By Caesar Vallejos
Eagle News Service online correspondent
BARCELONA, Spain (Eagle News) — Content may still be king but distribution is the queen and she wears the trousers.
Quoting Buzzfeed’s founder Jonah Peretti, the CEO of MIDiA Research Mark Mulligan aptly described the dynamics in the changing landscape for mobile media entertainment that includes the latest trends, forecasts and analysis for the sector.
In his presentation “Content Strategy in the Age of the Distributed Audience”, Mulligan showed how talent, consumption and business models have changed the media landscape.
“In the new world, go where your audience is,” he stressed by citing that the consumers use various platforms including Snapchat, Facebook, Google, Messenger, Netflix, YouTube, among others. Around 5 billion users go to messaging platforms.
Media disruption and innovation to accelerate
Media, according to Mulligan, is “being disrupted like never before.” The disruptors include cord cutting by operators, ad blockers, streaming, free offerings, audience fragmentation and strategies implemented by major technology companies.
He predicted that this disruption and innovation will accelerate in 2016 and beyond as messaging will continue to boom and morph, videos will explode, ad blockers to impact on revenues and the start of re-aggregation.
Mulligan cited smartphones as key driver in the unprecedented acceleration in consumers’ adoption of new technologies. There are around 2 billion smartphone users around the world today.
In the fight among the three biggest names in the digital world– namely, Facebook, Google and Apple — content according to Mulligan is both collateral damage and weaponry as the tech companies use various strategies and tactics to defend their own core businesses.
“The real growth of the global digital content revenue is coming from mobile apps and digital video,” Mulligan showed. However, he also stressed that free-to-paid content ratios are inverted.
Innovations in App platforms noted
Innovations in App platforms have accelerated in an unprecedented fashion. “This is going to be a brand new industry and will be as transformative to businesses as the internet 25 years ago,” he said.
“Multi-tasking is the norm of audiences. Not only as they are fragmented in terms of demographics but they do a lot of things at the same time because their digital IQ is increasing at the same time, thanks to the apps, ” Mulligan said.
“Free is the language of the web. But people will pay, given the right choice at the right price,” Mulligan concluded. However, he warned that in the era of free, value value exchange is crucial particularly when ad blockers do not allow making money anymore.
