8 digital media trends to watch in 2010

User payment, e-reading and more clever advertising solutions. Those are some of the online media trends that will put their mark on 2010.

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Making predictions is not easy – and most of them will be proven wrong afterwards. Still I find it useful to present some thoughts about what I think will be on the online media watch list for the year to come.  Working as digital media strategist at the Norwegian news site  Aftenposten.no my focus naturally is on trends I think will influence media sites.

1. Searching for new business models: A lot of experiments with user payment will take place

Many media houses have signalled that they will try to charge customers next year. “User payment” has become the new buzz word within the media industry, and a large number of experiments are bound to take place over the next few months.  One example: Hamburger Abendblatt just put all their local content behind a paywall.

Only a few media houses will dare to put their whole web site behind a pay wall, though. News content as such has become too much of a commodity product, and chances are that  few of the readers will decide to subscribe. In most cases we will rather see different versions of the freemium model where sites will try to charge some of their users for some of the content.

There is a good thing about these experiments. As 2010 draws to an end, the business model of news may have gone through some significant changes. We will know a lot more about which models may actually work and which will be doomed to fail.

One thing is for sure: Most media sites need to improve their business model. Unless you are a market leader, display ads alone normally is not sufficient to run a sustainable news business online. This is becoming even more evident as display ads have become under increasing price pressure in the market. Somehow news sites will need to find additional income sources.

2. Mobile web is exploding

This may seem as a repetitive prediction. Yet I believe we are in the middle of a revolution when it comes to connecting to the web through mobile services. The basic initiator is the iPhone, which revolutionized how people use the web through mobile devices. This trend is now being accelerated by Google‘s open source operating system Android, which in 2010 will be included in a large number of devices from  many different mobile phone manufacturers. The fact that Google now has launched its own mobile phone as well, called Nexus, will make smart phones a war area.

The result is a radical shift in how people use their mobile phones. The apps economy is exploding and a lot of people will be using their mobile phones for tasks previously taken care of by their laptops.

3. Media sites will connect much more closely to popular social networks

Only a couple of years back many media sites thought they could develop huge social networks on their own. This approach has largely failed. Media sites soon discovered that developing their own social networks required consistant dedication and allocaton of resources. It proved to be very hard to compete on an every-day basis with the huge global players.

Giving up the ambition to create their own social network, a lot of media sites will try to connect to the social networks people do indeed use:  Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. Take my own country, Norway, as an example: A recent study showed that 50 % of the population use Facebook every week, and as many as 34 % on a daily basis. For media sites, who depend on engaging readers with their content, existing social networks provide the best way to do this. I think we will see a large number of media sites using Facebook Connect and similar tools in an effort to create engangement.

Let me add to this that the ability to create engagement and loyalty among users will be a determining factor of which media sites will be the winners in the future. This is even more important as much general news have been commoditized.

4. Geo location will be the basis of exciting new services

As mobile services explode, the location of users will be more important. Most new smart phones have a GPS included, and content providers will offer services which utilize where users are located at any specific time.

Media sites will not necessarily be prepared for this trend. Many media sites are accustomed to preparing their content primarily for print and secondarily for the web. Typically they have not added the meta data necessary to offer geo  located services. Now it is the time to do it!

5. E-reading is taking a big step forward

The number of e-reader devices in the market will grow significantly in 2010 – and so will also the buzz around this technology.

Amazon created a mass market for e-readers with its Kindle device. Much of the success was due to the business model, with a huge selection of cheap content and seamless distribution through a 3G network.

So far other devices have not been able to compete. But that is already changing with the launch of exciting new e-readers like Que from Plastic Logic and Skiff from Hearst Newspapers and the expected presentation of a tablet from Apple in the end of January.  I am confident that we will see very interesting developments taking place in 2010. A number of players are positioning themselves, both among hardware producers, mobile operators and content provider.

The changes are so far driven by book reading.  Personally I think e-readers will revolutionize book reading and pose a significant threat to many traditional players in the book industry.

It may also be a great platform for newspapers and magazines, but this part is much more up for discussion. Screens in black and white, lack of interactivity and elegant presentation possibilities are some of the reasons that e-readers may not be a preferred tool for news consumption. On the other hand socalled “experts” tend do overvalue technical aspects and undervalue other benefits perceived by the users, like very easy access to new content.

6. Much greater emphasis on new advertisement models

As space for display ads is abundant and prices drop, media sites will be forced to spend a lot of time and money to develop more sophisticated ad models for their customers.  Advertisers will demand documentation that ads actually work – and media sites will be under increasing pressure to prove the effect of ads on their sites. We will probably see a lot more innovation in this area as the sites try to develop premium ad models which can offer high value both to the advertiser and the users.

7. Real-time

Delaying publishing is yesterday’s method – news and other content today is published as it happens. We are now experiencing the real-time web, driven forward by news feeds of services like Facebook and Twitter.

Users increasingly demand immediacy, a way of presenting news which is both compelling and addictive. At major news events users have more and more sophisticated ways of following the aggregated real-time news streams from numerous eye witnesses.

This of course poses great challenges for traditional media companies as they face competition from observant amateurs at the scene of the news.

I am convinced news sites increasingly will take advantage of this real-time web and find creative ways of making their coverage evolve live and continuously as new information is being gathered. This includes making efficient use of social media ans user content in the daily journalism.

8. News content will continue to disaggregate

It seems to me that most editors underestimate how news content is disaggregated. Yet this trend somewhat undermines the very business model of traditional media companies with their emphasis on broad edited packages as their main product.

As a journalist it hurts me to point out this. Yet I am convinced that the content focus slowly moves from one-size-fits-all packages to the single piece of news content and associated meta data.  For many news sites today a significant portion of their users don’t even visit the front page, but go directly to a specific news article from a Google search og aggregator service.

I think there is a clear parallell to the music industry. Their basic product used to be the album, an edited package of an appropriate collection of songs. This made sense when you had to make a physical product – like a record or CD.  But as music was digitalized, the individual song took over as the popular product.

I am not saying there will not be a market for edited packages.  Certainly people will still appreciate qualified editors making a choice for them.  But content pieces will no longer only live within a broader package, but also take on a life of its own being distributed wherever users want to consume it. And media sites will be forced to make their packages much more unique and focus on specific user needs.

More predictions:

I could have mentioned many more trends and many others have also blogged about this. Here are some of the articles.

• CNN: 10 web trends to watch in 2010
• Joshhallidaydotnet: A handful of media predictions for 2010
• Nieman Journalism Lab: Next year’s news about the news: What we’ll be fighting about in 2010
• Monday Note: The 2010 Media Watch List
• ReadWriteWeb: 2010 Predictions
• Nieman Journalism Lab: What 2010 will bring newspapers

You may also take a look at this “New Media Minute” by Daisy Whitney:

Tagged as: digital future, E-readers, media, social media, trends, user payment, web