March 11, 2021.
It will have been one year since the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
It will have been the year we saw a faster acceleration of digitalization than we saw over the past decade. A warp-speed acceleration of preexisting, long-term trends like e-commerce, digital services & payments, surveillance, gaming, interactive — and often social — entertainment.
I recently spoke with an investor in New York who told me we have arrived in the “new world”, a “dystopian society” where all our interactions are made online. We’re playing more video games, watching more porn, ordering everything online. And we aren’t going back to the way we were before.
Our new future is one where our homes are never again personal spaces, but are also our schools, our gyms, and our doctor’s offices.
We are hyper-connected, with smart devices like home speakers, AirPods, toys, wearables, and smart appliances. 100M AirPods were sold in the USA this year alone.
It’s a future where our every move, every word, and every relationship is documented online.
Whole categories of content, user experience, business models, and sub-economies have emerged that have never been seen before.
From the democratization of the creator economy, to fan-funded content and the future of voice-commerce, here are the 4 trends we see dominating 2021 and beyond.
Trend #1 — Everyone will become a creator
Lines between creators and digital creators are now blurred. Everyone has become a creator, not just those with a blue checkmark. The world is full of untapped creators — educators, financial analysts, entrepreneurs, chefs, nutritionists — who have never been given a platform to share their voice before.
The largest social media players of the past few years, like Instagram, Twitch, Patreon and Spotify, have laser-focused on lifting the top 2% of creators — celebrities, influencers, music artists, podcasters, all with massive followings.
But the next 10 years will see the emergence of community networks, platforms designed with an ease of creation, mirroring the ebb and flow of real conversations and the way we communicate with each other in real life.
We all have valuable perspectives, experiences, expertise that can be expressed creatively — a creative process, an experience, knowledge, interesting thoughts.
There are over 100M weekly podcast listeners in the USA, but less than 1% of these people have ever published a podcast. That’s a whole lot of untapped potential.
Trend #2 — Spending power moves to people, not advertisers
The last 10 years showed money coming into the ecosystem from advertisers looking to reach an audience. The next 10 years will see the spending power move to the audience itself.
Why?
People are willing to pay for more. More content, more experiences, for access to people, for intimacy. To feel part of something.
There is a huge willingness to spend.
We’re already seeing it in China, who’s leading the rest of the world in the future of audio and podcasting. While the US podcasting industry was worth $479 million in 2018, China’s clocked in at over $7 billion (23x). The reason? Chinese podcasters have moved to the subscription model, where loyal listeners pay for member-only content.
Or on YouTube, where 2 million users have supported creators by buying their first Super Chat (where users can pay $2 to make their comment to a creator more prominent), Super Sticker or Channel Membership, since the beginning of the pandemic. YouTube calls this “alternative monetization”.
Patreon sees 9.3 million monthly money pledges from fans to creators, paying out $20M+ to creators each month. OnlyFans is seeing an average annual growth rate of 304%, with 60,000+ creators earning an average monthly revenue of $250 USD.
Trend #3 — Social media becomes experience-driven
Content was king. The future of social media is in experiences.
Whether you join a digital hangout with other like-minded fans, pay for a personal 1:1 conversation with your favorite creator, get access to a private concert, learn from experts in self-help, language, music or psychology, the “experience economy” burst into the mainstream in 2020, in parallel with the rise of social media on-the-go.
Social platforms like Logcast, Clubhouse, ShopPopLive and Yubo, are building digital social experiences that haven’t been seen before, and in 2021 we’re only going to see this accelerate.
Trend #4 — V-commerce
As voice AI gets more competent and digital voice assistants pop up in more homes (by 2025, smart speakers will be found in 75% of all US homes) — voice commerce is becoming a force in the e-commerce market.
23 million consumers in the US used voice assistants to make purchases this year — a 45 percent increase since 2018 and an 8 percent gain since 2019, according to How We Will Pay, a study by PYMNTS and Visa.
If you look at the influence behaviours of Gen Z, they’re much more likely to be influenced by the people in their immediate networks, than macro creators. So as they talk and listen to their friends, they’re being influenced about what they want to buy for themselves.
Over the next 10 years, we will start to see the birth of applications that allow people to purchase directly from audio clips or live streams. Social media apps like Logcast will let creators promote products directly within their audio content, sending fans to browse and purchase from a store using only voice, from the moment they visit until full payment completion.
The recent explosion of video shopping (with players like Amazon Live, PopShop and Shoploop by Google) has highlighted the potential in this latest incarnation of social shopping. As the use of AirPods and digital voice assistants grow (there will be nearly 8 billion connected devices globally by 2023), voice shopping is predicted to be a $40 billion market by 2022 alone.
Imaginative creators will continue to find ways to manipulate social platforms and incorporate e-commerce into their content, making both an engaging viewing experience for their fans, but also earning from it.
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