December 21, 2008

Report card: predictions 2008

Almost a year ago I made some predictions for 2008:

- Flash 9 will make QT/WMA less relevant and make life difficult for Joost. In online video Flash was the underlying technology of choice for the year (except for the Olympics) and in the end even Joost launched in Flash.

- Better advertising targeting (interest/behavioral/contextual) makes remnant inventory more valuable and adds significant revenue to communities, social networks and other non-premium media. Even if MySpace is, reportedly, making $50 million a year from MyAds, targeting hasn't improved value of non-premium advertising space to the extent I expected.

- Social graph turns out to be more buzz than biz. Pretty obvious that it turned out that way.

- Google will still be king. Check. Even if the king might have been hurt, the princes fared much worse.

- Search traffic, Web 2.0 features and web analytics will make non-hyped e-commerce companies increase sales and margins in 2008. I haven't made a deep-dive into the data, but search and analytics have been a pretty big theme of the year. And with Twingly at least some Swedish retailers have started to go 2.0 beyond AJAX. The question is how it affected sales and margins.

- Spotify. If Spotify gets the label deals, it is going to be big. As Spotify launched pretty late in the year it doesn't seem to be quite as big in absolute terms as I thought it would be. By most other accounts (praise, media buzz and interest in invites) Spotify is big.

I'm not going to grade my predictions, or themes, as they are relatively broad and grading shouldn't be done by me but rather by you (feel free to leave a comment). In the next week or two I'm going to spend some time thinking about which themes I think will be important in 2009 (feel free to add predictions and ideas in the comments or via e-mail).

4 comments:

Oakieman said...

Good job! I predict that 2009 is going to be back to basics... Online retail is going to be the big thing (sic!). Both retailers and consumers are going to want to cut costs. I bought some ebay shares some time ago, I think that segment is going to hold up well during the downturn.

Anonymous said...

I made some predicitions for 2008 on WebAnalysts.Info last year. Many won't come true, but that's OK. I wanted to be very specific and bold since it makes it more of a challenge. I could have written "web analytics will increase in importance" but that would have been a huge DUH! One thing that has come true is Hans Rosling's motion graphs in Google Analytics. :)

Oakieman said...

Well, I put my money where my mouth is, that's pretty specific :)

Lars, can you link to your predictions, would love to read them.

Martin said...

Hi Henrik! Nice ones...

It would be cool to hear how you think how online advertising will be affected by the credit crunch (traditional advertising shifting over to online ROI or a general decline).

Consequently - if I decide to go all in and put the inheritance from my granny into GOOG - http://finance.google.com/finance?q=goog - when will it double up :) Hard one, but count on you as the Oracle! :)

Martin Varsavsky blogged that putting money into -50% pressed-down blue chip stocks would beat most start-up ventures over the coming 18 months.

http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/general/what-would-i-do-if-i-was-danny-rimer-or-mike-moritz.html

Besides... do you think any big Web 2.0 names will be wiped out from the scene during 2009 due to cashflow problems and VC draught?