Six Media Predictions For 2016

[Commentary] It seems almost inevitable that 2016 will be a year of accelerating trends in the media world more than one in which completely new ones emerge. So if there’s a unifying theme that will tie all of 2016’s major media dynamics together, it will be velocity. Given that, here are six trends likely to take on serious force in 2016 after gaining significant early traction in 2015, along with one more granular prediction that may serve as an important model to emulate.

1. Over-the-top (OTT) domination -- Linear television is on notice: consumers have embraced over-the-top television options faster and more pervasively than almost anyone predicted.
2. Political advertising goes digital -- Borrell Associates predicts that digital will capture $1 billion of a record $11.4 billion political ad spend in 2016.
3. Virtual reality rises -- Late 2015 saw a flurry of VR experimentation among media outlets including The New York Times, Gannett Co., The Economist and ABC News.
4. Ad blockers will rewrite the advertising playbook -- Ad blockers may not yet seem like the existential threat they were initially heralded to be. But don’t make the mistake of writing them off as overblown worries in the vein of Ebola or the Y2K bug.
5. Distributed publishing will widen and accelerate -- Publishers have equivocated mightily on this phenomenon since it reared up a year ago. That equivocation may be a luxury they can ill afford in 2016 as the platform wars get more thermonuclear and major platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Google and Apple expand their presence as publishers, compelling readers and viewers to follow.
6. The Washington Post will keep beating The New York Times -- Times writers sniffed when the Post overtook the paper in unique visitors for the first time in October, then they scowled when it happened again in November, dismissively attributing the traffic surge to clickbait and other manipulative reader-grabbing ploys.