What are your predictions for consumer Internet in 2010? Here are my top 5.
It is the time of the year for predictions – here is what I think will happen in 2010 in consumer Internet:
- Facebook will lock down on its dominance of the social graph: Facebook Connect will become the standard for the social web with every major website implementing it. Other social networks like MySpace, Hi5, Friendster or our own Nexopia will have to differentiate even more radically and build their business around or on top of Facebook.
- 2010 will be the year of content companies: with AOL‘s new focus on content generation, DemandMedia‘s looming IPO and tons of innovation in this vertical, content companies will get more attention than ever before and come up with new models to produce high-quality content at scale. I am with you, Tim Armstrong.
- We will see a leader in geo-location emerge: it might be Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook or Twitter but I am pretty certain that one of them will nail it and get to critical mass. My bet is on Facebook with outsider chances going to Twitter.
- The apparel vertical will see tons of investment activity with the private sales category getting close to bubble stage, new apparel brands being launched as web-only ventures (like Bonobos and Indochino have done) and new types of shopping concepts emerging.
- 2010 will see the IPO and M&A markets come back in full force with a long list of top companies readying for public markets (Kayak, Bigfishgames, DemandMedia, Zynga, perhaps Facebook) and successful IPO’s kick-starting the M&A markets.
So what have I forgotten or gotten wrong? And what are your predictions for 2010?
Posted: December 16th, 2009 under News.
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Comments
Comment from Mihai Mafteianu on January 15, 2010 at 1:12 am
First of all I’m on the same page with you most of the predictions.
I would add to your list the mobile shopping / mobile payments market that will grow along with the interest for the more and more complex feature phones. With more people using the Internet from such mobile devices there will be an increasing demand for instant shopping and paying for products or services right from the mobile device. This is an area that I am increasingly pursing.
What I’m not entirely sure about is the content creation business. I was involved for some 5 years in this area and creating quality content is an excruciating task. The entry point for competitors will always be low and this will push competition beyond the comfort zone of most venture capitalists.
I see more a market here for more user generated content shared on social networks and similar mediums. With such low entry point to creating content most people will prefer to get their friends take on various news or topics rather than getting the content from bigger, more rigid media companies. Quiet possible the days of making another Weblogs Inc., Gawker or B5Media are over and more and more bloggers, vloggers and independent podcasters will make a difference here, helped by their social media groups and network of friends while creating content relevant especially for a smaller, more focused group of people.
I’ve been watching some recent (and not so recent) media creation efforts and there are few examples of very successful efforts. Think how much money and efforts were put into sites like nextnewnetworks and how little impact they managed to do so far as compared to independent vloggers in each of the categories they target.
It is quiet possible that users will not articulate the demand and wait for content networks to create it, but rather create it themselves or spark a social network conversations.