Some 2015 Predictions
— Big savvy internet publishers will spend a lot of money posting things directly to social networks that they do not own or control. This will be a success by every immediately important measure: these posts will reach and delight many people; they will assume new forms, most of which will have fresh potential as vessels for advertising. Some of these forms will closely resemble common website posts, which will suddenly feel clumsy and unnecessary. Other types of website posts will not find a comfortable home on social networks. From the networks’ perspectives, this will be fine—these posts never did that well anyway. The publication of non-viral, non-native-social content will begin to be viewed by a new breed of triumphalists as either pathetic or vain. Home pages—now less curated selections of stories than uncomfortably revealing glimpses into the social sausage factory—will be considered by large sites to be something of a liability.
— BuzzFeed (disclosure: where I worked for a couple years) is out front on the native stuff, with a team dedicated to “distributed” content, not to mention an enormous video unit that already publishes solely to YouTube and Facebook (First Look is trying a newsy version of the concept, and Fusion is doing entire shows on Instagram). BuzzFeed is a large and diverse company applying capable people to a new project that may or may not be the future of its business—it has room to experiment. However, with any public evidence of success, it will be emulated by less-savvy and more vulnerable companies, large and small, looking for any escape from a set of converging and downward trending lines. In 2015, notable (choose your definition) publications will declare their intentions to go fully distributed—or some other term that means the same thing—effectively abandoning their websites and becoming content channels within Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest or Vine or Instagram.
Websites that expect to be able keep doing what they’ve always been doing will undertake this endeavor and fail. Websites that don’t mind changing their goals and identities completely—newer ones without much institutional momentum or history—will undertake this endeavor and succeed. It will resemble the multi-decade struggle to bring magazines to the internet—which, if we’re really honest about it, has been a failure—in that there will be large familiar categories of writing that will not be easily transferable to the new medium. Related: 2015 will be the year that a large magazine company folds a major lifestyle brand into a Pinterest page.
— The personality-driven professional use of Twitter will reveal itself, like all other phases of Twitter, to be a weird and regrettable aberration. For the media, Twitter will settle into its ultimate role on an increasingly television-like internet as its grim and noisy and constant 24-hour news channel. The Twitter gaffe cycle will be compressed and amplified; this year, however, nobody’s heart will be in it....
Prediction for 2015: URL-shorteners will fall out of fashion and long, luxurious URLs will become symbols of status and prestige.
— Mark Slutsky (@totallyslutsky) January 5, 2015
...MUCH MORE
