Last year at roughly this time, I published a “Web 3.0” list of predictions in which I predicted “A full length movie will be made about Craigslist. Jason Alexandar will play Craig Newmark” to which Craig Newmark replied “For update re “A full length movie will be made about Craigslist. Jason Alexandar will play Craig Newmark.”, see http://cnewmark.com, and photo from last night.”
I am terrible at picking stocks, but I’ve had an eerie ability for predicting the slightly out of focus obvious.
So here is my list of predictions for 2009.
- The last economic downturn started in the SF Bay Area. This one will end there. If you are out of a job, move west.
- Hemorrhaging markets will produce a flood of qualified talent that will quickly migrate towards long-term sustainable industries. A high percentage of unemployed financial analysts will repurpose their skills in search marketing.
- Companies that outsource SEM to agencies will migrate towards inhousing as a cost cutting tactic with mixed results. Competent agencies that understand the strategy of team staffing will return a far higher ROI than the “one man show” in house approach. The companies that think inhousing was a good decision will not realize that they either came to an erroneous conclusion because their prior agency sucked or they hired a rock star who will leave them as soon as market conditions change.
- Google will be perceived as the economic canary in the coalmine. For the first 2.5 quarters in 2009, Google’s biggest fault will prove to be not accelerating as fast as they should. Google’s market confidence will keep them in an expansion frame of mind that will receive a lot of criticism but prove wise.
- Traditional advertising and marketing investments will tank and be diverted into performance marketing in Q1 and Q2.
- In Q3, the media will recognize that LA has embraced online media. Websites like Sony’s Crackle and other “webisode” investments will create a wave of excitement and investment that will create optimism and a wave of capital investment. Q4 will see the beneficiaries as:
* Production companies that can leanly create content and publish content with high intuition for usability and performance and retention marketing principles.
* Advertising platforms will cater to the short per-roll and recognize a surge in both investment and revenue as traditional media investments plummet.
- Facebook’s market share will accelerate largely to the expense of MySpace. Facebook will struggle to monetize revenue per visit and in Q3 implement an advanced performance based marketing platform that evolves the company from their current “singles in your area” banner model to a more targeted and profitable model.
- LinkedIn will increase market share at an accelerated rate (I’m guessing 8%) due to the unprecedented number of people who are unemployed and did not previously see much value in business networking. Perhaps more importantly, the activity within LinkedIn and other business networking communities will be on fire.
- The long-awaited hype about mobile marketing will arrive at a polarized conclusion: mobile is crucial for some business models and irrelevant for others.
- The beneficiaries of mobile will surprisingly emerge in the entertainment sector. Music companies like Pandora, Rhapsody, and video companies will explode. The previously mentioned “pre-roll” companies will clean up.
- Obama will step into office with marching orders that will globally ripple optimism in Q1 and the first half of Q2. People who are employed with minimally concerned with losing their jobs will resent not throwing a lot of money into the stock market.
- Obama’s pick of Stephen Chu will result in high return on people who invest wisely in alternative energy companies before January 15, 2009.
