Creative SMEs Find Space to Grow at MediaCityUK

Posted on 24 October, 2013 by Neil Bird

Manchester’s MediaCityUK is proving a popular location for SMEs, statistics collected by Gather Digital reveal. The company, which is based at the Greenhouse on the site, began the data collection to learn more about their fellow tenants, but made the results public when they realised they contain some interesting information.

MediaCityUK is a 200 acre mixed use commercial development on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. Since 2011 it has been an increasingly important location for the BBC which currently has 26 departments based at the complex housing 2,500 staff. They have now been joined by ITV which completed the first stage of its relocation by moving in 500 staff earlier this year.

The site is also geared up to cater for the space requirements of smaller companies and is home to a growing community of creative SMEs based in the Greenhouse, the Pie Factory, Blue Tower, White Tower and the Landing.

Gather Digital’s survey included all the businesses, large and small, on the MediaCityUK database and it reveals the following findings.

  • 23% of businesses on the site are involved in TV and film production
  • 12% are involved in app development followed by 10% in design, 10% in web development and 8.5% in public relations
  • 26% of companies have been in business for between 1-5 years
  • 31% employ between 2-10 employees
  • 6 out of 10 companies have locations elsewhere
  • 88% of companies are actively engaged in social media

Discussing the results Richard Silk, of Gather Digital, said the information would prove useful to many other companies based at MediaCityUK.

“One thing that stood out for us was the amount of single person businesses that are located on site (at least 7% of businesses). To us, that shows that in a location dominated by the BBC and ITV, there’s still plenty of room to be a small fish in a big pond. As a young company ourselves, that’s very encouraging,” he added.

He continued to say that it was good to see so many businesses engaging in social media with nearly 80,000 tweets posted from the site to date (excluding those by the BBC and ITV).

Gather Digital plans to repeat the survey in a few months to see how MediaCityUK has developed.




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