using iconik has expanded to 19, including healthcare and real estate
• Iconik manages 233 years of video (+43% YoY), and 139 years of audio (+128% YoY)
• Media management is being used for more types of files. 38% of iconik assets are not media 

Welcome to the 2023 iconik Media Stats Report!

Iconik manages 232.3 million assets! In this report, we've broken down the trends for SaaS media management, allowing you to explore some of the data. Discover what shines, what’s changing, and what it could mean for you! Our annual Media Stats report is a part of our ongoing effort to make media-tech data available to our industry for the benefit of all. This report is based solely on iconik data, but we believe it reflects the direction of trends in the wider market.

Why share the data?

The knowledge in this report can assist leaders to make informed, strategic decisions based on insights around how we use media and the behaviors and trends of users. Leading organizations depend on data to drive decisions and it's our hope that this report's data will be helpful to you.

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Now we can look into the data and media trends and see how that has changed. To give more insight into how we present this data, our methodology for these reports answers a few essential questions.

Media Stats Methodology Q&A

Q: What assets are counted?
‍A: Only original assets added by our customers are counted in our data—proxy and other files are excluded.

Q: Is an asset the same as a file?
‍A. No, not always. Assets like video, images, and audio files are a container that consists of at least two files. A single asset can include:

•  A container
•  An original file
•  Various formats of that file, e.g. proxy, mezzanine, etc
•  Technical and user-defined metadata (both on the asset and time-based level)
•  ACLs (access control lists) and permissions
•  And other files

Q: How are industries defined?
A: All industries are defined by the GICS model.

Now let's dive into the numbers!

Iconik is Managing 55% More Assets

At the start of 2023 iconik had 232.3 million assets, 82.7 million more assets compared to this time last year. The 55% asset growth in assets confirms that the four trends that have guided iconik's development are real and rising. 

Four Trends Driving Asset Growth in iconik:

1. Data is migrating to the cloud and needs to be accessible
2. Data is growing rapidly and needs to be managed
3. Video content is rising and dominating the digital world
4. More teams are working remotely.

"Iconik’s Four Trends Driving Asset Growth are spot on. If I could add one that cuts across the four, it would be archive accessibility. A key benefit of iconik is how quickly you can onboard and enable a client since MAM adoption should be a key driver from Day 1."

Lance Hukill
‍Chief Commercial Officer, CHESA

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Diversity of Assets Reveals Widening Use Cases for MAM

Iconik was created to manage rich media like video, but as you can see from our data, it is used for more than that. Surprisingly, 38% of iconik assets are not media. Companies are expanding the assets they are managing in iconik. Much of what is being managed today bleeds into what a DAM would traditionally manage. Organizations can use iconik functions like metadata, sharing, access control lists (ACL's) features to help them manage and secure all types of files. 

This chart shows the total number of assets divided by type and how much data each type contributes to iconik’s data.

This asset breakdown has remained consistent for the past two years. It may be surprising that a video-centric solution like iconik doesn’t have more video assets, but consider this: While videos make up a relatively small portion of iconik assets (15%), it accounts for 80% of the data. Meanwhile, while images make up a much larger portion of iconik assets (39%), they only account for less than 3% of the data. 

The really interesting part of this data is the duration of these assets. So how much content is this? 

Iconik is managing:

• Video: 233 years (up 43%)
• Audio: 139 years (up 128%)

Astounding Rise in Audio Assets

128% is a steep increase for audio assets. The reason behind this is the dramatic growth in the audio book and podcasting markets over the past years. Recent research shows that the audio book market was valued at $4.2 billion in 2021 with an expected revenue of $35.05 billion in 2030. The global podcast market is also projected to be worth $98.78 billion by 2030, with a CAGR of 30.65%. All this suggests a great opportunity for continued growth for this sector and we expect to continue to see more audio assets managed by iconik in the years to come.

82% Rise in New Data Reflects Growing Demand for Media Management

Iconik data has grown 82% (42.5 PB), from 52.6 PB to 95.1 PB over 12 months. That works out to be about 4.8 TB per hour. During this time, iconik customer growth has steadily grown with weekly average logins rising 50%.

Storage Stats Show Greater Adoption of Hybrid-Cloud Structures for Media Management

Iconik was built for the hybrid cloud, meaning it can manage media on both cloud and on-premise storage. Since the pandemic, cloud storage has accounted for nearly 70% of iconik's data. As the cost of cloud storage drops, more companies are taking advantage of this to become more agile. This year the hybrid cloud data split remains consistent with previous years with 67% cloud and 33% on-premise. Iconik users are managing 14.6 TB more original, hi-res files from on premise storage via the iconik Storage Gateway. 

When users connect multiple existing cloud storage locations to iconik, they centralize all their assets. Over 12 months the amount of data managed in iconik from various cloud storage providers has changed:

• Amazon S3: +83% with 18.5 PB more data
• Backblaze B2: +88% with 2.9 PB more data
• Google Cloud Storage: +45% with 1.7 PB more data
• IBM: +55.8% with 2.1 PB more data
• WASABI: +526% with 2.5 PB more data

"With remote collaboration becoming more prevalent in the media production world, organizations are shifting to leverage services on the cloud. Iconik’s Media Stats is another proof point of this shift. Where there is storage, there is a need to use it."

Elton Carneiro
Sr. Director of Partnerships, Backblaze

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19 Diverse Industries Use iconik

At iconik, we strive to make media management more accessible and easier to understand because we realize that media plays a critical role in the success of all industries today. This year, we've seen consistent growth in each sector, and the diversity of our customer's industries is confirmation for iconik to continue on this path. 

Iconik enables users from a wide range of professions, including media editors, designers, producers, developers, and teachers, to leverage the power of our SaaS media asset management platform. They are using iconik for media management, post production, collaboration, and automation in order to maximize productivity and workflow optimization. The data in this report offers insights into who these users are and the trends of adoption and feature usage.

The largest industry using media management is Media and Entertainment, which has remained nearly the same at 62.5%. Customers in the M&E industry represent seven sub-industries. GICS identifies these as, "Companies that engage in producing and selling entertainment products and services, including companies engaged in the production, distribution and screening of movies and television shows, producers and distributors of music, entertainment theaters and sports teams. Also includes companies offering and/or producing entertainment content streamed online."

At 12% of iconik's customer base, Public and Non-profit organizations represent the 2nd largest industry we serve. Within this industry are educational, religious, and social awareness organizations.

We Serve a Wide Range of Team Sizes

The beauty of scalable, cloud-based solutions like iconik is how it can expand from one user to hundreds of users. Small user groups do not always represent small organizations, because even large organizations may only require a few users from a single department to manage media. However, this data does demonstrate a point. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) often have greater autonomy and flexibility in their approach to onboarding. Our self-serve processes are usually good enough to get SMBs up and running quickly. In contrast, Enterprise customers tend to have longer sales cycles and adoption timelines due to larger teams and more rigid processes.

Usage of AI Services for Transcribing & Auto-tagging are Up 40%

Usage of AI services for transcribing and auto-tagging media has risen 40%. Iconik users have used AI to transcribe 29,000 hours of media in iconik. AI transcriptions are being used to save time on manual work, while adding huge amounts of metadata into assets with the entire transcript being made searchable. AI transcription technology is more affordable than visual AI technology, which makes it a good option for organizations who want to start using AI to enrich their media.

Auto-tagging media with visual AI has also been an easy win for organizations who need to maximize the visibility of their archives. However, the majority of our users are not using this technology yet. We believe that visual AI needs to improve so that it can be trained to the needs of each organization. Current pricing models are also not ideal for large media archives. Because of this, iconik will invest in more custom AI tools in 2023 so businesses can train AI to fit their tagging needs.

Adobe Integration Panel Usage is Up 178%

Integrating a MAM with NLE or design software allows creatives to find and add media to their projects without ever leaving the creative workspace. More creative teams are adding this to streamline their production workflows. The iconik Adobe panel allows access to all media in iconik directly from within Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, and support for more NLE's is underway.

The iconik panel for Adobe is utilized mostly for Adobe Premiere Pro, which also has the most functionality, making it the most robust Premiere panel on the market. The panel is used to facilitate proxy-edit workflows that allow for faster editing with iconik proxy files without the need to work with original, hi-res media.

“The combination of iconik and LucidLink’s streaming file service provides the ability to collaborate on projects without waiting for media downloads—perfect for distributed creative teams. The integrated solution really comes together in iconik’s Adobe Panels. Right inside Premiere, video editors can find the assets with the iconik Panel, either proxy or hi-res, and immediately import the files from their locally mounted LucidLink Filespace.”

David Phillips
‍Rich Media Solutions Architect, LucidLink

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Download This Report and Come Back Next Year for New Data!

We hope this data has offered some insight into the current state of media and media management. This report featured some new data that hasn't been in prior reports, and next year we promise even more. Iconik continues to find more exciting data points to further explore the trends around media.