Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Share in 2024

Digital media has been the center of all businesses with an online presence, for practically all companies nowadays. Its digital assets are used in websites and documentation and include media files, photos, documents, software licenses, blueprints, and many more. However, these assets are often spread out, hard to find, and stored in separate data silos, usually accessible only to certain teams or departments. They often number in the hundreds of thousands of files, and managing them all without any digital asset management software tool is often next to impossible.

It is well-recognized that increasing productivity with digital asset management tools is essential to success in the modern business world. This article will discuss the digital asset management (DAM) software market share and other key information about this software category. Not included here are other forms of digital assets like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and financial or fintech tools that are not ordinarily part of a B2B company’s DAM platform.

Digital media services have evolved drastically over the past 10 years, and over-the-top (OTT) media services, which serve media directly over the Internet to users, have replaced the vast majority of cable TV, broadcast TV, and satellite TV platforms as the platform of choice for streaming TV shows and movies.

Digital asset management integration into marketing content activities has produced a 75% marketing overhead reduction, a 30% increase in conversions, 34% less time spent managing assets, and an incredible 500% reduction in time to market.

Key improvements in DAM software use were experienced by surveyed companies, 58% of which reported improvement in the use of consumer data/analytics and demonstrated the synergy possible between DAMs and analytics usage. Fifty-six percent experienced improved omnichannel marketing capabilities, 55% had improved quality of digital experiences, and 53% reported improved personalization capabilities. These are great indicators of increased customer satisfaction that are crucial to customer conversion and retention.

Have you experienced any of the above issues? Can your company keep up with changes in branding to keep up with industry regulations and your company’s mergers and acquisitions? Can different versions of your digital assets be easily deployed to specific customer segments automatically? Can your digital media files be easily converted to country-specific versions and translated into local languages, with corresponding international subtitles? And can you keep up with the licensing requirements of assets you acquired from other companies without violating time and asset usage requirements (each violation is fined separately)? If yes, DAM software is for you.

Examples of Digital Asset Management Software

What are examples of digital asset management software? To help you get a clearer picture of the DAM marketplace, the leading DAMs in the market are as follows:

monday.com

monday.com is a cloud-based multi-functional and highly-configurable platform that performs digital asset management as a subset of its business management tools. You can organize, manage inventory, track, modify, and deploy your digital assets enterprise-wide using automated tools, programmable scripts, and intuitive dashboards. It is very useful for efficiently managing all your media assets for campaigns, website design, and launches of your product and services. It is mobile-friendly and the platform hosts an entire business management platform that tightly integrates DAM functionalities.

WrikeVISIT WEBSITE

Wrike is a project management application that can be used for digital asset management as part of custom workflows in your organization. Wrike manages your digital assets such as documents, images, videos, and other media files as part of your projects and helps provide your employees with quick, full feedback on all proofing and approval steps.

Project teams quickly can turn ideas into action plans and campaigns while keeping all employees updated with project progress status and reports. Its visual and shareable project dashboards, reports, and interactive GANTT charts make asset management and scheduling easy to do.

Cloudinary

Cloudinary is an enterprise-grade, cloud-based media management and deployment platform for all types of rich media. The platform uses AI, automation, and advanced image and video processing features to help eliminate manual handling of digital media assets and deliver rich media and visuals at scale. It utilizes content-delivery networks to increase speed in localized areas and to help your business scale up locally and internationally.

UploadcareVISIT WEBSITE

is a cloud-based platform that provides end-to-end content handling, including file uploading, processing, and delivery. Its platform is built for developers, offering simple, customizable, lightweight, and powerful building blocks to handle digital asset uploads, storage, processing, and delivery with less coding required. It utilizes multiple CDNs with the efficient routing of assets. Its malware scanner automatically scans and eliminates malware- or virus-infected files and malicious files. It has a pay-as-you-grow pricing scheme, making it affordable while remaining flexible and scalable.

FilecampVISIT WEBSITE

Filecamp is a cloud-based SaaS platform that handles digital asset management of documents, media files, and graphics, among others. It has a simple and powerful interface, helping you organize company digital assets, review and approve projects in real time, design, distribute, and deploy company-branded materials and media, distribute assets and content to teams, and deliver the right content to customers through all your channels.

You can easily set up and configure monday.com to suit many business needs, including managing various data assets.

Market Share/Value of Digital Asset Management

The 2021 total value of the media and entertainment segment stood at $3.5 billion, with the digital asset management (DAM) software market share forecasted to grow to around $8.2 billion by 2030, with an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18%.

The market share for cloud-hosted services is expected to grow to around $11.3 billion by 2030 from just $2.2 billion in 2021, at a forecast CAGR of 20%.

For the digital asset management market segments of SMEs and large enterprises, the latter had the larger market share valued at $1.9 billion in 2021. It is foreseen to increase to $7.8 billion by 2030 at a forecast CAGR of 17%.

Reduced Content Search Time, Content Costs, Legal Risks & Other DAM Benefits

Centralized asset management in DAM software improved overall performance and efficiency in some key areas. In a compilation of key 2022 statistics, 66% of company employees indicated a reduction in content search time, 23% had reduced legal risks, 47% had increased speed in creating new assets, 28% experienced decreased asset recreation costs, and 23% had a faster time to market.

Robust content management has been found to reduce the time spent on content updates and publishing requests by 80% and reduce content creation costs by 40%. Marketing overhead was reduced surprisingly by up to 75%, and IT-related costs by 50%. Thirty-four percent reported spending less time managing their assets per week. These stats indicate the large cost savings through efficient use of time and resources made possible by DAM usage.

Improved content production presented its own ROIs with 30% of respondents reporting increased marketing productivity, 80% experiencing a reduction in brand asset creation costs, and a 50% cut in agency spending. These stats indicate the immediate impact and value of adopting DAMs into your company workflows and enterprise software platforms.

The Future of Digital Asset Management

The digital asset management software market is in for more growth in the coming years. In a 2020-2027 forecast study, it was predicted that the fastest growing market would be the Asia-Pacific, while the largest market would still be North America. Overall CAGR is forecast at 18.58 % through 2027, clearly presenting businesses with a lot of opportunities in the DAM software market.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology has been harnessed in many ways on almost all cloud-based DAM platforms. It has been employed in training models specifically using certain media types in order to parse them, automatically generating movie or TV show subtitles in multiple languages, and indexing key moments for chapter partitioning. AI has also been useful in image classification and rescaling, image editing, background removal, downscaling and upscaling movies to HD or 4K resolution, colorizing black and white movies, keywording, sentiment analysis, and many more capabilities, often done very fast and in real time.

AI has also been used to create movies with different versions or editors’ cuts, including teaser trailers edited into several different versions before the final versions are released to the public. The number of DAM features will only increase with time and help produce faster workflows with more capabilities.

Meanwhile, the digital asset management software market share is expected to expand as more DAM platform companies are integrating their DAM systems with enterprise platforms like CRM software platforms to provide a complete and high-quality digital experience to customers, the top factor facilitating customer conversions, retention, and brand advocacy. Adding features that will help clients in consolidating and standardizing branded content across multiple channels or omnichannel is also one of the key trends in DAM software development.

As businesses scale up and require more storage and computational requirements, scalability and fast content delivery will be the main choke points, so content delivery networks or CDNs and cloud computing platforms will increasingly be integrated into DAM software development. Currently, most DAM APIs allow for third-party apps and software integrations, providing users with familiar software while using new DAM software. Mobile-device friendliness will increase in importance, and key improvements in asset resizing and content optimization will likely continue.

Why is digital asset management important?

Companies without any DAM platform or who have not fully exploited DAM systems report a large number of problems that have cost them a lot of time and opportunity costs. It has been estimated that 3.9 hours are lost (half a day of work) due to slow email chain reviews and approvals, and at 240 work days per annum and $AUD 118.02 team cost per hour, this amounts to $AUD 110,467 lost per year—per team!

That is a huge loss in terms of opportunity cost, which translates to financial losses. A 2021 study found more disadvantageous consequences of non-DAM usage.

Many assets are unused because no one knows where to find them or if they even exist. 51% of marketers produce or recreate these assets, wasting time and money. Fifty-five percent said that the ability to manage and organize digital assets is among their biggest challenges.

Assets should also have only a single source of truth, a master copy or blueprint that serves as the definitive reference for derivative assets and reusable content. However, 40% of marketers state that they do not have it.

As for data access, 68% of marketers said that data silos across company teams and technologies were the top barrier to creating and delivering content strategy.

Key Features of Digital Asset Management Software

The following are the key features to expect across the digital asset management software industry:

DAMs have evolved to incorporate advanced features that have become more standard over time. These features have improved work efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and legal compliance in handling digital assets, and are as follows:

Cloud-based platforms

Most digital asset management platforms have standalone versions of their software, but their full power is unleashed on the cloud because of more intensive computational capabilities and distributed, fault-tolerant servers that can host all your digital asset files reliably in multiple locations worldwide. Partnered with this back end are their mobile apps that allow for flexibility and quick task management.

Single source of truth

Digital media assets are often modified or incorporated into larger designs, sub-licensed to other companies, translated into other languages, transformed into other media formats, shared multiple times, and changed in many ways over time. This creates problems with asset duplication, asset variability, and problems with branding compliance. In addition, for assets acquired externally, derivative work may need royalty payments and may become a source of inadvertent copyright violations. Therefore, one original version or the single source of truth for each asset should be archived and made available at all times to all teams working on design and marketing campaigns, together with conditions for the creation of derivative works.

Analytics and reporting

DAM platforms can report which media files, website elements, or documents customers are engaging with most via clicking or time spent on the assets. This is a valuable source of customer behavior information that can be exploited to create more effective sales and marketing campaigns.

Change control and version control

As digital assets are used over time, changes or variations, country-specific versions, language or ethnicity-specific versions, customer-segment-specific versions, and derivative works are almost impossible to track accurately and consistently. Change and version controls can be specified in asset metadata and configuration rules to prevent inadvertent or incorrect changes and to ensure proper rights management and branding compliance.

Use of cloud computing resources

Distributed cloud computing as the computational back end makes keyword searching, asset indexing, media parsing, image recognition, text-to-speech/speech-to-text generation, subtitle generation, and many more functions quick and accurate work.

Use of content delivery networks or CDNs

Especially in areas with bandwidth limitations and countries with poor Internet connectivity, content delivery networks or CDNs make serving your digital assets quick and efficient using their own localized networks. This allows you a fast and efficient global and international reach.

Asset logging and cataloging

Logging and cataloging all your assets are best practices in ensuring that your teams can easily find the assets they need with the necessary change and licensing information.

API integration with third-party apps

As platform integrations steadily increased, API compatibility and integration with third-party apps have become easier and more standard in all industries. APIs can be no-code, low-code, or high-code capable depending on the company’s needs.

Media parsing

Creating movie chapters, subtitling, international translations, speech-to-text conversions, and many other tasks used to require watching the entire movie and manually doing them. With AI and automation, these tasks can easily be done.

Scripting and script programming

Scripting is often performed for highly-specific tasks in order to automate asset management, especially for large enterprises with millions to billions of digital asset files. DAMs that have excellent scripting capabilities are essential for these organizations, but may not be necessary for single-person businesses.

Keyword/metadata generation and editing

Manual keywording and metadata editing were the traditional methods of asset labeling and indexing, but AI has greatly improved and automated these tasks, including image classification and keywording, media file parsing and keywording, and text analysis for topic and sentiment classification.

Automation and triggers

Aside from indexing and keywording, when incorporated with CRMs, DAMs can monitor website and media file usage and customer micro-behaviors to trigger the next messaging or web page serves to better micro-target your customers. Most DAMs also do automated housekeeping functions of digital assets.

Is digital asset management for you?

Digital asset management is for you if you have problems with unsearchable assets across your organization, making it difficult to meet multiple asset requests from other departments. Other issues include multiple digital versions of assets, asset duplication, large file sharing problems, unmet brand compliance requirements because of outdated or missing assets, and poor asset rights management and licensing issues.

If you deal with massive amounts of content that are continually updated or replaced, licensed, and/or offered as different products (especially across many different locations or countries), you definitely need a DAM system. Also, if your assets are used for mission-critical control apps/software, products, or services, it is crucial to have a centralized DAM system.

With digital media’s increasing importance to a company’s web presence, products and services, data analytics, customer segmentation, and sales and marketing, DAMs are essential to efficient centralized management and deployment of all your assets. DAM triggers and integration with marketing automation software can greatly simplify timed targeted marketing and data gathering to hone in on your customers’ preferences and specific interaction points on your websites.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.