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What is the market size of audio tour in the US?
Hi! Thank you for your question on the market size of audio tours in the U.S. I was able to arrive at a rough conservative estimated market size of $688 million with a potential client size of 35,000. I found the most useful information to be corporate data from an audio tour production company. Little information was available regarding this niche, so calculations were made using triangulation methods based on various data. Below is a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
I searched corporate websites, industry reports, and trusted media sites for information regarding audio tours. As is often the case with specialized niches, not much information is available with regards to the audio tour industry and none from the past two years. Audio tours may fall into other categories within publicly available industry reports such as tourism or audio production. Research may be further complicated by the presence of various types of audio tours. Tours requiring designated equipment and headsets may not be classified in the same category by some reports as cell phone tours which rely on apps. However, I was able to find data on a company that does both hardware audio tour production as well as app production and calculate the average spend of their clients in the United States. From there, I could apply this data to the number of currently active museums.
KNOWN DATA AND CALCULATIONS
Acoustiguide is a global company that specializes in audio tour services. They provide everything from hardware and apps to custom design presentation and tour content. They provide a directory of their clients that can be filtered by country and industry category (art museums, historical sites, etc). From this source, I took a tally of their U.S. clients and recorded in a Spreadsheet. Altogether, Acoustiguide serves 160 clients in the United States.
According to Buzzfile, Acoustiguide Inc. (the U.S. branch of the company) generates $3,148,833 in annual revenues. This means that each client using their service spends and average of $19,680 on audio tour expenses.
Most of Acoustiguide clients fell into the categories of museums and historical sites. I therefore focused on finding data for these two categories as they are the most likely to seek audio tour services. For historic sites, there are 90,000 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, this data is not broken down in such a way that it would be useful to determine which of those listings would qualify as a potential client for audio tour services. The most recent museum count was conducted in 2014 by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and estimated 35,000 active museums in the United States. Of these museums, 15,000 generate less than $10,000 per year in revenue. This means that only 20,000, or 57%, museums have the potential budget for services at a company such as Acoustiguide. Multiple this by the average spend of $19,680 and you get a conservative estimate of $393.6 million. If you calculate the market size according the 35,000 figure (assuming other tourist attractions with larger budgets will make up the difference), the result is $688 million. I would say that given the lack of data available for other types of industries that use audio tours (historical sites, parks, exhibits, botanic gardens, and other tourist attractions), even this would be a low-end estimate.
OTHER INFORMATION
In the course of my research, I also came across a 2012 report by the American Alliance of Museums. While the Mobile in Museums Study does not provide much in the way of determining market size, it's included because it provides some insights into the increasing trend of smartphone usage in museums and how museums are using mobile apps for various visitor interactions.
CONCLUSION
While the available data does not allow for the determination of a definite market size, a conservative estimate can be made of $688 million with a potential client market size of over 35,000.
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