2012 is going to be a year of contrasts – of consolidation of power for the
Internet Big Five,
and fragmentation and disruption of that power due to both startups as
well as government and consumer action. I’ve spent the past few weeks
jotting down thoughts for 2012, and hope to do the Year That Is About To
Be justice in the following set of posts.
Yes, I said “set of posts,” because for the first time since the
birth of this blog (that’d be nine years ago), I’m going to post my
predictions one by one. Why? Well, because I’d like to dig in a bit on
each. If I do it all in one post, we’d have a *very* long read, and most
of you are just too busy for that. I don’t plan to release these posts
slowly, I’m just going to write till I’m done, so ideally I’ll be done
in a few days. And when I’ve finished, I’ll post a summary of them all,
for those of you who want all these predictions in one easily linkable
place.
So let’s start with Prediction #1:
Twitter will become a media company, and the only “free radical of scale” in our Internet ecosystem.
Let me break this into two parts. First, the media company angle.
We’ve seen this movie over and over again, with Google and Facebook the
most notable “new media companies” of the past decade (and Microsoft the
most reluctant). Most engineering-driven Valley companies resist the
mantle of “media company,” though Facebook seems to be adapting rapidly
to that fact. Its key executives make a point of declaring themselves in
the business of selling advertising, and if the
new Timeline feature
isn’t a play to create the world’s biggest media company at scale, then
either A/I’m crazy or B/no one else is paying attention. I doubt the
latter is true. The former, well…
Now, Twitter is an engineering-driven company, but its future rests
in its ability to harness the attention of its consumers, then resell
that attention to marketers. If that sounds crass, I don’t mean it to
be. Twitter has a chance to do what Google did – at least initially –
provide a platform for advertising that actually adds value to the
ecosystem in which it lives. Twitter’s initial platform for ads is
pointed generally in that direction – Promoted Tweets only get
“resonance” if people engage with them, for example. But it’s about to
get more complicated.
Here’s why. When Twitter rolled out its mostly-lauded new design late
last year, it added a new section to all of our accounts. Can’t
remember what it’s called? You’re probably not alone.
Twitter’s new “#Discover” section reputedly addresses what I’ve called the service’s
greatest problem and opportunity: How to filter all that Twitter noise into a signal that adds unique value to each individual account.
If Twitter gets #Discover right, it’s created an extraordinary media consumption machine. But so far, #Discover ain’t there yet.
You know what
is close to there, when it comes to creating a new kind of media consumption service?
Flipboard.
And that might make for a few uncomfortable board meetings over at
Twitter HP, because Flipboard CEO Mike McCue sits on Twitter’s board.
Inevitably, Twitter’s #Discover needs to beat Flipboard at its own game.
In the end, Twitter may have to buy McCue’s company (or Mike may have
to recuse himself from an awful lot of meetings).
And that’s not the only thing that’s “complicated” about getting
#Discover right. As Flipboard has already figured out, once you curate
copyrighted material at scale, and then want to sell ads against your
curation, things get tricky. This is why Flipboard has spent so much
time
negotiating rights deals
with major publishers. And this will become a major part of Twitter’s
work in 2012; work that, to my point, is the work of a media company.
Once Twitter fixes its #Discover problem, an entirely new front opens
up for the company in terms of advertising. I find consuming Twitter on
Flipboard eerily similar to reading a good magazine, and I don’t think
that’s a coincidence. And good magazines already have a good advertising
model called the full-page ad (and the two-page spread). I predict that
Twitter’s rise as a media company (along with the success of Flipboard
and various at-scale “magazine-like” apps like Wired and The Daily) will
augur a new ad unit we can either swipe past, or
engage with. New formats like these need a scale player to really drive
them into the minds of ad buyers, and Twitter will be that driver (yes,
there’s
Zite, and
Livestand,
Google’s supposedly upcoming Propeller, and and and…but.) This ad format will be a huge hit with marketers, and the subject of many fawning industry press mentions.
My second post will expand on the latter part of my first prediction:
Twitter as the only “free radical at scale.” Watch for that later
today. And Happy 2012!
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