With the media landscape taking a sharp turn every few weeks, it is difficult to contemplate changes set to take place in our industry over the next 12 months. However, predictions are fun so we decided to make some of our own.
Here is our team’s take on what will happen in 2023 across email, organic search, paid media, and beyond.
Ash Considine
Media
Privacy and data will still be the center of the audience development/advertising conversation. As consumer trust wanes, brand transparency around data and privacy practices must increase. Making sure your techstack is made up of trustworthy companies would be a good place to start. Mailchimp (yep, Mailchimp) was recently hacked for the second time in 6 months, reporting dozens of customers’ data was exposed (one customer was e-commerce giant Woo-Commerce). That’s a pretty big deal. Data collection and standardization can and should be at the forefront of your marketing team's priorities all throughout 2023. Frankly, your audience expects it.
First-party data will be the main component of growing revenue for publishers in 2023. AI will give us better tools for personalization, particularly when it comes to send times but it won’t replace quality curated content/newsletters. Brand values will continue to be at the forefront of consumers’ minds, pushing publishers to do the same to attract and retain younger audiences.
I also predict that publishers will finally give up on the one size fits all model pushed through basic subscriptions or paywalls and offer flexible subscription start/stop times and the ability to pause as needed based on economic challenges or just consumer preference. HubSpot has ‘Automation Command Center’ on their 2023 product roadmap, which promises to manage, organize, and action all workflows from a top-down view. Hopefully this will continue to push the limits on creating and managing a unique customer experience.
Dallas Holland
Organic Search
If anything is certain for the year ahead, ranking in search will be more competitive than ever. In 2023, I predict that we will see even more companies prioritize their SEO—specifically technical SEO. As Google continues to deploy increasing updates, it has become impossible to ignore your site’s overall user experience. You can have the world’s most pristine content, but if your site is littered with 404s, inappropriate usages of noindex tags, and yields a 13-second load time—you’re not ranking on page 1 of Google. This is where technical SEO comes in.
I also predict that video and imagery will take on a new paramount importance in SEO. Research has shown that 40% of Gen Z prefers to perform search queries on visual-centric social platforms (specifically, TikTok) and Google has taken notice. With that, the search engine has invested heavily in visual optimizations to their search engine including Google Lens (a visual search option), Multi-Search (a search option that allows you to combine images and text), and an immersive Maps experience (a visual-focused update that allows you to experience the “vibe” of a specific location). Google also states that “video is becoming an even more fundamental part of how we share information, communicate, and learn.” These once-multimedia assets are quickly becoming SEO essentials.
Melissa Chowning
Social Media
I predict that Twitter will ultimately cease to exist by the end of 2023. The social media platform was purchased by a megalomaniac without a filter who cut staff by 50% and scared off 500 of the top advertisers on the platform, reducing advertising revenue by 40% within a matter of 3 months. What already non-profitable business do you think would survive that?
I also predict, unfortunately, that Meta will be one of the most successful social media stocks this year. Meta is still an advertising giant, and while it has focused and invested heavily on the metaverse in the last year, when that delusion dissipates, its financial model will be as healthy as ever, since it uses a very conservative accounting model and recognized all of that investment immediately, ensuring the metaverse investment won’t drag down the future P&L.
Organic Search
Much has been made about ChatGPT and its supposed threat to, well, lots of things, including Google. However, I predict that ChatGPT will not kill Google. Why? ChatGPT and other LLMs (large language models) rely on the datasets supplied to them to build their knowledge base. For every LLM, a new set of data needs to retrain the model before it can deliver new information. But Google (and other search engines) already have technology that refreshes their model hundreds of thousands of times a day, making the data that Google delivers the freshest representation of relevant information on the web. ChatGPT is a long way from being able to respond to new data and information, and without that, it will not be a Google-killer.
Media
I think media companies will, in preparation for a slower (but not recessive) economy in 2023, will focus on building stronger sales processes and infrastructure to prepare for the inevitable upturn. Media companies with a focus beyond 2023 will leverage lower costs of advertising to build audiences efficiency and cost-effectively. The reader will continue to be king even as reader revenue projections dip because, like reader revenue models, advertising models rely on an active and engaged audience to thrive, so building, attracting, and retaining an audience will be as important as ever.
Natalie Paschall
Social Media
In 2023 there will continue to be fracturing in the social media landscape, but the big ones will continue to dominate: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and….. Twitter? But Twitter is slowly becoming unusable and rife with bots, and disinformation. We can expect the news-junkie and journalists on Twitter will need to find a new home. Meta might be looking to replace Twitter as a source for news and could push out new features for that in 2023. There is chatter online that TikTok will be “regulated,” but they’re making moves to allow US oversight, so I predict that TikTok will not be regulated.
The blurry lines between mega-content creators and celebrities will get harder to define as companies leverage individuals with large followings to be the face of their brand. I foresee content creators joining the labor movement wave to unionize against social media platforms, fighting for rights, content ownership, and of course, money.
Section 230
Social media companies, publishers, basically anyone with a website that has comments, is going to be in for an interesting 2023 as the Supreme Court takes on the Gonzalez vs Google case. I don’t think that Congress will put together a privacy package before the ruling comes down, so there is potential for chaos to break loose regarding comments on websites. Don’t forget, in 2021, Australia ruled that page owners are responsible for the content in their comments, so who knows how this will impact our lives/livelihood.
Privacy
The EU is leaps and bounds ahead of the United States in establishing user privacy and digital rights (hi, GDPR!), and I believe they’re going to take even more extreme measures this year to regulate not only how data is processed/stored/sold, but also how AI is applied/used across industries.
And one more just for grins - Fox News will cease to exist, and Dominion will be the new home for conservative news.