Press package

The supply side is a long tail

What the number is

The dataset holds 1420 arrangements read from company newsrooms and named trade press. 1091 are ways of reaching a customer. Of those, 452 state plainly which side supplies the capability and which side distributes it.

Counting the supplying side gives 106 distinct companies. The distribution is not close to even: 77 appear once, and the shape is a long tail rather than a market with a few dominant suppliers.

What the number is not

The head of this list is a property of what we read, not of the market. The companies at the top are the ones whose own archives we crawled most deeply. Synchrony appears 50 times because we read twenty years of Synchrony announcements, not because Synchrony supplies more than anyone else. Do not report the ranking.

The tail is the finding. That most suppliers appear once holds regardless of which archives were read, because adding a company's archive adds that company to the head and adds its many partners to the tail at the same time.

It is not a census. This counts announcements that were found and read. A company that announces nothing is absent, and absence here is not evidence of absence in the market.

The top of the corpus

Shown so the shape of the corpus is visible, not as a ranking of suppliers. See the caveat above.

How to check it

Every arrangement counted here is on this site with the source it came from and the sentence it was read from. Start at the partnership types or the companies. The methodology states how a row is decided and how often the second reading disagrees with the first.

Quote

Figures generated 2026-08-28. If a figure looks wrong, tell us which row and why.