Every year around January, I write an article about the most important trends publishers should focus on, but, right now, publishers are faced with a combination of trends that has a potentially huge impact on the next several months. This being the energy crisis, the inflation crisis, and the expected wave of COVID ... as well as a bunch of other trends, like polarization, news fatigue and avoidance, trust problems, relevancy problems, news consumption problems. And on top of all that, there are several very interesting external trends where people are changing their media mix.
Now, I want to make it clear that trends are not short-term. Nothing that happens over the next 3-6 months will really change the overall trends, but events might act as a catalyst, dramatically accelerating the trends that exist.
The last time this happened in the media was in 2009, when we were hit by the financial crisis. Back then we had a number of external trends. Like, the internet, print to digital, people going to brands directly, social media, a shift in time spent away from the media and more towards 'your friends online', mobile internet, and brands getting interested in new ad platforms.
A few of those trends were new, like how the mobile internet trend had massively changed after the iPhone came out in 2007, but the other trends had been around for a decade.
But what happened was that it all came together when the financial crisis hit, and the result was this:
We all know this graph. You have seen it many times before, but it's such a clear example of how existing trends can suddenly accelerate massively when companies, and brands, are faced with a sudden change in their financial situation, or some other factor that forces people to evaluate what they are doing.
And so the question is, what about today? What will happen over the next six months now that we see a similar situation of outside events putting huge pressure on existing trends.
Well, that's the focus I want to talk about in this article. What are these trends? What do we need to be careful about? Why are they actually beneficial to publishers (unlike in 2009), and why is it so important for publishers to act now?
Let's list the trends
To explain this better, the best way is to organize and categorize these trends, and we are going to start with external public trends.
External public trends
These are all the things that are happening outside of the media that impacts the public as a whole. And this impact comes in the form of pressure to evaluate your situation and decisions that you make.
