Reports: Paid Content

When it comes to disruptive technology, emerging formats such as Virtual Reality have been here before. The part about innovation that can so often omitted by uplifting TED lectures is that whilst these technologies present incredible opportunities, amongst the hype and excitement are often serious debates on how differently various contributors within the technology ultimately view the world and the value that they contribute.

Facebook beat financial analyst estimates with its Q3 2016 earnings but announced that ad revenues would likely slow in 2017, due to the digital ad market feeling the pinch of advertiser budgets, which are lagging behind the shift in user behaviour. Facebook’s stock fell by 7% but Plan B is already in motion: to become a media company.

As we correctly predicted, 2016 was the year video ate the world. 2017 is going to be shaped by the battle for consumer attention through formatting and distribution wars. VR is likely to cede further ground to AR, bots will become established, while messaging apps add to their dominant position (even though user growth will slow).

The Monthly Active User (MAU) metric is the default measure of digital services but its usefulness is lessening. While it offered desktop-era services a better alternative to page views, its use for mobile apps is increasingly anachronistic. With the advent of smartphones, users are absorbing app-based services far more intimately into their lives, consequently leading to frequency of activity going far beyond monthly usage.

Paid content used to be one of the web’s backwaters. Change, however, is afoot, thanks to innovations such as app stores, tablets and media streamers. Music, video, games and books all compete for attention and wallet share on consumers’ connected devices.

The global digital music industry may only be growing steadily (5% in 2013) but beneath the headline number is a richly varied picture of different services, diverse regional growth rates and competing business models. To better understand this marketplace, MIDiA Research conducted a Global Music Services Tracker.

Streaming has arrived and is here to stay, that much is clear. What is not is how it will impact existing music revenue streams. Though neither a business model nor a product, streaming is the lens through which the irresistible force of the shift from ownership to access is best understood.

Content Connectors, devices such as Apple TV, Google’s Chromecast, Amazon Kindle Fire TV and Roku, are set to transform the way in which mainstream consumers interact with digital content. Current adopters of these devices are the most valuable paid content consumers across all content genres, not just the video for which Content Connectors are best known.