The media landscape has changed more in the last 5 years than the previous 50.
Think back over what’s happened in just the second half of this decade.
- At the beginning of 2004, Google was a privately owned company. At the close of 2009, it is worth almost $200 billion.
- Facebook, started in 2004, exploded from a geeky Harvard Web service into a massive avenue for real-time communication on which users spend 8 billion minutes a day.
- Twitter, founded in 2006, has become a channel for 18 million active users to discover ideas, create content, and share both easily.
- At the beginning of 2006, the average cell phone user made 198 calls per month and sent 65 text messages per month. In 2008, it was 204 calls per month and 357 text messages per month.
- Old media incumbents—including papers such as the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times—have filed for bankruptcy.
Heading into the new decade, the velocity of information will increase further. Interactivity is a table stake. Engagement marketing is a prerequisite. Customization is a given.
Companies will live or die by how well they adopt to a rapidly changing consumer. And those who plan for the future are most likely to profit from it. Here are my 5 predictions for what we’ll see in the next 5 years:
- Empowered consumers will screen out advertising. Advertisements have decreasing impact on consumers. In July 2007, 32% of Internet users would click on a display ad in a given month. In March 2009, only 16% of Internet users would click on an ad in a given month (ComScore). Consumers will go beyond just ignoring advertisements though. Widespread adoption of Caller ID, DVR or TiVo, and satellite radio have made “interruption marketing” increasingly difficult.
- Marketing services firms, media companies, and technology companies will converge. In this last decade, a distinction remained between advertising and editorial content. (Advertising funded editorial; supposedly a line existed between the two.) In this next decade, those lines blur completely. There are two new categories of content: content people want and content people don’t want. The content they don’t want (“interruption”) will be screened out; the content they want (“permission”) will increasingly come over email, mobile, and Web.
- Media consumption will increase. Time spent across all three screens—TV, computer, and mobile—has increased over the last ten years. As automobile companies integrate media hardware into vehicles, consumers buy more smart phones, and hardware companies introduce new consumer devices, media consumption will become easier and easier. Eventually, consumers will access media anytime, anywhere. The barriers to creating media will also fall. Digital video recorders, like the Flip, will upstream to YouTube wirelessly. Every consumer will find it intuitive to create and share text, images, audio, and video—making real-time interaction ubiquitous.
- Social networks will increase in importance. Facebook is where the Internet starts for most people. Blogs are asynchronous, a reason blogging has never developed mass appeal. Social networks are life in real time. And it will only become more powerful as smart phone adoption increases, layering in location-based features to the existing real-time, two-way communication capabilities of social networks.
- AppWorld will enable a new method of monetizing content. Apple cracked the code, and convinced people to pay for music via iTunes. Just as the iPod and iPhone transformed the way consumers purchase and experience music, eReaders will alter the way we consume images and text. Always connected, portable eReaders make it possible to read a magazine on the beach—something few people are willing to do with their laptop. As eReaders such as Apple’s long-awaited Tablet begin to incorporate applications, they will become a powerful new monetization tool for content publishers.
