Predictions for ‘Social’ in 2017
I get a lot of people asking me to tell them what’s going to happen in the social media space, which I happily do. But I realized this year that I too rarely track the efficacy of my predictions. As a little experiment, I thought I’d write them down here for posterity and we can see just how wrong I am. Here goes:
Facebook Shows Signs of Mortality
After an epic run of virtually unprecedented growth, could 2017 be the year when Facebook finally faces a challenge it can’t easily hurdle? I don’t think ‘fake news’ alone is going to take $FB down. But between weeks of the left decrying the role of fake news in shaping the election’s outcome, and now Trump and the right calling last night’s ‘kompromat’ dossier fake news, you can bet that Congress is going to start calling folks like Zuck and his team to D.C. to pull back the curtain on how they determine what stories people see and possibly force their hand in making disruptive changes. Perhaps more ominously, you also have multiple rounds of disclosure around misreported video views not far in the rear view mirror. If Congress wants to come out swinging, they’ll certainly have a cudgel to wield.
In addition to those likely distractions, the core Facebook platform is running out of places to squeeze ads. Maybe mid-roll is the next cash cow straight outta Menlo, but my guess is Facebook will make some acquisitions to help increase the potential revenue they can squeeze out of every user. Expect the usual assortment of advertising and A.I. tech acqui-hires, but don’t be shocked if Facebook makes a big play that helps them break into an entirely new revenue source. Could someone like Spotify or even Netflix make sense as a potential Facebook streaming/subscription media platform to rival Amazon, Apple and Google’s?
Add it all up, and this might be a year where Facebook acts more like Amazon and takes the foot off the growth pedal to invest in some bigger long-term plays. As a result, I won’t be shocked if this is the first year since its IPO that Facebook doesn’t achieve massive growth. Silly as it might seem to turn on FB for a slower-growth quarter or two, rest assured the market will find ways to overanalyze and overpunish Facebook for even the tiniest of slip-ups. Still every reason to be long on Facebook, so if a downturn comes, make sure you snatch up some $FB stock at a discount.
Instagram Becomes King
While its parent company may face challenges in 2017, expect Instagram to thrive this year and pick up a lot of the torch on Facebook’s growth. The big key will lie in Instagram’s integration of commerce into the platform. Expect that to take off in a big way this year, and don’t be surprised if they announce some sort of image recognition technology that allows products to be tagged/shoppable within influencers’ posts. Facebook could potentially expanding on their mid-roll video revenue sharing to provide individuals with a lucrative new way to monetize their content (with a significant cut coming back to Facebook in the process).
Snap Crackles and Pops
I’m not sure anyone knows what to make of Snap’s IPO. Plenty of smart folks think it’s going to thrive, a lot of other smart people are convinced it’s going to get crushed. My biggest question is who does the market use as a measuring stick to quantify Snap’s value? Are they compared to Facebook? Twitter? Based on their current ad model, probably makes more sense to compare them to a broadcast media player, but who would that even be? Spectacles were clearly an attempt to position Snap as something wholly different from the other players on the market, but Wall Street can have a hard time assigning value without analogs. I’d predict that that will lead to a lot of early ups and downs for $SNAP after it IPOs, as lots of people struggle to make sense of Snap’s numbers and business. But ultimately, as they grow their ad clientele (remember, a large percentage of advertisers have yet to run a campaign on their very young advertising platform), as their advertising technology matures, and as they potentially scale their product business with Spectacles (and other products that fulfill their promise as a ‘camera company’), I expect $SNAP to finish the year up significantly from their Q1 IPO.
Twitter Evolves
2016 was a rough year for Twitter. The chorus of prominent figures stepping away from the platform intersecting with the too-slow efforts to address harassment problems were both trendlines moving in the wrong direction.
Twitter faces some very real challenges at the start of 2017, but I believe this is the year where Twitter takes meaningful steps to change the way people interact on their platform. They won’t solve every problem that’s been lamented in a million Medium posts and hot takes, but I predict Twitter at the end of 2017 will look very different and be all the better for it. It’s an outcome we should all root for: at a time when truth is becoming increasingly subjective and the soon-to-be leader of the free world seems hellbent on silencing or marginalizing voices that stand in opposition to his, we need Twitter’s democratized and distributed sounding board more than ever.
Adtech Connects the Dots
I’ve heard some speculate that with so much of online ad revenue running through Facebook and Google, it’s basically game over. I’d argue just the opposite: their duopoly actually creates the biggest opportunity for adtech, which is creating ways for advertisers to unify messaging and experiences across both platforms. Neither one is going to invest heavily to help sell ads for their main competition, which means that other players can step up to fill the void and help advertisers to do a better job of targeting the right ads with tools that are Google/Facebook-agnostic. So while some players may succumb to the titans, expect some interesting new players to emerge who do a better job of unifying tracking and targeting across not only Google and Facebook, but Snapchat, Twitter, streaming video platforms, etc.
We Stop Calling It ‘Social’
Let’s face it, the designation of ‘social’ media feels are outdated as ‘digital’ did a few years ago. Is Spotify a social network because I can share music? Is YouTube a social network even though most people just go there to consume and never comment or even log in? Does any site that offers membership and allows members to talk to each other qualify as a social network? Even the major players in the space have stopped calling themselves social networks, it’s time that we move past a meaningless signifier and recognize that all media can and should be ‘social’ in 2017.
That’s what I’ve got. What do you think will happen in 2017?
