Middle School Marketing: 10 Predictions for 2010

As 2009 comes to an end, we decided to use our last Middle School Marketing of the year to review our predictions for the past year and discuss our new ones for 2010. Here goes...!

Predictions for 2010

1. The Internet Will Be Less Free: Users will be more comfortable paying for services they love rather than being pestered with annoying ads, or seeing their favorite services go bankrupt. Pandora has begun charging if you reach a certain number of listening hours, and Hulu will almost be a paid service in 2010. Additionally, there are examples in the news industry such as the NYT Reader built on Adobe Air and Rupert Murdoch announcing he would charge for online content by July 2010.
2. Mobile: This is a no-brainer. Yes, Android consumption will increase greatly; yes a new iPhone will appear; and yes, my Mom now has a Droid. The average Joe and Jane will pick up smartphones on their favorite network, thus forcing marketers to more thoughtfully engage in an application-based digital economy (and please, God, let that not mean more ads). We hope that networks will stop holding things back, but that seems overly optimistic (unless Nexus One sells unlocked at a reasonable price; that could change things). 

3. Pocketized Computers: With the rapid improvements in smartphone operating systems and hardware, the lines will blur between Netbooks, eReaders and smartphones - particularly Netbooks and smartphones, perhaps leaving Netbooks out in the cold in the near future.
4. Acquisitions: It's always fun to make acquisition predictions. With the recent Apple acquisition of LaLa, and Pandora reaching 40MM users, we predict that Pandora may have a buyer in the near future.
5. Apps: Application development and interaction will grow at an even greater pace due in large part to Android penetration, which will lead to more and more application based marketing. In 2010, people may actually hold it against certain companies if they don't have an app.
6. Paid Search: The Bing/Yahoo! search deal will fail. Even with the Yahoo! deal, Bing will not gain significant market share on search leader Google (although Bing travel is pretty sweet). 
7. Organic Search: We will see dramatic shifts in Google and Bing as they begin integrating Twitter and other "latest" news sources (think TweetMeme or TweetMixx). Now if we could just get people to stop typing URLs into Google...
8. Facebook: Facebook will be back in court over privacy issues. Facebook advertising will "improve" – both the advertising platform and the targeting ability. However, the ads will probably still suck.
9. Digital Media/Online Video: The digital media experience will grow significantly. Apple's acquisition of LaLa and Amazon's digital store are just the beginning. Digital media will be enriched by full-blown experiences using things like desktop/mobile apps and augmented reality (examples: Avatar, Mayer).
10. The Fall of the Social Media Expert: This is more of a hope. If we hope it hard enough, maybe all those so-called social media experts will just... go... away.

So there you have it: MSM’s collective predictions for 2010. Do you have any predictions that we didn't cover here? If so, please share!