Few other analysts give as comprehensive and solid analysis of current Internet trends as Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. Here is her latest presentation of mobile and other digital trends.

KPCB Internet Trends (2011)

I always try to bookmark the presentations of Mary Meeker, as I find myself going back to them again and again. And what is a better way of bookmarking a great presentation than to blog about it?

Mary Meeker used to work for Morgan Stanley. Her annual presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit continues to draw a lot of attention.  The presentation inserted above is from this year’s summit.

A few points that I have noted:

• The top global players are still mostly US companies with a couple of Chinese services as the only exceptions
• Still China now has almost twice as many Internet users as USA. And half of them been added during the last four years.
• Smartphone usage is exploding  - but still has tremendous potential for further growth
• iPad is growing at much faster rate after launch than iPhone did
• Social media is moving mobile big time: 55 % of Twitter usage and 33 % of Facebook usage is now from mobile platforms
• The next “big thing” is online sound
• Mobile commerce is finally lifting off
• There is a big discrepancy between the time spent on different media and where advertising dollars are spent. For instance: 8 % of media time in the USA is spent on mobile, while only 0,5 % of the advertising budgets
• In hardware tablets and smartphones outshipped PCs in Q4 of 2010

Related articles

• Mary Meeker’s 2011 Web 2.0 Summit Presentation (readwriteweb.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)
• Mary Meeker’s state of the Internet report (digitaltrends.com)
• The global state of the mobile industry (rossdawsonblog.com)

Here are some of the important trends shaping digital media now – as I presented them at the Media Trendy conference in Warsaw, Poland recently.

John Einar Sandvand presents digital media trends at Media Trendy 2011 in Warsaw

I was invited as a keynote speaker at the annual Media Trendy conference in Warsaw, Poland on April 14th, 2011.  The speech was about current digital media trends for about 300 media and advertising professionals and executives.

Here is a video of the presentation, filmed by the Polish media consultant Marek Miller, who was my host.

Regular readers of this blog will recognize many of the thoughts. In fact the presentation is largely based on a previous blog post I wrote about digital media trends.

You may also check out this article: How a speech for 70 people reached an audience of 4500.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

Do you need to catch up on the latest mobile internet trends? Check this excellent presentation from the highly respected analyst Mary Meeker.

Few analysts receive as much attention when presenting the future internet trends as Mary Meeker. Until recently she was with Morgan Stanley. She is now a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

The presentation was given together with partner Matt Murphy at Google’s Thinkmobile conference in New York this week.

I really recommend that you flip through it. They elaborates on several mobile internet trends that are taking place at the moment:

• Mobile platforms hit critical mass
• Mobile is global
• Social networking accelerating growth of mobile
• Time shifting to mobile usage
• Mobile advertising – growing pains, but huge promise
• mCommerce – changing shopping behavior
• Emergence of virtual goods and in-app commerce
• Not all platforms are created equal
• Change will accelerate, new players emerging rapidly

You can download the presentation from Slideshare.

I gave a speech for 70 managers in Media Norway. But the audience turned out to be more than 4500. Here is how!

This is a simple and personal story of the power of social media. It explains how a presentation for a small group may reach many more people than the ones who actually attended the original presentation.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

On January 25th I gave a presentation for the managers conference of Media Norway (a Schibsted-controlled company owning four major media houses in Norway).  About 70 people listened to my speech of digital media trends in 2011. To be honest I was quite nervous about this presentation, as the audience was composed of top managers in all the Norwegian media companies I work closely with in my work as editor and senior manager at Media Norway Digital.

But in fact this group of highly competent managers within my own media corporation turned out to be only a small proportion of the total audience for my speech.

Here is why!

My audience was 70 people. They were all top media managers in one of the most technologically advanced markets in the world.

After giving the speech a few people asked me for the slides. To make it easy for them, I decided to upload the presentation slides to Slideshare.

That started the viral distribution! The Slideshare team liked it so much that they decided to feature my presentation the front page of their site. Suddenly a lot of people decided it was worth their time to flip through the presentation.

And then people started spreading my presentation in social media. As for myself, I wrote a blog post elaborating the somewhat scetchy details in the presentation. Even that blog post was shared quite a bit.

The conclusion after 10 days?

• 70 managers attended the presentation
• 270 people – almost four times as many people as those who listened to the speech – downloaded the presentation from Slideshare to their own computer
• More than 120 people spread the ideas in social media, primarily on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. About 20 of them commented on the presentation, mostly on LinkedIn.
• 3900 people have viewed the presentation on Slideshare.net
• 37 web sites have embedded the presentation
• More than 1000 people have read the blog posting on BetaTales.com
• About 20 people I did not know before have asked to connect with me on LinkedIn. I have also received many new followers on Twitter.

The conclusion?

The speech I gave for about 70 of my colleagues ended up with an audience of almost 5000 people.

So far, that is. The viral distribution will probably continue.

I have had similar experiences before. Two years ago I taught seven online journalists at Aftenposten about how they could use Twitter as a tool for journalism. The now out-dated presentation – uploaded both in Norwegian and English – since has been viewed by more than 7000 people.

The physical audience was multiplied by 1000 times!

In April last year I was going to give a presentation at the annual conference of Society of News Design Scandinavia. Unfortunately the conference was cancelled at the last minute due to the vulcano ashes from Iceland which interrupted a lot of air traffic in Europe at the time.

I never had the chance to give the presentation, with an expected audience of 50-60 people, but the slides that I had prepared have been viewed by more than 1000 people on Slideshare.

We are talking about a presentation I never gave!

It is quite amazing, isn’t it?

Of course I realize this is not the most stunning example of the power of viral distribution. However, this is my personal experience, which is what inspire me to continue sharing my content. And that is what matters to me. It is also these types of experiences that make me continue blogging on BetaTales.

For me blogging has been a tremendous learning experience. It has taught me a lot about what what works and what doesn’t work in the digital world. In fact BetaTales has become my private lab, where I can try out a number of things without the risks of doing it on a large commercial site.

And I have learned so much about the power of sharing!

What are my conclusions so far?

Here is the essential one:

The most important driver for creating value in content is engagement!

Really, if your content is not able to inspire engagement, it has no or very low value.

That’s my experience at least!

What do your think?

By the way: Here is the presentation that was embedded on Slideshare:

Localization, platform shifts and continued fragmentation of the content market are some of the digital media trends that will shape 2011.

What are the core forces influencing digital media in 2011?  This question can be approached in a number of different ways.  I have tried to identify five trends or forces that I think will influence or continue to influence the media industry in a particular way in the year to come.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

This article, as many others on BetaTales, was written as preparation for a presentation I gave on digital media. I had the pleasure of talking about digital media trends in 2011 for about 150 communication and marketing professionals at the annual Scandinavian Futures Conference held by the Norwegian market research agency Opinion. As similar presentation was also held for the management conference of Media Norway (see the slides for the presentation above).

None of the trends are new – rather it is an attempt to sum up some of the more powerful ones. And of course: Many more could have been mentioned.

But at least I think any digital media executive should try to analyze how these five forces will influence his/her business in 2011.

The five trends are:

1. New platforms take big parts of media consumption
2. Localization
3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content
4. Everything is social
5. New business models for content

Let us go through them, one by one:

1. Mobility and platform change

E-readers and tablets are about to reach critical mass. On one end of the scale you have dedicated e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle. Here we are already seeing a dramatic drop in prices; the cheapest Kindle now sell for USD 139. I will not be surprised if we see the cheapest e-readers fall below USD 100 in 2011. That could give these readers a boost in numbers.

On the other end of the scale we have iPad and a long line of Android-based tablets that are about to enter the market. These are multi-purpose devices that satisfy a whole range of needs among users.

Gartner has already estimated that mobile phones will overtake PCs as the dominant web access device worldwide by 2013.

Access to content is therefore no longer a limited good. People will be continuously online and expect to be able to access whatever they need wherever they may be.

As part of this we will start seeing “tablet-only” and “mobile first” media companies, as pointed out by Vadim Lavrusik at Mashable.

Parallell to the emergence of new platforms we see anincreasing number of services and products moving into the cloud. In fact many products become platform agnostic. Users expect that they can access the service on whatever platform or device they use at any given moment.

In the media industry we used to talk about print versus the web – and then we would define how our products would differ on the two platforms.

Not any more. As more platforms emerge and users consume media on several devices during the day, the value of the brand will be more important than the value of the platform-specific product.

Look at some of the most successful digital services out there now, like Facebook, Evernote, Dropbox and Kindle. None of them are platform specific. If you decide to pay for the file sharing service Dropbox, for instance, it will not be because their iPhone app is so awesome. Instead you buy a service with some specific attributes – and use this service on whatever device that is handy right now.  The core benefits of the product, like how many GBs you can store in your account, follow you across platforms. And the convenience of being able to use it on many platforms is actually a core benefit of the product in itself.

We see a very strong trend towards platform agnostic services – where a product is not defined in terms of one platform only, but as a service across all available platforms.

In this area most media companies are dragging behind. Many media executives seem to believe they will be able to sell each platform specific product individually. For instance they want you to pay for an iPad subscription as a different product than the premium level of the web site.

I believe this type of platform specific strategy will fail. Instead the winners will be those who succeed in defining product offerings that are available wherever people choose to access them. As smart phones and tablets become more common, most people will indeed consume media content on several devices during the day.  In this new reality users will expect seamless transfer of product benefits across platforms.

One important point: That products become platform agnostic does not necessarily mean that they have the same attributes on all platforms. In fact I think we are about to see that making digital versions of the printed paper will fail as a business model. Content must be presented according to the specific user situation of each platform, and the traditional broad print bundle may no longer be the core of the digital product.

2. Localization

The rise of smart phones is pushing localization services many steps ahead.

In 2010 we saw the rise of localization networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. At the same time Facebook introduced Facebook Places as its tool to encourage people to tell where they are and Google made clear that location-based coupons would play an important part of its strategy.

In short: It is time for local media sites to watch out as the global giants prepare to move into their territory.

2011 will be the year when we see services based on localization take a big step forward. People will start getting used to content and commercial offers being served according to where they are at any given time. And people will start to depend on these type of services in their everyday life.

The development will be driven by big services like Google and Facebook, which both see great opportunities in the local ad markets.

But also media companies will follow along, creating local news services targeted at users’ location.

An especially creative service using localization information is Ratio Finder. The service uses check-in information from Foursquare – and makes a dynamic map of pubs and clubs with higher than average ratio of female checkins right now.

One interesting question: Who will own the biggest database of location-based offerings in each market? I am convinced those who succeed in building such a database will make lots of money. And I think this market will be defined by the network economy, in which the market leader will have a huge benefit.

A creative example of service based on localization is Ratio Finder: http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/

3. Disaggregation and repackaging of content

As I see it, most editors seem to underestimate the powerful forces of disaggregation of content in the digital area.

And still disaggregation of content is perhaps the most powerful force influencing the traditional media industry.

What do I mean by disaggregation?

Think back a few years at the typical offering of a traditional media company, be it a newspaper or television company. At the time distribution of news and content was limited by physical restraints. In order to be able to present the news to people in your local target area, you had to package it so that it fit the needs of most of your users. It was “one size fits all”.

In the digital era these physical boundaries are no longer valid. In fact there is no longer an additional cost to speak of to present news to each user according to his/her personal interests.  News can be distributed freely – specialized for the individual user.

So we see that content is being split up into its individual pieces.

And then it is being repackaged. Sometimes it is done by the media companies themselves, but more often other agents have more at stake. Content is being repackaged in all kinds of ways. Some examples:

• Social repackaging. People use services like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to receive content recommendations from friends or people they trust. For music playlists on Spotify perform a similar function.
• Repackaging by aggregation. Google News or similar services aggregate content from thousands of sources and present it according to different categories. In this way users can follow all the news on one particular topic of interest without having to look up each content source individually.
• Repackaging by search. Searching for information on Google helps users find exactly what they are looking for.
• Repackaging by human curation.  Huffington Post is in many ways an example of this, where editors summarize and link to stories from many different sources.

The huge challenge for media companies is that the main focus is switching from the edited package as the core of its offering to the individual article or content piece. I believe edited packages still will be important, but they will no longer be the only way people consume news.

For media companies this means that the content structure becomes much more important than before. In fact we can state the following:

Content without metadata has no value!

No value!

And this is a huge challenge for most media companies! In the analogue world they did not have to worry about meta data. In the digital world it has become essential for success.

4. Everything is becoming social

Social media is ingrained in more and more digital services. Therefore it is impossible to talk about digital media trends without mentioning social media.

Facebook has become the new hub for people’s digital life. More than 550 million people now use Facebook – and for many of those it has become the online starting point, replacing photo albums, address books, chats, news services, etc.

While many media companies a couple of years ago tried to build their own social communities, many of them today decide to use Facebook as the social glue around their content. In Norway this trend was illustrated by the demise of the once hugely popular newspaper-owned social network Nettby.

The social aspect of digital life spreads to more and more areas:

• Social shopping is growing, illustrated by services like Groupon and Livingsocial.
• Search is becoming social. Google is experimenting with including results from your Twitter followers and Bing and Facebook has started a partnership to make search more social.
• Social gaming has become a huge industry, as illustrated by the success of Zynga, the creator of the very popular Facebook game Farmville.
• Even ads are becoming social. A good example is Facebook’s new ad format Sponsored Stories, in which your interactions with brands online may show up in ads displayed in your friends’ newsfeed.

5. New business models for content

Almost all media companies now try to find ways to charge users for content. In this regard 2011 will be the year of experiments. The task is extremely difficult, though:

Content is everywhere in the digital world – and no longer scarce.  In addition people expect to be able to share the content they like with their friends.

Does that mean we cannot make users pay for content? No, it does not. But it is extremely important to remember that people rarely pay for just the content. Many other aspects are equally important, such as Unique Convenience and Unique Usefulness.

• Read my article: Five ways to build Unique Value for digital content

I have asked myself why user payment suddenly has so much more important for media companies. I believe there are at least two reasons:

• Media companies need more revenue streams to finance good journalism. This has been even more clear as newspaper readership continues to drop – and banner ads are loosing value by the day. The process has been helped by the financial crisis, which gave media companies a new sense of reality.
• The shift to mobile platforms for media consumptions has changed the rules of the game. People seem to be more willing to pay for content on mobile platforms – and media companies are eager to explore that.

My guess is that most attempts at charging users for content in 2011 will fail. The reason is that media companies need to completely rethink their approach to content in order to succeed. That does take some time.

But failures are what will push us forward. Only by making mistakes we will realize the steps we need to take.

And we will see some success stories. Many of them will be surprising. And they will help the rest of us to identify what really creates Unique Value for our readers. In the long term the experience will also improve the quality of journalism, as we learn more about what our readers truly appreciate and are willing to pay for.

————————————————————————-

More to read about digital media trends in 2011

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• 10 predictions for the news media in 2011 (Mashable)
• Our Bets For Digital Media In 2011 (paidcontent.org)
• Ten newsroom New Year’s resolutions for 2011 (lostremote.com)
• Seven Digital Media Trends of 2011 (socialmediatoday.com)
• My Mix of Social Media Trends 2011 (John Bell)
• Ten digital trends (ClickHere)
• Trends to watch in 2011 (sfnBlog)
• The rise of apps, iPad and Android (Wall Street Journal)

From Copy Economy to Access Economy: The media industry must prepare itself for a future in the cloud, claims a digital future expert.

Media futurist Gerd Leonhard was the keynote speaker of the Future Media Days conference in Oslo, Norway this week. Leonhard is a media strategist and popular keynote speaker on the future of media. He lives in Switzerland and also writes the Mediafuturist blog.

The Future Media Days conference was held for the first time by the New Media Network in Norway. After his speech (you can download his slides here) I made a short video interviw with Leonhard that you can watch above.

• Join BetaTales on Facebook
• Join BetaTales on LinkedIn
• Subscribe by RSS

- A tornado is coming for the media industry,  warns Leonhard. He points out how some big mega trends will affect the very essence of how the media companies have been used to running their business.

One of the most important trends is the transformation from a Copy Economy to Access Economy.

Traditionally media business models have been based on selling copies of content: A printed newspaper, a book, a DVD, a music record, even a digital copy of a song.

That model is about to disappear, claims Leonhard. He compares Internet to a giant copy machine. Selling “copies” is a model of the past. Instead the entire world shifts to a world of access.

“If you are in the media industry you better get used to this. It is a whole new industry.”

Gerd Leonhard

We must review our assumptions, says Gerd Leonhard.  Like what is a copy in this new world? How do you define “a copy” when you have unlimited music streamed to you like in Spotify? If we cannot even define a copy, how can we speak of copyright?

Gerd Leonhard’s answer: Access (to the cloud) is the new copy!

We used to live in what can be described as the Broadcast Culture.  It was a disconnected society, based on everybody watching or reading the same content. For the media it was a one way stream of publishing.

Now it has been transformed to the Broadband Culture, which is based on millions of links between people.

“What matters on the Internet is not the noise, it is the trusted connections that you have generated”

The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention, says Leonhard.

In the past the media made money through control and scarcity.

“The future of the media is not a fight for distribution, it is a fight for attention.”

What then about media companies’ attempt at putting up paywalls in such an economy, like what The Times is doing.

- The paywall is an attention wall, unless it is so cleverly done that you don’t really notice that you pay, says Leonhard.

“Forcing people to pay cannot possibly be our future!”

Leonhard wasn’t necessarily agains asking users to pay, but underlined how i all depends on how it is done.

- It is very important to make models that keep 95 per cent of the population engaged. Then you can create uppselling options, he said.

Related articles about Gerd Leonhard

• Gerd Leonhard: The Future of IPR and Copyright (presentation at TedX NewStreet London) (slideshare.net)
• The Future of Advertising: Gerd Leonhard at Adtech London 2010 (slideshare.net)
• Gerd Leonhard: The Journalists Formerly Known as the Media: My Advice to the Next Generation ( /Jay Rosen) (mediagazer.com)
• New video: 5 customer engagement trends by Gerd Leonhard (future of marketing) (mediafuturist.com)
• Gerd Leonhard: Hot Trend – Tools To Find Relevant Web Information (gigaom.com)

Newspaper-owned Nettby used to be Norway’s largest online social community. Then came Facebook. Gone were the media companies’ hopes of being the centers of gravity for people’s social activities.

This blog is about digital media trends. That includes trying to look into the future, for instance by identifying 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010.

Yet the digital media landscape is changing so fast that only one thing can  be stated with certainty: The future will be different from what we are able to predict.

At the peak Nettby had more page views alone than the 10 next web sites in Norway together. But then came Facebook ...

This week brought the news that the once hugely popular social community Nettby in Norway will cease to exist in the beginning of next year. Probably very few of our readers internationally have ever heard of Nettby. Still, stay with me as the story is an interesting example of how the digital landscape has changed within just a couple of years. Certainly it illustrates how what we thought about the future just a short time ago completely failed to materialize.

Let us go back around three years – to 2007. At the time a lot of media companies were starting to discover the power of social media. We were thrilled by how media tycoon Rupert Murdoch two years earlier had bought MySpace.com for no less than 580 million USD. By 2007 Myspace was considered the leading social community site in the world.

In many newspaper companies, especially in small markets like Norway, we were dreaming of creating a big local social network of our own. We hoped that we could be a center of gravity for our readers, helping them connect to each other.  To achieve this we were studying MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and other global social communities that were growing.

I worked for Aftenposten at the time, which is now Norway’s largest newspaper. In our digital development department we strongly believed that we could build a leading social community for Norwegian users.

800.000 Norwegians had a profile on Nettby at the peak

The thinking was similar in other media houses in Norway. And it certainly was not without merit.  In Norway the newspaper Dagbladet already had some success with its social community Blink, which was followed by an even more successful community by the tabloid newspaper VG, namely Nettby.no (launched in September 2006).

In the Norwegian web market media houses have maintained a very strong position. Several newspapers are on the top 10 list of popular web sites among Norwegians. The most popular site is VG.no, which last week had 3,7 million unique visitors – in a market of 4,5 million people. With the possible exception of Aftonbladet.se in Sweden, I doubt that you will find any other newspaper company in the world with such a dominant position in its local market.

VG’s social community Nettby had a broad appeal – and tried to be the social meeting point of all Norwegians online. At the most – in 2008 – it saw 400.000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views. Again: Remember the small size of the Norwegian market!

In 2008 the Schibsted Media Group, which owns VG, valued Nettby at around USD 31 million. Others valued it at up to three times as much.

But then came Facebook.

Slowly Nettby, which had become so popular in Norway, started to loose ground. Norwegians discovered Facebook. They concluded Facebook gave them more benefits in terms of functionality and opportunities of connecting with old friends.

Even though Nettby was supported by the biggest traffic-generating web site in Norway, it was not sufficient. People just decided that they were better served by Facebook – despite all efforts by VG to convince them otherwise.

Social communities are often ruled by the principles of network economics. People tend to gravitate towards the biggest service, as all users are better served by being where everybody else is. When Facebook grew in popularity, people would experience that was the site they would indeed meet all their old friends from school. Today 58 % of Norwegians use Facebook on a regular basis.

Young people were the biggest user groups at Nettby in the end. Source: b2b.vg.no

The last bastion of Nettby were the teenagers. Nettby had its strength among the younger users. However, a social network cannot survive without volume. As Nettby had been loosing users steadily for 20 consecutive months, the board decided the lower limit had been reached. Nettby had to cease to exist – and the users needed to be given time to deinstall all their content.

Currently Nettby sees only 60.000 unique visitors per week, a small portion of what it had at the haydays.

Page views per week in 2010 for some of Norway's largest news sites. Nettby is included in the numbers for VG and the main reason for the dramatic drop.

VG’s decision to close down Nettby was certainly not surprising. In fact, those of us who are working for competitors have betted with each other when VG would make the inevitable outcome public.

Still, the demise of this social community illustrates how hard it is for local players to compete with the global giants, like Facebook. Today very few media houses, however strong their position might be, think that they can build a large general social community in their market. The thinking is very different compared to only 2-3 years back.

Instead we are now discussing how we can connect our services to Facebook by using its social plugins. We want our content to be distributed wherever people are and we fight to have the Facebook pages with the most followers. It is important for us that people engage with our content and discuss it. But no longer do we try to have readers do all the discussions on our sites. Rather we tell them: Please tweet about our content! Blog about it! Share it! Like it on Facebook! Engage! Engage! Engage! Wherever you are!

And having noticed how much our thinking has changed, I have asked myself:

What of all our assumptions today will be proven wrong over the next 2-3 years?

I would love to hear your answer to that question!

What are the digital trends that will shape the media industry? I asked three digital media experts. Here are their answers.

I had the pleasure of talking to the board of executives at Schibsted Media Group recently about the big changes taking place in the digital landscape. As part of my preparation I asked three smart digital media observers to answer the following question:

• What are the three most important digital media trends right now that will shape the media industry over the next 3-5 years?

Here are their answers:

Thomas Crampton used to work for years as a globetrotting newspaper journalist, primarily for the International Herald Tribune and The New York Times.

He then changed the course of his career – and since 2004 has been passionately involved with digital media. He is now the Asia Pacific director for 360 Digital Influence at Ogilvy – and a frequently used keynote speaker on social media.

I recommend you to follow his excellent blog, in which he often provides very interesting information about social media in Asia.  He also tweets at @thomascrampton.

Grzegorz Piechota is the president of International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) in Europe.

One of the points he makes is how the older generation also will become digital.

“New devices like iPads seem to be much easier for the old generation to understand and to use. (Look at my parents-in-law.)”, he writes.

“Printed media used to think they had problems with the young readers, now watch out as their core readers are going finally to discover digital news, entertainment, communication, geolocation and e-commerce.”

“And you know — at least in developed countries the market of the old is much bigger than the market of the young, and it is going to be bigger and bigger.”

Grzegorz tweets at @forum4editors.

Nic Newman presents himself as a “digital consultant working on the future of journalism”.  For many years he used to work for BBC, first in different editorial positions and then in charge of teams developing major web sites for the broadcasting corporation.

One of his points is how the use of videos create new ways of telling and distributing stories.

“Navigating the world of the web through video led gateways will shake up the old broadcasting elites and open a new wave of innovation on TV, PC, Tablet and mobile”, he writes.

He tweets at @nicnewman.

• Read also: 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010

Global web users spent on average five and a half hours on social network sites in December. That is an increase in time spent of 82 per cent in one year, according to the latest number from Nielsen.

• Subscribe to BetaTales by RSS
• Receive our posts by mail
  
• Follow me on Twitter

It is an amazing growth, as is illustrated by the graphs from Nielsen below.  According to the analysis company social networks is now the most popular online category, followed by gaming and instant messaging.  And most popular is Facebook, with an average time spent of about six hours per month. Two thirds of global social media users visited the site during a month.

This remarkable fast development proves indeed how social networks are becoming platforms for all other kinds of services and content on the web. No company wanting to communicate with people can anymore ignore the power of social media.

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

• Subscribe to BetaTales by RSS
• Follow me on Twitter

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: