How to calculate the potential market size for an Internet project?

Question

Project management

Greetings friends! I am now reading the requirements for candidates for the IIDF, and one of the requirements they indicate: "The potential market volume should reach 300 million rubles a year in 3-5 years." How to calculate this volume for your project? In our Find-out project, we want to make an anonymous social media. network. Something like ask.fm mixed with VK. An improved version of the anonymous questionnaire with a user-friendly interface and thoughtful design. I have already asked about the relevance of this idea here. Here you can learn more about the idea , or in the groupproject. When asked about the relevance of the idea, we were told that: "It is possible to lure some users from Ask.ru (where, approximately, 5M visits per month), ask.fm (where, approximately, 75M visits per month) and nekto.me (175K per month) + VK / Facebook / Twitter." and based on this figure, how to calculate the potential volume of this market? I understand that everything is relative and depends on how we will earn money, but I would like to know the approximate amount of this market. Here are preliminary ways to monetize the project:
1) Income from advertising
2) Gifts between users (as in VK).
3) Paid questions (about once a week, users will receive questions from advertisers, for example: "Do you use this and that toothpaste?")
I would also like to know your opinion about the very methods of monetization proposed by me. Will they frighten users if they are introduced gradually?

Answer 1

In order to use the average number of visitors per month, you need to have data on their activity and approximate financial flows. But, such information is very difficult to obtain, and I am still silent about its reliability.
It is much easier to use open analytical sources. Look for studies on this topic, look at the overall dynamics, derive a compound percentage from the market scale decomposition.
For example:
Here I have given some information.
To begin with, let's look at the general state of the social networks market. According to the forecast, the market size in 2015 is approximately = $1.5 billion. Knowing that 95% of long-term forecasts are not accurate, we make a correction of at least 15-20% minus = ~ $1.2 billion
.how the market share is distributed among the main players (as a percentage). We add on $1.2 billion and get a very approximate income of these companies in Russia (because we still have a lot of unknown variables). Also, knowing the approximate attendance of question services, you can understand their market share from the total number.
Based on option 1 - by searching for public data, we can understand the size of the market. You just need to start the path from big to small.
Also, you can analyze the performance of competitors on this data, try to estimate the V-market = $.
In response to one of your questions, I wrote:
Since this data has not been filtered, we need to look for more accurate numbers.
Above, I gave data on organic traffic ask, ask someone. Knowing this indicator and looking at the cost of this traffic, throwing in an adequate margin, you can roughly understand how much the operating income was. Accordingly, having done this with as many services as possible and summing up these data, we again have very approximate targets.
I hope my answer will be useful to you.