Statista

• 1. Introduction

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  Statista, the German online platform that collects and visualizes data, handles 31 million visits a month. That figure, recorded as of December 2022, hints at something worth examining: how did a single Hamburg-based platform become a destination that researchers, business analysts, and university lecturers all turn to when they need a number to anchor an argument?

  The questions this documentary will explore run deeper than traffic counts. Where does Statista actually get its numbers? Who owns it, and what does that ownership mean for the data it publishes? And what can one company's decision to shut down a French-language platform tell us about the economics of data in an English-dominated internet?

• 2. Scale and Sources

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  More than one million statistics, drawn from over 22,500 sources across more than 150 countries, sit behind the Statista interface. The company claims to cover around 170 industries, with topics ranging from advertising spend and buying behavior to sector-specific economic data for individual countries.

  Not all of that data flows from outside sources. Statista's own team conducts surveys and analysis to produce exclusive data that cannot be found elsewhere. The platform's named partners include institutions with serious research credentials: the Federal Statistical Office, the Allensbach Institute for Public Opinion Research, the OECD, and the German Institute for Economic Research. The Financial Times and Fortune are also listed as data partners, which points to the commercial side of the information Statista aggregates.

  By 2024, those more than four million registered users were generating around 167 million euros in revenue for the company, a figure that reflects the subscription and licensing model at the heart of how Statista turns publicly accessible data into a business.

• 3. Ownership and Recognition

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  Since 2015, Ströer Media has held an 81.3% stake in Statista. Ströer is a German media company, and that ownership structure places Statista firmly within a larger commercial media ecosystem rather than as an independent data cooperative.

  Before that acquisition, Statista had already drawn public recognition in Germany. In 2010, the initiative called "Deutschland - Land der Ideen," which translates as "Germany - Land of Ideas," selected Statista as one of the winners in the category "Landmarks in the Land of Ideas 2010." The platform also received the European Red Herring Prize that same year. The timing matters: these awards came just three years after Statista was founded in 2007, and they marked the platform as part of a wave of German digital ventures that international observers were beginning to take seriously.

• 4. The Language Pivot

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  In November 2025, Statista announced it would shut down its French-language platform. The company's stated rationale was a consolidation of its material into a single language, English, with existing French-language content to be archived rather than deleted.

  French-speaking users were not simply cut off. Statista directed them to the global statista.com platform and pointed to a Research AI tool that accepts queries in French, even as the underlying content is now published only in English. The company framed this as a move to "optimize quality and user experience," a formulation that places editorial coherence above linguistic reach.

  The decision is a concrete illustration of how a platform that covers more than 150 countries can still make English the sole production language. For a company whose partners include institutions from the French-speaking world and whose data covers countries where French is a primary language, the consolidation signals something about where Statista sees the center of gravity of its audience. In 2020, Statista had also announced plans to offer subscriptions to a database of companies, a move that pointed toward deepening its presence among business customers even before the language shift took place.