Your point about quality being hard to scale is a good one. That’s mostly why we have image-based reports, because it’s impossible for big vendors to produce good quality reports at volume, so they invented this automated image-based report product. Investors and their needs were never considered.

Unfortunately, one result of image-based reports is that the dominance of big vendors chased away a lot of the smaller firms that provided quality work. They moved on to other business opportunities. The IR profession shot itself in the foot and chased away some of its best talent. Today, there are only a handful of expert companies like yours that produce the very best work and understand the market.

However, I do see signs that good developers are slowly coming back to the corporate reporting area. That means companies will have more choice, but it’s a competition and developers will go where the business conditions are best. It’s up to the IR profession to support their support network or lose it.

we are a vendor for high-end HTML reports and experience very heavy demand for our services. We grow by 30% + per annum and still have to decline new business from prospective clients every season. The reason, that we do not do more business has to do with capacity, which is not that easy to expand if you have to assure quality.

I don’t agree when you say that online reporting isn’t improving. Like Dominic reports, I see lot of innovation in Europe. And it takes time. Time to educate, to understand and to adopte and also for the vendors to grow.

Every year, I wonder about the same thing. Are good HTML annual reports a waste of money? In fact, I’ve advocated in the past that companies try something different and create HTML summary reports focused on the sections that investors use most heavily. I made that recommendation prior to e-proxy and default electronic delivery, when producing online annual reports was an added cost on top of the print run.

But with each passing year, the evidence in favor of a full HTML report becomes more compelling. There really is no replacement for one. And the cost of a good HTML report is coming down and companies are replacing print with electronic formats and realizing huge cost savings, so the cost argument is moot.

I think it’s just a matter now of companies being 1) ignorant and 2) having poor internal management practices and systems that they cannot get their heads around the idea that you start with the web first. There are a lot of people in the profession who aren’t comfortable with technology. They will be replaced in time by younger more tech savvy people who will change the game completely. You can already see that happening in academia, and soon those people will be rising up the ranks in the private sector and in the regulatory world.

But the bottom line is that it is best for companies and their investors to provide information in ways that make it as easy as possible for investors to arrive at accurate decisions, and big PDFs and image-based documents are not good formats.

Wow! A cookie is only a “tracking feature” in this context when it infringes upon anonymity. It’s amazing how unintelligent the vendor community is about the Web and yet is so willing to take money from companies for web services.

Please read the story as well as you should be reading the rules and the adopting releases (plural). “Cookie-free” — where’s that term? It’s not used.

Under the rule, a company must refrain from installing cookies and other tracking features on the Web site on which the proxy materials are posted.

The term is used within the SEC rule.