It’s a new year! And Nieman are still publishing 2019 predictions! I have read about a hundred of these now and I want to gouge my eyes out! I hope it brings you value!
I pray that this is the last batch of Nieman predictions
There are actually a few really good ones this week. Gabriel Snyder is completely right about how subscription revenue might start to affect editorial decisions – not just in terms of pandering to your audience’s beliefs (*cough* The Sunday Times *cough*), but also in terms of prioritising stuff that gets conversions (NYT’s Cooking section is a good example of this). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing though: publishers could always do with focussing more on what their readers actually want.
Meanwhile Steve Henn from Google’s piece on audio news shows how serious Google are about experimenting in and funding this area. The usual caveats about not fully trusting the platforms always applies, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on what comes out of these experiments.
Finally, the New York Times’ Mike Isaac is as insightful as ever, particularly when he highlights the need for an AdSense equivalent for podcasts. It’s quite astonishing that most podcast ROI tracking is still done through coupon codes. There’s gotta be a better way.
Everything is Fake
You might have seen this Intelligencer piece over Christmas about how fake the internet is: less than 60% of web traffic is human, all the metrics are BS, and even the companies you buy from aren’t real. It’s a bleak read, and if anything it undersells how bad things actually are.
I’m reminded of when I worked at one news site: an editor told me Facebook had advised the publisher to promote sponsored content to audiences in South East Asia. Click-rates are higher there (it’s a cultural thing), so the metrics would look better when reporting back to advertisers. Never mind that SE Asian views are of no use to a UK advertiser. (Click to tweet this).
At some point, advertisers are going to wake up to how much publishers and platforms are ripping them off. It’s just a matter of when.
Robo-Journalism
Having spent a year trying to use AI to auto produce content, I’m naturally very interested by anyone else doing the same. Forbes is the latest to try: they’ve built a tool that produces first drafts of articles. It’s a bit unclear how it works, or exactly how good/detailed the drafts are, but it sounds like a big leap forward in AI journalism. Expect to see tons more of this over the next year, as natural language generation continues to improve and become more accessible. Jeremy Gilbert (from the Washington Post) has a Nieman prediction which, if you read between the lines, suggests the WashPo might be expanding their AI tools soon too.
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Tech
The elephant in the room this week is Apple, who slashed their revenue forecasts this week. The best I’ve read on this is Dave Lee, who makes it clear that this is bad, but not the end of the world.
In the wake of this, I’ve seen more and more people suggesting that Apple is going to acquire either Netflix or Disney to boost their fortunes. But I’m unsure how much this would help Apple. The synergies aren’t particularly obvious: it would hurt the content companies’ core business too much to restrict the content to iOS devices, so it wouldn’t drive device sales; and I can’t see how either Netflix or Disney would really benefit from Apple owning them. I guess preinstalling the services on devices and bundling the content with Apple Music/Texture/iCloud into a Prime-esque deal could be appealing, but I don’t think it’d attract that many people.
The bigger question is why would Apple need to acquire them? Apple’s business is a cyclical one: revolutionary new product, make millions, eventually everyone has one so sales slow down, then another revolutionary new product is released. We’ve seen it with the computer market and now the smartphone market, which has indisputably reached maturity thanks to market saturation.
But this isn’t that big a problem for Apple, because we’re on the cusp of the next platform revolution (which I think will be AR glasses). If Apple can dominate this new market (and with their design and UX focus they’re uniquely positioned to do so), there’ll be another decade of insane sales and growth. I don’t imagine Tim Cook is particularly concerned about the future – Apple investors shouldn’t be either.
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Final Thought
I don’t like doing predictions, because there are too many unknown variables. But if I had to hazard a guess, this year will one where AI becomes more mainstream in media. We’ll also start to see the first good AR experiments, though nothing revolutionary will come of it just yet. And as for audio…I don’t think the user experience will improve that much for at least another year. (I look forward to revisiting these in December and seeing how wrong I was).
Have a lovely week!