Measuring the internet economy with big data

This study primarily addresses the question; to what extent is the internet economy becoming an important part of the economy? In 2016, Statistics Netherlands carried out a first study which defined the internet economy, developed a methodology to measure it, and produced statistics for the year 2015.

The next step is try to understand how the internet economy is developing over time. Creating a time-series of data on the internet economy facilitates analyses of trends and provides a new angle for evaluating the big data approach. Therefore, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate has asked Statistics Netherlands to describe the internet economy for the years 2016, 2017 and 2018.

In order to create the time series, Statistics Netherland has again worked in partnership with Dataprovider. Dataprovider has extensive experience in crawling the internet to collect data on websites on a regular basis, in particular companies’ websites. When this data source is linked to the Statistics Netherlands data on businesses, the resulting dataset permits an analysis of diverse economic indicators (e.g. turnover, employment etc.) at both national and regional level, and over time.