Our top 5 predictions for 2010

Starting the year with a list of predictions is probably as clichéd as resolving to go to the gym/change your life/change jobs. But it has to be done so here’s our list of the big digital developments to look out for in 2010.

The UK’s first truly digital election

Barack Obama’s use of the internet to help him win the 2008 US presidential election is widely seen as a model for how digital thinking can make a real impact on the course of a campaign. To date, UK elections have been largely untroubled by the internet but we predict that all of that will change in 2010. Bright young members of the digerati will be co-opted on all sides to transform the way that organising party loyalists, campaigning and fund-raising is carried out. It will be fascinating to see how each party thinks about the internet and whether they use it to entrench and mobilise existing support, or reach out to new audiences.  

Digital books come of age

2009 has seen all the elements of massive growth in electronic books slotting into place. Core technology like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s eReader got greatly improved new versions, and Google came a step closer to bringing millions of the world’s books online by partially resolving their dispute with US publishers. Although sales are currently small compared to print books they are growing rapidly; Waterstones reputedly sell an ebook every 90s. And, the hotly anticipated launch of Apple’s iSlate at the end of this month may well do for ebooks what the iPod did for music. We’ll stick our necks out and predict that electronic books will reach 3% of all books sold by the end of 2010.

Mobile internet hits the big time

Another market that Apple seems to have single-handedly transformed is mobile, and particularly its relationship with the internet. Pre iPhone, the mobile internet was one of those things that sounded like a nice concept but nobody could imagine having a practical use for. Now, iPhone users are the scourge of pub quizzes everywhere and the Apple App Store has delivered a staggering 2+ billion applications covering everything from games to emergency medical applications and more. Informa estimates that about 13.5% of all handsets sold in 2009 were smartphones (a term covering iPhones and competitor models) and that at least 38% of all handset in use will be smartphones by 2013. Yet all this has happened with relatively thin involvement from major brands and the public sector. We predict that mobile will be the big thing in 2010 with every large organisation worth their salt wanting to make sure they know how they are going to put smartphones at the heart of the digital strategy.

Less free online news

2010 will be the year when we start paying for online news. In 2009 Rupert Murdoch highlighted the harm that free news is doing to his newspapers, and the evidence backs him up. Enders Analysis suggests that half of all the UK’s local and regional newspapers could close by 2014 if current trends continue. Even passionate advocates of the free news model like the Guardian are struggling to make it work – the Observer came close to closure in 2009. 2010 will bring so-called pay walls across local and national newspapers. Some, like Johnston Press, are already trialling payment systems for local newspapers. News International are due to relaunch the Times and Sunday Times as paid-for titles online in the spring. Our prediction? By the end of 2010, the majority of online news will have moved to a ‘freemium’ model that blends some free content with a pay model for premium content or high usage. The new revenues will help but won’t replace what has been lost and consolidation in news providers will continue apace.

Real time web will become an essential

You can tell when a new online medium has really arrived. That’s the moment when Google builds it in as a separate type of search result. It happened for Twitter in December and now, where Google thinks that your search results can be enhanced by real time information from Twitter and elsewhere, it will include live updates that change as you watch them. Whilst this brings breaking news to Google it also create new opportunities and headaches for organisations. The opportunities: getting news, offers and other real time information to customers more efficiently. The headaches? Well, real time search means that what people are saying about organisations and their services is now immediate too. We predict that the implications of the real time web for product developers, marketing departments, and PR specialists will emerge over the course of 2010 through successes and disasters yet to happen.  

Best wishes for a very happy and successful 2010 from all at Digital Public

Image courtesy of Ernesto Lago