Thanks to everyone for their participation. Personally I have always leaned towards the use of 'Directory Industry', however when I actually sat down and thought about it, the term industry didn't seem to fit based on my own background within various industries outside of the Internet. Industry to me, has always been pretty much what it's primary definition is in the dictionary: Commercial production and sale of goods. But when I sat down and read a little deeper, this excerpt seems to provide base for it's usage: "A clear indication of the way in which human effort has been harnessed as a force for the commercial production of goods and services is the change in meaning of the word industry." WORD HISTORY - http://www.answers.com/industry As far as market goes... "A market is a social arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to discover information and carry out a voluntary exchange of goods or services." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market This would appear to cover us as a whole through our sale of service, however the dictionary does not cite service and instead sticks to merchandise or physical goods. And last but not least, Sector was included as I saw a number of people use this in threads on the forum during my research. As Sector is part of a whole it makes sense too. Note, the wiki and dictionary were not my only sources of information, but I have included them for reference. @britishguy "Its all of those and more I believe that directories can support many generic descriptions and parameters" Yes, this is true and my idea was to try and obtain the most used, preferred or most referenced by directory owners. All 3 were found being used by searches in this section of the forum and other directory related forums. "G has little influence on the Directory development progress" I agree totally and the further we can separate Google and directories as a market, industry, sector the better. @Freewebspace I disagree with your comments relating to Google. Google is not the be all and end all of the directory xxxxx, as britishguy quite rightly pointed out. A business can and will prosper in any market providing the planning is in place. If a business plan is solely dependant upon Google, then I'm sorry but that business plan would need a serious rethink because no business would be safe under such a plan. I am working on several projects which I hope will go someway to clearing the misconception created by so called 'SEO Professionals' that a directory is only useful for one thing. Google PR. Furthermore, many of the serious directory owners don't just concentrate their efforts on generating high PR. They have realized that to continue to succeed and push the envelope they have to bring in traffic and that traffic will disperse among the sites listed in said directory. @an0n I would have to agree to disagree with you on 'Niche' because I think this is open to a lot of interpretation. My own take on this is that a niche is a subset of a market or market sector see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_market However, as I say, the dictionary does leave it open to interpretation in the form of 'A special area of demand for a product or service', see http://www.answers.com/niche And I am sure that we both agree that we do indeed provide a service. Again, just IMHO @smub I think field would be a subset of either market or indsutry, unless your talking about those big green things that don't seem to exist very much anymore. Once again, thanks for participating in my little poll, the results and views have been interesting and helpful.
Web directories can be recognized as an industry within the Internet. It's rather new use of the term probably, but I think it can define like that.
My personal take on it is that the 'internet' it the foundation, and each and every part of it makes up a 'niche'. All niches in turn make it a whole. just my .o2 Thanks for the lengthy post. Should have made that into a blog post. Definitely something work reading again and re-referencing back on. Rob
I refer to it as directory market. I think the word industry is not suitable for the services market, that directories operate.