PC Magazine, The Top 100 Classic Web Sites, #75
Pretty much all that remains of the original are three little letters in the "Technology" vertical of BI:
http://www.businessinsider.com/saiThis intro has been a long meander to get to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's Liberty Street Economics blog who, by-the-bye, only asked the first of the headline questions:
Will Silicon Alley Be the Next Silicon Valley?
For at least the past few decades, New York City’s economy, both its booms and busts, have been driven primarily by the finance sector, or more specifically the securities industry (a.k.a. Wall Street). In contrast, the city’s current economic boom—one of the strongest on record—has seen virtually no job growth on Wall Street. Much of the job creation has been in lower-paying sectors like retail trade, restaurants and hotels, and health care and social assistance, with some of the fastest job growth going on in what would be considered “information technology” industries—jobs that pay quite well for the most part. But how big is the Big Apple’s “tech sector,” how fast has it been growing, and how does it stack up against other tech hubs across the United States? Before addressing these questions, we must first answer a more fundamental question: what exactly is the tech sector?
How We Define the Tech Sector
This question is actually trickier and more subjective than it may appear. Traditional industries are classified based on what they produce, be it a manufacture or a service. But what we often think of as tech companies are actually just firms that are good at exploiting current technology in more traditional industries: local firms like Etsy (retail marketplace), Spotify (music distribution), Refinery29 (fashion magazine), and Uber (transportation services). A recently published study on the city’s “tech ecosystem” defines tech industries as those that “enable or produce technology,” but also notes that there plenty of tech jobs (based on occupational classifications) in non-tech industries.
While we recognize the important role and sizable number of tech jobs in traditional industries—for example here at the New York Fed—we will focus on a handful of industries in which firms use technology as the core of their business strategy. These industries will serve as a rough proxy for the tech sector. We then use these specific industry codes, as defined by the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS), to approximate the relative size of New York City’s tech sector, to gauge how fast it has grown, and to compare New York with other leading high-tech cities. For the analysis presented below, we specifically focus on the following industry codes:
There are other industries that we arguably could have included—most notably telecommunications. However, we opt to exclude this industry, because most of these jobs are not what are typically viewed as “techie.” In fact, the vast majority of employment is at firms that rely more on existing infrastructure (such as fiber optic networks) than the development and creative implementation of technology as their primary productive asset.
• NAICS 334 Computer Manufacturing • NAICS 454111 Electronic Shopping • NAICS 5112 Software Publishing • NAICS 518 Data Processing, Hosting & Related Services • NAICS 51913 Internet Publishing & Broadcasting and Web Search Portals • NAICS 5415 Computer Systems Design & Related • NAICS 5471 Scientific R&D Services
A Geographic Profile of New York City’s Tech Sector
When asked where tech firms in the city are located, many New Yorkers will mention Silicon Alley in Manhattan—roughly speaking, the area between the Lower and Midtown Manhattan skylines. But as shown in the map on page 13 of this study, there are also plenty of tech firms in both Lower and Midtown Manhattan, as well as some clustered in neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens near the East River, where distance to Manhattan is minimized. Similarly, this map of New York tech start-ups shows that they proliferate throughout the southern part of Manhattan, while there are a few such clusters in nearby parts of Brooklyn and Queens.
Using 2014 data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, we see that the vast majority of the city’s tech sector jobs (86 percent) are in Manhattan, while most of the rest are in Brooklyn and Queens. Overall, tech, as defined here, accounts for about 3½ percent of jobs citywide but almost 5 percent in Manhattan, which is about a percentage point above the nationwide share. Moreover, these industries, taken together, pay fairly well: an average of roughly $118,000 per year citywide as of 2013—not quite on par with the securities industry, but well above the citywide average for all jobs of $84,000. By far the largest of these industries is defined as Computer Systems Design & Related, which accounts for more than half of the city’s tech jobs (above the U.S. average of 40 percent). New York City also has a relatively high concentration of jobs in Electronic Shopping and Internet Publishing & Broadcasting and Web Search Portals. This makes sense when we consider that such firms as Spotify, Facebook, Etsy, BuzzFeed, and Seamless all have offices located in New York City. The numbers above illustrate the current tech landscape here, but how has this landscape changed over the past few years?
Recent Trends in the Tech Sector
Tallying up jobs or even income in just these industries will tend to understate the absolute size of New York City’s tech sector because it misses some businesses like online magazines, web-based advertising firms, and so forth. This count also does not include the self-employed—for instance, web designers, programmers, and other consultants who work on contract and are not on any firm’s payroll. Still, these job tallies can be useful for gauging trends and growth rates in the tech sector. The chart below shows how employment in New York City’s tech sector, as we define it, changed from 2007, before the Great Recession, to 2014, for which we have the latest available data....MUCH MORE
