Market monitoring can start in three places: with a topic, with a sender or with a platform. Topic-First starts with a topic or search term and asks: what is being said, whoever says it? Source-First starts with a fixed set of sources and asks: what is this market player saying and planning? Platform-First starts with a platform and asks: what appears there, such as every new job ad in a region or every tender in a sector?

None of the three is wrong. They aim at different things and suit different tasks. This site argues for Source-First when the question is what specific market players say themselves. This page sets out what each one delivers, where it reaches its limits and how the three work together.

The three approaches differ in where they start

Approach Question Starts with Typical practice
Topic-First What? a topic or search term, whoever uses it and wherever Keyword monitoring, media monitoring, social listening
Source-First Who? a fixed set of senders and the content they publish themselves A list of sources with the channels of each source
Platform-First Where? a platform whose entries of one kind you follow in full or filtered by fixed fields Job boards, tender portals, registers

A hypothetical example: a maker of industrial sensors can set an alert on a technical term and see where it shows up. It can follow the newsletters and careers pages of its five main competitors. Or it can follow every public tender for measuring equipment to see who is about to buy.

A platform is a place run by a third party where many senders publish entries of the same kind. A channel is the medium of one particular source. A competitor’s company page on LinkedIn is a channel of that source; LinkedIn as a whole is a platform.

Topic-First: fixed on the topic, open on the sources

Topic-First fixes what you want to learn about and leaves open who it comes from. Google describes its alert service that way: you get emails “when new results for a topic show up in Google Search” (opens in a new tab). Media monitoring analyses what editors report; social listening analyses what people say about a brand or a topic. The Topic-First page covers the three practices in more detail.

Its strength is openness. If you want to see the full breadth of a topic, or you are looking for players you do not know yet, you cannot start from a list of senders. George Day and Paul Schoemaker describe in Harvard Business Review how Mattel, between 2001 and 2004, lost 20% of its share of the worldwide fashion-doll segment to smaller rivals (opens in a new tab) and “didn’t see it coming”. Such rivals are more likely to turn up through a topic than through a list of known senders.

One limit lies in language. A search term can have several meanings, and the same thing can be said in different words. Manning, Raghavan and Schütze’s textbook notes that synonymy affects the recall of most information retrieval systems (opens in a new tab), and that for Boolean search a good balance of precision and recall is “difficult or impossible” (opens in a new tab) to find.

Another lies in the sender. Because the sources are open, the sender plays no part in what is reported. This gains weight as machine-generated content grows, as the Source-First Manifesto describes in thesis 3. In Findings of ACL 2024 (opens in a new tab), Thompson and colleagues show that low-quality, machine-translated content makes up a large fraction of all web content in those lower-resource languages. The study does not measure the share of machine-generated text on the web as a whole. In our assessment, a search that admits any sender can push such content to the top as easily as edited content, as long as it contains the keyword. Checking the origin is then left to the reader.

Source-First: fixed on the sender

Source-First reverses the order. You decide which sources matter, such as competitors, customers, associations or public authorities, and follow what they publish on their own channels. The measurement association AMEC calls such channels “owned media” (opens in a new tab): websites, company blogs, newsletters and brand accounts on social media that an organisation owns or controls. The Source-First Manifesto puts the stance in four words: “Track who, not what.”

Its strength is the sender. You get a market player’s own statements, whatever words they use: a product announcement in a competitor’s newsletter reaches you even without your keywords. Why that matters is the subject of the comparison Sources, not keywords.

Its limit is the list itself. A list of sources contains only the ones you know. A new competitor is missing until someone adds it. Sources also speak in their own interest: a press release is a primary source, but it is not neutral. How to build a list with every channel of each source and keep it current is covered in Source-First in practice.

Platform-First: a platform as a whole

Platform-First starts with a place where many senders publish entries of the same kind. You follow every new entry of one kind, usually filtered by fixed fields such as region, sector or category rather than by keywords. A hypothetical example: a recruitment agency watches job boards to see which companies are hiring right now. A list of sources would answer that only for the companies already on it.

Job boards: who is hiring

Eurostat defines online job advertisements as “postings published on the internet by employers” (opens in a new tab). They provide detailed information (opens in a new tab) on the positions to be filled, the skills sought and the employer, such as location, sector and type of contract.

In 2020 Eurostat and the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training (Cedefop) set up the Web Intelligence Hub (opens in a new tab), which collects job ads from private job portals, public employment service portals and recruitment agencies.

One Eurostat example: in 2023, sales, marketing and development managers had the highest online job advertisement rate in the EU, at 26.6% (opens in a new tab), measured as job ads per person employed.

Public tenders: who wants to buy what

Public contracts above certain thresholds must be advertised across the EU. In its consolidated version of 1 January 2026, Directive 2014/24/EU sets thresholds including EUR 140 000 for supply and service contracts awarded by central government authorities and EUR 216 000 for sub-central contracting authorities (opens in a new tab). Notices are published no later than five days after they are sent (Article 51).

They appear on TED (Tenders Electronic Daily) (opens in a new tab), the online version of the Supplement to the Official Journal of the EU. According to TED, over 3 000 procurement notices are published there every weekday, and they can be searched and sorted by country, region and business sector. For automated analysis there is a Search API that requires no authentication (opens in a new tab), with business sector and place of performance as structured fields.

Patent registers: who is working on what

Patent applications are usually published 18 months after the filing or priority date; for European applications this is set out in Article 93 EPC (opens in a new tab). Germany’s patent office describes its free DPMAregister as “suitable for the regular and systematic checking of newly published IP rights as part of a monitoring search” (opens in a new tab). The EPO’s Register Alert service lets you monitor up to 5 000 files (opens in a new tab) and receive an email when something changes.

Company register notices: who founds, changes or moves

In Germany, entries in the commercial register are made public by being retrievable for the first time in the electronic system (§ 10 HGB (opens in a new tab), in German). The joint register portal of the German states (opens in a new tab) (in German) contains the registers of all states and the register notices. A new limited company (§ 7 GmbHG (opens in a new tab)), a change of managing director (§ 39 GmbHG (opens in a new tab)) and a move of the registered office (§ 13h HGB (opens in a new tab)) must all be filed for entry.

What a platform shows and what it does not

A platform shows entries, not the whole market. The limits are best studied for job ads.

Not every vacancy is posted online. Eurostat notes that job ad data are biased regarding economic activities and occupations (opens in a new tab): IT positions are posted online more often than jobs in small shops such as butchers or bakeries, or in the public sector. A Cedefop working paper from 2022 finds high-skilled occupations and more industrialised regions overrepresented (opens in a new tab). The OECD adds: “While online job postings can have some limitations in covering the entire labour market, so do other sources.” (opens in a new tab)

The same ad appears more than once. According to Eurostat, the same advertisement may be counted multiple times (opens in a new tab) if it was posted several times on one portal or on several portals. In data for Germany from July 2018 to June 2023, the German Federal Statistical Office found a share of duplicates between 1.6% and 7.5% (opens in a new tab) (in German).

Not every ad names the employer. In US data from 2007 and 2010 to 2015, the employer name was missing in 40% of postings (opens in a new tab), mainly those on recruiting websites that typically do not reveal the employer. On the German Federal Employment Agency’s job search, Germany’s Institute for Employment Research (IAB) counted 50.8% of job ads from April 2019 to December 2023 as temporary agency work (opens in a new tab) (in German). There, the employer is the temporary work agency. In our assessment, such ads often do not show in which company the work will actually be done.

An ad is not a hire. Eurostat stresses that “OJAs are not equivalent to job vacancies” (opens in a new tab): some employers post ads without intending to fill the vacancy soon, and one ad can refer to several vacancies. The OECD adds that ads are often not removed immediately (opens in a new tab) once a vacancy is filled.

The other platforms have their own shape too: a patent register usually shows an application only after 18 months, and tenders are advertised EU-wide only above the thresholds. It pays to know the rules by which a platform is filled.

Following a platform as a whole often means reading many entries automatically.

Databases are protected. Under the EU Database Directive, the maker of a database that required substantial investment can prohibit the extraction of substantial parts. Article 7(5) (opens in a new tab) also rules out “the repeated and systematic extraction and/or re-utilization of insubstantial parts” where it conflicts with normal exploitation of the database or unreasonably prejudices its maker.

The Court of Justice has ruled on job boards. Case C-762/19 (CV-Online Latvia) (opens in a new tab) concerned a search engine that copied job ad websites onto its own server and made them searchable by the nature of the job and the place of employment. The Court held that this is “extracting” and “re-utilising” the content, which the database maker may prohibit where it adversely affects the maker’s investment. The main criterion is the risk that the investment may not be redeemed. The Court also acknowledged that such search engines contribute to “the transparency of offers and prices”.

Platforms set their own rules. Indeed’s terms (opens in a new tab) prohibit bots and scrapers without Indeed’s express written permission. StepStone’s terms of service (opens in a new tab) (version of 6 November 2025) prohibit scraping content to use it for another purpose or publish it again. The German commercial register may be inspected “for information purposes by individual retrievals” (§ 9 HGB (opens in a new tab), in German). The register portal’s terms of use (opens in a new tab) (in German) prohibit systematic retrieval to build parallel registers and allow at most 60 searches or retrievals per hour. For automated data retrieval from Espacenet (opens in a new tab), the EPO points to its Open Patent Services (opens in a new tab).

Some platforms invite reuse. The TED Search API is aimed at data reusers and does not require authentication (opens in a new tab). According to TED’s legal notice in its June 2024 version, procurement notices “can be freely reused, for commercial or non-commercial purposes” (opens in a new tab).

Which task, which approach

The table is an assessment, not a measurement.

Task Best fit Complemented by
Seeing the full breadth of a topic Topic-First Source-First, once the important senders are known
Discovering players you do not know yet Topic-First Platform-First: new names in registers, tenders and job boards
Brand perception, PR evaluation, crisis communication Topic-First Source-First, to read what those involved say in the original
What is a specific competitor saying and planning? Source-First Platform-First: that competitor’s job ads, patents and register entries
Who is hiring in a region or occupation right now? Platform-First Source-First for the careers pages of selected companies
What are public authorities putting out to tender? Platform-First Source-First for key contracting authorities
Who is filing patents in a technical field? Platform-First Source-First for the applicants who stand out
New companies, changes of management, moves of registered office Platform-First Source-First for the companies that become relevant

How they work together: find, follow, cross-check

The three approaches do not exclude one another. Each does best the job it was built for.

From platform to source. Platform-First shows who is hiring. You then follow that company as a source, as the comparison Source or Platform? describes in detail. Writing in Harvard Business Review (opens in a new tab), Wei Shi calls the jobs a competitor is trying to fill “one of the clearest and most accessible signals of strategic intent”. The bridge lies in the ad itself: Eurostat treats it as a publication by the employer. And the German IAB job vacancy survey lists a vacancy on the company’s own website and one on internet job boards (opens in a new tab) as separate recruitment methods (question 43, in German).

From this, the site proposes an assessment of its own: a company’s careers page is a channel of that source; a job board is a platform of many senders. No cited source puts it in these words; it rests on the individual pieces of evidence.

From topic to source. Topic-First finds new names. For every hit, ask: who said this, and does this sender belong on the list? Social media research also treats discovery as a step of its own before data collection (opens in a new tab).

From source to platform. You can also query a platform for a known source. A hypothetical example: a competitor announces a new product line. Whether it also posts related jobs or files patents, the platforms show.

Two comparisons look at one pair each in more detail: Sources, not keywords sets Source-First against Topic-First, and Source or Platform? sets Source-First against Platform-First.

Each approach has its task

Topic-First fits when the topic is fixed and the senders are open: to discover the new and see a topic’s breadth. Source-First fits when the question is what specific market players say and plan. Platform-First fits when a platform already structures the question: who is hiring, tendering, filing or founding. Often the answer from one approach leads to the question for the next.

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Author: Dr. Karsten Richter, Managing Director of Picasi GmbH. Picasi GmbH publishes this website. About this website