The year 2016 has been an interesting year for the Internet. The year saw us crooning to cover versions of old numbers, laughing at the funniest memes, installing and updating new news apps, and dreaming of new ways to get ‘Baked’! But we also saw some of the most interesting shifts in the space with innovative marketing campaigns, generation of original content to interest seldom pleased Internet audiences, and an overall upgrade in the use of social media. Here is my take on what to expect in 2017:
2017: The Year of Video Content2016 was a great year for web video content. But 2017 is when India moves from WWW to WWVB (World Wide Video Web). We will see a lot more video content being produced on the Web by both established legacy brands and new age media companies. We will see both fiction and non-fiction content in both short and long format, with focus on quality and quantity.
The Rise of Branded Content and Native Advertising Display in its current form will not survive, especially with adblockers getting popular with every passing minute. For instance,when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad?
For brands to stay relevant to the urban Indian millennial who hardly watches TV (except when there is a live sporting event); they will have to create meaningful conversations that are more than just advertisements. For this very reason, I believe branded content has a great future. However, companies that are able to measure the impact of these campaigns well will take majority of the revenues from the pie. Vanity metrics such as share, comment, re-tweets will not work.
Rise of the Long Form Content ‘Snackable’ short form content rules the Internet, from memes, to lists, to explainer videos. While they will continue to be popular, I believe long form is slowly but steadily making a comeback.
However, diminishing attention spans will ensure content creators are forced to invest in quality long form content in both text and video format. Web series is a great example of engaging users through quality long form video content.
Vernacular Reports say that 300 million Indians are set to come online in the next 2-3 years. However, English or even Hindi will not be their choice of language over the Internet; hence vernacular is a huge opportunity and presently a virgin eco-system.
Publishers and media companies who invest in vernacular will be the eventual leaders. You can’t be a large media company if you don’t talk in the language that large Indians comfortably understand.
Content Views Versus Unique UsersMost of the publishers today have a platform agnostic approach. Let us take ScoopWhoop as an example. What that means for us is that we don’t care where people consume our content as long as they do. Unique users and page views are slightly old metrics when you look at how many people consume content on third-party platforms. At ScoopWhoop media, we do 30 million unique users but at the same time we are clocking 350 million-plus content views. Content views is a submission of page views, video views and social interactions. And all these content views today are up for monetisation, hence it makes sense to track them.
Guest Author
The author is Co-Founder and CEO, ScoopWhoop Media