New research
Digital City Index 2017/2018
D2 – Analytics, together with Bloom Consulting, are very proud to present the first Digital City Index 2017/2018. After launching the Digital Country Index 2016/2017, we decided to expand the data investigation further and create a City version of the Ranking.
The Digital City Index compiles the measurement of the total amount of searches performed by all worldwide citizens towards any given City. All thanks to our proprietary software called D2 – Digital Demand ©.
Available editions: Europe 2017, Asia 2018, Americas 2018, Africa 2018, World Top 10.
Results of Digital City Index 2017 Europe edition
The Digital City Index 2017 Europe edition reflects the actual demand that Global Citizens have for 67 carefully selected European Cities. Around 260 Million searches about these Cities have been performed over the past year. As we are living in an increasingly digital world, this number will keep growing in the future. This City Top includes 67 cities, every capital city in Europe, plus other major cities. It’s focusing just on the dimensions of Tourism, Talent and Investment as these are the dimensions we associate most with cities.
London must not rest on their laurels – Cities with higher growth are hungry for the poll position!
London is the clear leader in all three dimensions. Although it is not the fastest-growing city, it is growing enough to stay in a poll position. We cannot talk about London without mentioning the elephant in the room: Brexit. The severe drop in the pound immediately after the vote caused tourism to increase. However, negatives were apparent; in the Investment dimension, a notable decline in searches related to labour costs and start-up’s and in the Talent dimension, searches were down 6%.
Reykjavik steals London’s thunder with the highest growth!
Reykjavik has experienced the highest growth through an unbelievable augmentation in its Tourism industry, here searches have almost doubled. With searches increasing by 84% overall – commencing with Iceland’s astonishing performance in the UEFA Euro Cup 2016. However, Tourism is not significant enough to place it high in the overall ranking as its less-than-average performance in Talent and Investment holds them back.
Digital City Index compiles the measurement of the total amount of searches performed by all worldwide citizens toward any given city.
Not all cities can be proud of their positioning
Paris is the prominent loser of the Digital City Index 2017, as it loses its 2nd place to Barcelona and drops to 3rd. This follows the string of violent attacks on the city, searches declined by 3% in Tourism and Talent searches made a small growth of 1%. We hope Paris can overcome the incidents and increase its digital appeal for the 2018 edition.
Other notable cities whose digital appeal declined in 2017 are Brussels and Istanbul. Brussels dropped 6 positions and Istanbul fell a worrying 12 positions.
What is Digital City Index
By using our unique software for destinations D2 – Digital Demand ©, every search is collected and categorized into three different dimensions: Investment, Tourism, and Talent. This is the first year we have released this digital city brand ranking. This digital city top allows organisations to not only measure the performance of each city on a global and continental level, as well as for each of the 3 dimensions but also to analyse the changes in positions of each City in comparison to the previous year and understand which are the top cities in the world regarding digital searches.
The #DigitalCity
The Digital City is a City that has triggered proactive interest from Global Citizens (tourists, investors and general citizens) towards that City in the Digital World. This definition was presented by Bloom Consulting in 2015 after determining through its own research and multiple other sources, including Google Intelligence, that when someone searches for information about a City in the context of Tourism, Investment and Talent, one of the primary sources used today is a “search engine”.
