Having just sat through numerous TV nostalgia offerings I’m now ready to predict the next decade. Are you ready for this. Let me know in 2020 how right I was (and I’ll tell you ‘I told you so’).
1. In 2010, Google AdWords will announce a procedure for “hearings and fair trials” for banned advertisers. They are already geting loads of bad press for their high-handed rules, quick-changes and tweeking as the call it.
2. Twitter will get sold to a much larger company for less than the $500 million they turned down from Facebook in 2009. They’ve really missed the boat now that FB is going to start charging!
3. The next rage in pay per click is cookie-ing visitors on your site and then having targeted contextual ads “stalk your prospects” on other sites as they surf the Internet. There may be lots of press about this once people realise what’s happening, invasion of privacy comes to mind.
4. By 2014 the traditional newspaper will be drastically different than it is now. Most local newspapers will have vanished by then leaving mainly loss-leaders who can afford it to drive they readers to paid websites for instance. Sorry, but there’s no need for 200 different newspapers to all be running the same stories. Meanwhile more high-traffic bloggers will be identified as doing better research with better reporting and much less bias than the traditional media newsmen.
5. The music industry is headed in the same direction. The bands that succeed during the next 10 years will be the ones who figure out how to connect directly to their audience via social media and direct marketing. I predict that small membership and continuity models are the future of the music industry not the big music labels.
6. There will always be demand for excellent Media Content, regardless of what happens to TV companies, record companies, etc. The worst place to be in media is in the “expensive bureaucratic mediocre middle.”
7. This will be the year that ‘Kindles’ the electronic book revolution everyone has predicted over the last decade. Electronic books are most definitely on the rise. Electronic readers are awesome, they’ll become the norm, and the future is not bright for traditional printing and publishing models. However… excellent independant magazines and books will NEVER disappear.
8. The traditional HTML website site hand-crafted by an HTML editor and uploaded via FTP is fast becoming a relic, replaced by Content Management Systems and platforms like Wordpress and Joomla.
9. A 21st century version of evolution is coming, one that doesn’t sneer at religion.
10. Wikipedia will silence its critics. Obviously it’s immensely practical and it’s worked, having entirely replaced the traditional encyclopedia (vandalism aside). Wikipedia has always had a reputation for smearing controversial people and topics. But they’re cleaning up, and for the most part doing an excellent job. Nothing has done more to bring the Open Source movement to the masses.
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