The Future of the Internet Depends on Trust and Safety Investment

Risks are higher than ever for both companies and users.
T&S solutions keep everyone safe and set investors up for a profit.
Wednesday, March 13, 2024

We are proud to announce the release of Duco’s Trust & Safety Market Research Report, which provides a comprehensive business case for investment in T&S. It analyzes the total and serviceable addressable market, vendor landscape, and investment activity to illustrate T&S as a distinct industry which manages the sociotechnical risks that are affiliated with user– and AI–generated content and services.

T&S is defined as the policies, processes, and tools digital platforms employ to manage content- and conduct-related risks to users and others, mitigate online or other forms of technology-facilitated abuse, advocate for user rights, and protect brand safety (DTSP), efforts fostering safer platforms by design. T&S solutions refers to the services and software tools designed to support T&S teams with creating, maintaining, tracking, and reporting these content and/or conduct risks. Such risks include child sexual abuse material (CSAM), mis/disinformation, fraud, harassment, spam, and violent extremist content.

To accurately assess the size of the industry and the opportunity, researchers conducted expert interviews, desk research, and quantitative market analysis to define the T&S solutions market scope and identify platforms that could consume these T&S solutions. Researchers found:

  • While outsourced T&S services currently represent the largest portion of the $24.8B T&S total addressable market, T&S software solutions are poised to rapidly capture outsourced services market share as available LLMs now provide a strong baseline to aid T&S efforts at a lower cost. By 2028, T&S software TAM is projected to grow from $7.4B to $15.4B at a CAGR of 15.7%, while T&S services TAM is projected to only grow from $17.3B to $17.5B at a CAGR of 0.2%.
  • Over the past decade, governments worldwide have been increasingly introducing legislation on T&S issues. As platforms increase their global scope, companies will need to equip their T&S workflows with the appropriate localization. The E.U. and U.K.’s significant presence in the T&S market can be attributed to its leadership in T&S-related regulation, and the T&S market is poised for growth in other regions as similar legislation gets passed worldwide.
  • A combination of T&S professionals noticing gaps in the T&S market coupled with technology industry layoffs have led to a major outflux of talent building new T&S software startups, which fill the gaps in a $14.7B serviceable addressable market.
  • Media scrutiny, brand safety concerns, and user expectations have led to an era of heightened platform accountability from the public. News events such as elections and global conflicts will have all eyes on platforms for the foreseeable future.
  • Such factors have contributed towards an inflection point in the growing T&S software market over the past few years. From 2019-2023, the total amount of venture capital investment in the T&S software market ($7.78B) was 4.7x the amount of capital invested from 2014-2018, and 40x the amount of capital invested from 2009-2013. As a result, the number of T&S software companies on the market has grown 138% within the past 13 years.

The report’s comprehensive assessment of the T&S industry seeks to provide a reference point for further collaboration between funders, platform leaders, vendors, professional organizations, academia, civil society, and government bodies to continue the growth of this burgeoning field, as digital platforms increasingly seek to leverage emerging technologies which address existing and emerging challenges in the age of AI.

Download the Report

Download Executive Summary Deck

Huge thank you to Harmonic for helping to provide access to company data on the Trust and Safety industry.

Financial support for this report was provided by the Future of Online Trust and Safety Fund, a fiscally-sponsored multi-donor fund at Global Impact that supports charitable activities to build a more robust, capable, and inclusive Trust & Safety ecosystem and field.

For more information on Duco and to learn more about the report, follow us on LinkedIn, visit us at ducoexperts.com, or contact [email protected].

About Duco
Duco's mission is to empower leading companies to operate safely, securely, and responsibly by mobilizing experts to help solve complex challenges. Duco is reinventing the way corporate executives access and hire experts to help solve complex global challenges. With a global roster of thousands of world-class experts and partner organizations in over 70 countries, Duco builds and manages project-specific teams to deliver innovative solutions. Duco features advanced surveying capabilities, rapid thought-leader advocacy mechanisms, and robust project management tools to quickly aggregate insights and produce comprehensive analytical products that inform strategic decisions for global teams, including policy, intelligence, trust & safety, operations, research, and security teams. Duco’s primary client base is Fortune 100 companies, including leading internet companies.