January 8, 2025 • 25 mins
In this episode, Kyle Scott discusses 7 digital media trends expected to dominate in 2025.
He highlights the resurgence of local media, the importance of AI search optimization, the rise of online communities, the growth of live and social shopping, the emergence of prediction markets, the potential of Beehiiv as a content platform, and the trend of businesses acquiring audiences.
Takeaways
Local media is experiencing a resurgence due to underserved markets.
AI search optimization will become crucial for visibility.
Online communities will provide a sense of belonging and engagement.
Live shopping will transform how brands sell products.
Prediction markets will offer new ways to gauge public sentiment.
Beehiiv is set to revolutionize content creation and distribution.
Businesses will increasingly seek to acquire and engage their audiences.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Media Trends
01:11 Resurgence of Local Media
08:08 AI Search Optimization
11:13 Communities
13:18 Live and Social Shopping
17:02 Prediction Markets
18:52 Beehive: The Shopify of Content
21:43 Businesses Acquire Audiences
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
All right, welcome back toMonetize Media. I am Kyle Scott.
Today I want to go over myseven digital media trends set to
take over in 2025. Before wedo that, if you're listening to the
show, do me a huge favor.Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube,
wherever you're listening orwatching, go ahead and leave a review,
(00:22):
drop a comment, give me one orfive stars. I don't care what it
is, just one of those sort ofinteraction things. It's really good
for the algorithms andhonestly, if you like what you hear,
great. If you don't, give mesuggestions, give me feedback, tell
me you hate it, whatever, it'sall helpful. So take a minute, open
your podcast player and leavea review of some sort on your podcast
(00:43):
mechanism of choice. Allright, let's get into it. Today I
want to talk about these sevendigital media trends, which I think
many of which arecontinuations of of what we saw in
2024 and will be exacerbatedand expanded upon in 2025. And some
of them are brand new. Solet's start with number one, and
I'm going to kind of runthrough the first two relatively
(01:06):
quickly because we've coveredboth of them on the last few shows.
Number one is the resurgenceof local media. So if you listen
to my interview with MichaelKaufman of Catskill Crew, you'll
see that there is a lot ofopportunity within with lean local
digital startups. So why isthis? Well, over the last decade,
(01:28):
tons of bad business decisionsand printing and overhead costs have
led to a devastation in thelocal news market. Some of that is
because major metropolitannewspapers that historically serve
surrounding and suburbancommunities have cut back on the
number of reporters they'rewilling to employ. Others have been
(01:49):
because smaller upstarts orsmall networks of local newspapers
just don't have the economicsto survive anymore. There's a lot
of costs associated withprinting and delivering newspapers,
and we don't need torelitigate those here. But the local
news market has beenunderserved and over the last year
or two, a number of peoplehave begun creating kind of lean
(02:11):
one or two person digitallocal news outlets, largely built
on beehive. By sending one ortwo weekly emails about news and
events in a town that wasunderserved or served not at all.
And this was largelypiggybacking on a model that I think
6am City has probablyperfected where they went in the
(02:35):
sort of medium sized citieslike Raleigh and Greenville, South
Carolina and places like that.Maybe not the top 10 biggest cities
in the country, but Also notthe top 10 smallest cities. And they
found a foothold with thesesorts of daily newsletters in these
medium sized cities. But thatstill left a number of local communities,
suburbs, small towns,underserved. And a lot of people
(02:57):
have picked up the baton andran with it. Now where do I think
this goes? So my belief isthat only a sliver of these will
be successful. Hopefully whatwe're building at Access Media in
the Philly area, where we havea dozen plus local websites, a sports
website, and as of right now,I think five local newsletters will
(03:19):
be successful because we'reable to bundle together enough scale
to get the attention of midsized and regional advertisers. I
think what Michael Kaufman isdoing with Catskill Crew, I think
what Ryan Sneddon is doingwith the Naptown Scoop in Annapolis,
Maryland, what Jay is doing inWinnipeg, the name of the publication
(03:39):
escapes me. This guy inWichita, I'm forgetting names and
newsletters here, but there'sprobably a half dozen to a dozen
of these do. It will becomegood media businesses in and of their
own, right? But then I thinkthere's dozens, if not hundreds,
that will kind of butt upagainst a 10 to 15,000 subscriber
(04:00):
amount and struggle togenerate enough advertising revenue
to be a sustainable business.And they could make a good side hustle
for some. They could help somepeople get access to events in and
around their town, and thatmay be enough for them as well. But
I think the real opportunitywill be in either bundling these
together as media products andkind of having overlapping towns.
(04:22):
But where I think the biggestopportunity, as I said in previous
shows, is building orpartnering with a business in an
area to maximize their reach.And when you think about how difficult
it can be for a local servicebusiness, for example, to get a customer,
I'm talking everything from HVac to lawyers, accountants, insurance,
(04:43):
home escrow agents, mortgagelenders, real estate agents. These
are the types of purchasespeople generally hope to only make
a few times in their life.Most people don't go to a mortgage
broker. Often they don't buy ahouse. Often they don't know which
company they should use forhome or auto insurance. These things
(05:05):
are largely commodities andyou go on a good solid recommendation
or you search for an H Vacperson when your AC blows in the
middle of the summer. I thinkthat local newsletters that either
partner with these businesses,acquire these businesses, launch
these businesses themselves,or flip it around a little bit. These
(05:26):
businesses that create a localnewsletter that brings you news and
events on a weekly basis tobecome the most trusted brand in
town, can use it forunbelievable lead gen. Now you have
to bring value to people. Youcan't just sell your product every
week. But if every week yousend them a valuable email that they
want to open and that email ispresented by your insurance agency,
(05:50):
then when it comes time forthem to get home and auto and they're
looking for a locally trustedperson, which I would say is probably
70 or 80% of the name of thegame. When someone is making one
of those service purchases orinteractions that they didn't really
plan for, they're going toturn to someone they know and trust.
That's where these localnewsletters can be really good. The
analogy I would make for thisis think about what is an OG analogy
(06:13):
here. But Mr. Beast is doingwith MrBeast bars and he is outwardly
taking on Hershey. Why isthat? Well, a chocolate bar is generally
a commodity product. And ifyou're a fan of Mr. Beast, which
many people are, he reacheshundreds of millions of people and
you go to the store and youwalk in Walmart where they sell it
and you see a Beast bar and aHershey's bar next to each other,
(06:35):
you're probably going to buythe Beast bar because if nothing
else, it'll just be the samechocolate bar and maybe it'll even
be a little bit better. And tobe honest, I actually do think they
are better and this ishappening. Gary Vee's been pounding
the drum on this about CPGbrands being overtaken by influencers.
Most people don't care whatbrand of toilet paper or paper towel
or plastic spoon they buy.They just know the brands that have
(06:58):
advertised on TV for years andknow they're a safe enough legitimate
choice. But influencers areincreasingly turning to CPG products
because it will appeal toeveryone. And I think you can take
that analogy, strain it alittle bit, but extend it to local
newsletters and have thembacked by these service businesses
that when it comes time tomake a purchase, someone's going
to say, oh yeah, thatnewsletter owns or is partnered with
(07:23):
an insurance agency. I mightas well go to them. I got to spend
a thousand bucks a month toinsure X, Y and Z. It's going to
cost me that much anyway. Idon't actually know who's good just
because I see a gecko on tv.Let me turn to the local guy who
seems like he has good serviceand has been sending me value every
single week. So that's where Isee the resurgence of local media
(07:43):
going Backed by partnershipswith local service businesses. If
they can't piece togetherenough newsletters and overlapping
small towns to have astandalone ad supported or subscriber
supported media business. Thecaveat, there would be a city like
(08:04):
Winnipeg, which has 800,000followers. I talked to Jay earlier.
I think that is a city largeenough to create a $500,000 million
dollars media product. Butthat's pretty unique. Most cities
of that size are larger, inthe US at least, have a lot of competitive
media. So most local mediaupstarts, I would say, are much smaller
(08:27):
areas than that. All right,number two, AI search optimization.
I put out a bonus show on thisfor the last show. I would recommend
you just go listen to that.But the bottom line is search isn't
going away. There's been a lotof hand wringing and some for myself,
and I've kind of rethoughtabout this. That search is dead.
I would say if I make ahundred searches today, 50% of them
(08:47):
start on ChatGPT. The other50% start on Google. And of those
50%, maybe half, 25 of thoseget an AI search result. So I'm a
Internet power user, and twoyears ago, 98% of my searches were
going to Google, maybe 2% toAlexa or Siri, and now maybe only
(09:09):
25 of those hundred are goingthrough the conventional Google mechanism.
But AI bots, chatbots, and Iwould include voice assistants, need
to very quickly triangulate ona best possible answer for you. Unlike
Google, which has a list of 10links and they're pretty confident
they can serve you one or tworelevant links, chatbots have to
get it right the first time.So the better your media brand, your
(09:34):
business, whatever it is youhave can output Data that the LLMs
that back these AI chatbotslike and can more easily and quickly
parse, the more likely you areto be cited in their result. If you
say, what is the best snowshovel? Google may give you a bunch
(09:55):
of websites that review themwith Amazon links. But if you're
I don't know who makes snowshovels. Rubbermaid, and you output
the correct format of data onyour website and the LLM crawls your
website and it identifiesRubbermaid as the best snow shovel.
When people ask their AIassistant or search ChatGPT before
(10:17):
a snowstorm what the best snowshovel is, and the AI tells them
it's a Rubbermaid, and here'sa link to Rubbermaid, which is what
it does, that is in many ways,I think, more valuable in the long
term than ranking number oneor two on Google. So the trend will
be about optimizing for this.And again, I kind of have a whole
show and a Twitter thread,Kyle Scott L on X where you can kind
(10:40):
of read about what I think aresome five low hanging fruit things
you can do right now. And thisspace will evolve and I think in
2025 it becomes a trend aboutoptimizing content and data output
for AI leader in this isprofound. I believe their website
is triprofound.com and theyhave some tools. I'm not super familiar
(11:02):
with them yet, but they lookto have a robust set of tools to
get your brand mentioned byChatGPT and monitor the mentions,
which is super interestingactually. All right, number three,
online communities take off.So kind of piggybacking on the wave
of AI and lack of humanconnection. I think the latter will
(11:24):
be at a premium in the worldgoing forward, if it's not already.
And in a world like this,people will turn increasingly not
only to kind of theirparasocial relationship with creators
and podcasters that they like,but also to communities of like minded
people or people in their areawhere they can engage and be involved
(11:46):
in a discourse on a platformlike Discord or Circle or a learning
community like Skool S K O O Lwhich recently got an investment
from Alex Hermosi. I thinkthese will be huge in 2025 and beyond.
And more than being a part ofthem, if you're a creator who has
an audience and you'rethinking about pushing them into
(12:08):
a newsletter or a text groupand owning that audience off of the
social platform, you reallywant to get to the spot where you're
either selling them ourproduct or getting them into your
community. Because now youhave more ownership over your reach
to them. You can sell things,you can interact with them, you can
have in person events, and youcan coordinate all of this in a community.
Bonus points if you can launcha paid community. Because now when
(12:32):
you create a premium, saynewsletter subscription, you have
to bring it every day, everyweek, every month, whatever that
posting cycle is. A premiummedia content product requires a
lot of premium output to keepsubscribers. But if you create a
community, the people in thecommunity are generating 80 or 90%
of that content and you'resort of the leader and you can charge
(12:56):
for that. This is how youbuild a scalable business that doesn't
make you a slave to sort ofthe content hamster wheel. So super
bullish on communities in 25,both as kind of a trend but also
a media opportunity. Numberfour, live and social shopping so
TikTok shops, whatnot, AmazonLive I think will lead the way here
(13:18):
as brands sell directly whereattention is. So why, why will more
sales happen on social? Allright, so let's just think about
the mechanics. Go back to TVcommercials of the 90s and early
2000s. If it were up tobrands, if it was up to Froot Loops,
they would just allow you tobuy cereal directly on your television
(13:39):
remote control. That would beperfect for them. Instead they had
to show you a commercial andyou had to drive to the store. Now
fast forward 15, 20 years, youcould see a commercial and immediately
order something on Amazon orDoordash or Uber Eats. But the reality
is more attention now thantelevision is on mobile phones. It's
on social platforms. That iswhere the attention is. I mean if
(14:01):
you listen to Gary Vee, youare aware of this. They are the new
broadcast networks, TikTok,Instagram, Facebook, X, whatever
it is. And the technology isat a point now where you can easily
transact on these platformswith the tap of a thumb. Why is that?
Well, most people have Appleor Android pay on their phone, their
(14:22):
credit card's already there.It's a one time login. There's face
id. You see something youlike, you swipe it identifies your
face, maybe you choose ashipping method and next thing you
know the product is on its wayto your house. Brands love this.
Best example to do so. I thinkyou'll see a lot of new brands pop
up this way and I think you'llsee a lot of legacy brands try to
figure out how to crack thisnut. But billion dollar brands will
(14:45):
be built on the backs ofsocial shopping the way billion dollar
brands were built on Shopify,utilizing Facebook ads in the mid
and late 2010s. One of thebest to do it as far as I'm concerned
is Cole Schaefer and BrianWaddick over at Smacking Seeds. So
if you're a baseball fan, youknow, you've probably had sunflower
seeds your whole life and youprobably had David sunflower seeds
(15:06):
and they're fine, you know,kind of the legacy brand. These guys
decided, hey, we're going tocreate our own seed brand, okay?
Super competitive kind ofcommodity space in many ways. But
we're going to add coolflavors to them which others have
done. Brands like Biggs. Andthen we're going to show up at major
League baseball springtraining camps and we're going to
get players when they're moreaccessible, they're walking to and
(15:27):
from the back fields, they'regoing to their car. It's much more
easy to get access to big nameprofessional athletes during spring
training. And we're going toroll out a box of seeds and shout
out to them, hey, you want totry some seeds? And nine out of 10
players are going to say yes.And then you're going to get, you're
going to get star players likeMatty Machado and many other guys
who are going to come over andtry your seeds and say they like
(15:49):
them. And you're going to putthat on a TikTok video and then you're
going to be able to swipe upand buy that product right after
you're done watching thevideo. And that's exactly what these
guys have done. And theylaunched a couple of years ago, a
couple of young guys, I think,out of Michigan, and they just opened,
I believe, a 50,000 squarefoot warehouse. I follow them on
LinkedIn every day. It seemslike they're shaking hands with some
(16:09):
other grocery store chain thatis carrying their product. They had
a holiday advent calendar boxwhere there were 24 different flavors
of seeds that I saw on TikTokand bought two of them for both of
my kids. And we had a lot offun with it. And the point is, this
is a great example of a brandthat is building on social first.
And so I think you'll see alot more of this. And for the legacy
(16:31):
brands, I wouldn't besurprised. More on this in a second
that they will think aboutacquiring large social media followings
where influencers are maybenot monetizing the way they would
like, but they have a bigaudience on a platform that offers
these social shoppingfeatures. TikTok. So big trend, lots
of big brands. Five years fromnow, book it that will be built and
(16:54):
go public the way a companylike Allbirds did by promoting their
shoes on Facebook in 2013.Okay, number five, prediction markets
quantify the news. Soprediction markets went mainstream
in the run up to the electionand I think they'll grow rapidly
in 2025, especially onceRobinhood enters the game, which
it sounds like they're goingto. So if you don't know what prediction
(17:15):
markets are, it's where youcan, quote, unquote, bet on real
world events like thepresidential election, the weather,
the outcome of, in some casesa sporting event. Prediction markets
are here. And what I thinkwill happen in from a media perspective
is you will begin to see theseodds quoted more in mainstream media
(17:37):
articles and you will seeentire media operations spring up
around quantifying andanalyzing these odds. And since I've
been paying attention to thema little bit prior to the election.
What you'll notice is that alot of narratives, and I don't just
mean political ones, I meanentertainment narratives, sports
narratives, real world andyes, political narratives that are
(17:59):
in the press can be quasi factchecked very quickly by looking at
its complementary predictionmarket. And you may have seen a debate
on TV about whether Trudeauwould step down as the Prime Minister
of Canada. And maybe you wouldhave come away from that thinking
there was a 50, 50 chance ofhim doing that. And then maybe you
(18:20):
would have looked at themarket on Couchy on December 28 and
seen that there was a 72%chance he would step down. And lo
and behold, he stepped down afew days into the new year. So I
think these will become reallyimportant, not just for sports and
politics, but for accuratelygauging and getting a public sentiment
on all sorts of real worldthings. Huge opportunity for media
(18:41):
to kind of be early andcrafting, getting away from narrative
street and backing reportingwith and prediction reporting with
public data. Okay, number six,Beehive becomes the Shopify of content.
So just like Shopify we talkedabout a little bit earlier has become
the centralized platform ontop of which retail experiences are
(19:02):
built. And they are generallyagnostic. They started off by allowing
you to create your e commercewebsite and then they offered the
ability to be the back endwhen you sell directly on Facebook
shops and now they have theirown app where you can browse stores
and they have a point of salesystem that if you go into your local
coffee shop and use Apple payon that little white thing, it's
(19:24):
either square or sometimesit's Shopify. They want to become
the operating system forcommerce, for retail and I think
Beehive will do this foronline content. So just like Shopify
started with just the websiteand now they've expanded to social
and in person, Beehive hasstarted by in my opinion becoming
the best content newsletterplatform. They are about to launch
(19:47):
an extremely beefed up versionof their web editor thanks to their
acquisition of AI web editortype Dream last year. So I think
you'll be able to build morerobust websites than you have before.
Once they launch this I thinkJanuary 22nd and I suspect from there
they'll rapidly evolve intomessaging and communities. This will
(20:09):
give creators a one stop shopto own, engage and monetize their
audience. Top of Funnel Socialis great for top of funnel. You can
get massive scale, thousands,tens of thousands, hundreds, millions
of eyeballs by using socialmedia. But one of the other trends
for this year, which isn'teven in here, is the value of an
(20:31):
individual piece of content.Which means the algorithms take what's
good and put it in front ofpeople. Which means if you spend
a decade building up 100,000followers on X, there's no guarantee
that any given post will reachmore than 2 to 3% of your audience.
And that hasn't always beenthe case. So as you establish thought
leadership on social, you willneed to push people into audiences
(20:54):
you own, I. E. Newsletters, I.E. Communities, which we've already
talked about and I thinkBeehive will underpin all of this
eventually. So you will haveone, a one stop shop, much like Shopify
is for a retailer which willtrack your inventory across platform,
handle the backend sale acrossplatform, handle the SKUs and pricing
(21:14):
across platform. The same willbe true of Shopify where you create
a piece of content, you candistribute it to your community,
you can send it to your emaillist, you can text or message your
most premium members, you cancut it up and repackage it and have
AI use your voice to put itinto podcast form rather than recording
this manually like I am, basedon the email I sent yesterday, think
(21:37):
they become the Shopify ofcontent and continue to churn here
number seven. And lastly,businesses acquire audiences. So
I think in particular inparticularly legacy businesses understand
that they need to cultivatedirect relationships with their audiences.
Modern day consumers are moresavvy than just being receptive to
(22:00):
being pounded over the headwith the same Scott ad on TV or Froot
Loops ad. We kind of look pastthese things. You need to engage
people and I think franklynewsletters are a great way to do
this. I already talked aboutwhy in local but overall brands will
understand that they can'tjust use social to do this. See above
all the reasons I just laidout about not owning your audience.
(22:23):
And they will begin to pushtheir audience into their own newsletters,
their own communities and yes,their own social. And inherently
brands aren't great at thisbecause they want to sell, sell,
sell and even when they quotetell a story, it's usually just some
funny ad somewhere. Nowthere's some really good ones that
do this. I think Robinhoodbought snacks a few years ago. Pretty
good financial newsletter.They've rebranded it as Sherwood
(22:45):
News and turned it into awhole Bloomberg like operation. I
think Bloomberg itself is agreat example. They're a media company
and they basically use themedia company to sell their high
priced investment software,their Bloomberg terminal which goes
for hundreds of thousands ofdollars per seat, I believe. And
you've seen this in finance,you've seen it in maybe the creator
(23:06):
economy, maybe in the techspace. I would say HubSpot acquiring
the hustle is a good exampleof this, although I think they've
really kind of killed theproduct. But you will see businesses
in all verticals in 2025 lookto acquire, I think newsletter audience,
especially B2B newsletters,newsletters that serve people in
finance, in agriculture, ininsurance, whatever it is, you will
(23:29):
see brands acquire them anduse it to soft sell their products.
They will still bring valuethrough the newsletter. And like
I talked about before withlocal soft sell to become the trusted
brand for a highly valuablegroup of people. And I also think
you will see brands begin tolook to influencers who have had
trouble monetizing on a givenplatform, maybe aren't getting the
(23:51):
ad and the cool ad deals theyused to get and say hey, this person's
got a lot of followers onTikTok or Instagram or they're very
influential. We can leveragetheir influence to put a shop link
at the bottom. Now you couldobviously make them an affiliate
of yours, but I do think youwill see some brands acquire these
audiences and maybe evenemploy the kind of influencers who
(24:14):
aren't big enough to kind ofsell and tap out. So look for businesses
to acquire and own theiraudience as a major trend in 2025.
All right, that's it. Thoseare my seven digital media trends
set to take over in 2025. Ifyou think I should double click on
any of these and create awhole episode about them. Kind of
largely covered the local newsand the AI optimization, but there's
(24:36):
a bunch of others in here thatI'm happy to go deeper on. I wanted
this to just be a broadoverview. If you want to interact
with me on this, you coulddrop me an email. You could just
email where's the best for youto send to? You can send it to Kyle
scottmm All one word Kylescottmmonetize Media in email you
can find me on X. That'sprobably the best space kylescottl
(24:59):
on X or leave a comment leavea review so you know how to get a
hold of me. Love to interactand please be sure to leave a comment,
a thumbs up, a five starreview, something somewhere that
greatly helps. Tell yourfriends about the show. We'll have
try to do two episodes a weekthroughout 2020 25. That's really
my goal is to kind of doubledown from a personal standpoint on
(25:19):
putting out thought leadershipin digital media and newsletters
as I'm actively in the spacehelping run Access Media in the Philly
area and have a lot ofexperience both in local affiliate
e commerce. I've done a lotover the last 15 years and looking
to share that on a consistentbasis and turn this into a monetizable
large audience by the end of2025. So thanks for listening.
All right, welcome back toMonetize Media. I am Kyle Scott.
Today I want to go over myseven digital media trends set to
take over in 2025. Before wedo that, if you're listening to the
show, do me a huge favor.Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube,
wherever you're listening orwatching, go ahead and leave a review,
(00:22):
drop a comment, give me one orfive stars. I don't care what it
is, just one of those sort ofinteraction things. It's really good
for the algorithms andhonestly, if you like what you hear,
great. If you don't, give mesuggestions, give me feedback, tell
me you hate it, whatever, it'sall helpful. So take a minute, open
your podcast player and leavea review of some sort on your podcast
(00:43):
mechanism of choice. Allright, let's get into it. Today I
want to talk about these sevendigital media trends, which I think
many of which arecontinuations of of what we saw in
2024 and will be exacerbatedand expanded upon in 2025. And some
of them are brand new. Solet's start with number one, and
I'm going to kind of runthrough the first two relatively
(01:06):
quickly because we've coveredboth of them on the last few shows.
Number one is the resurgenceof local media. So if you listen
to my interview with MichaelKaufman of Catskill Crew, you'll
see that there is a lot ofopportunity within with lean local
digital startups. So why isthis? Well, over the last decade,
(01:28):
tons of bad business decisionsand printing and overhead costs have
led to a devastation in thelocal news market. Some of that is
because major metropolitannewspapers that historically serve
surrounding and suburbancommunities have cut back on the
number of reporters they'rewilling to employ. Others have been
(01:49):
because smaller upstarts orsmall networks of local newspapers
just don't have the economicsto survive anymore. There's a lot
of costs associated withprinting and delivering newspapers,
and we don't need torelitigate those here. But the local
news market has beenunderserved and over the last year
or two, a number of peoplehave begun creating kind of lean
(02:11):
one or two person digitallocal news outlets, largely built
on beehive. By sending one ortwo weekly emails about news and
events in a town that wasunderserved or served not at all.
And this was largelypiggybacking on a model that I think
6am City has probablyperfected where they went in the
(02:35):
sort of medium sized citieslike Raleigh and Greenville, South
Carolina and places like that.Maybe not the top 10 biggest cities
in the country, but Also notthe top 10 smallest cities. And they
found a foothold with thesesorts of daily newsletters in these
medium sized cities. But thatstill left a number of local communities,
suburbs, small towns,underserved. And a lot of people
(02:57):
have picked up the baton andran with it. Now where do I think
this goes? So my belief isthat only a sliver of these will
be successful. Hopefully whatwe're building at Access Media in
the Philly area, where we havea dozen plus local websites, a sports
website, and as of right now,I think five local newsletters will
(03:19):
be successful because we'reable to bundle together enough scale
to get the attention of midsized and regional advertisers. I
think what Michael Kaufman isdoing with Catskill Crew, I think
what Ryan Sneddon is doingwith the Naptown Scoop in Annapolis,
Maryland, what Jay is doing inWinnipeg, the name of the publication
(03:39):
escapes me. This guy inWichita, I'm forgetting names and
newsletters here, but there'sprobably a half dozen to a dozen
of these do. It will becomegood media businesses in and of their
own, right? But then I thinkthere's dozens, if not hundreds,
that will kind of butt upagainst a 10 to 15,000 subscriber
(04:00):
amount and struggle togenerate enough advertising revenue
to be a sustainable business.And they could make a good side hustle
for some. They could help somepeople get access to events in and
around their town, and thatmay be enough for them as well. But
I think the real opportunitywill be in either bundling these
together as media products andkind of having overlapping towns.
(04:22):
But where I think the biggestopportunity, as I said in previous
shows, is building orpartnering with a business in an
area to maximize their reach.And when you think about how difficult
it can be for a local servicebusiness, for example, to get a customer,
I'm talking everything from HVac to lawyers, accountants, insurance,
(04:43):
home escrow agents, mortgagelenders, real estate agents. These
are the types of purchasespeople generally hope to only make
a few times in their life.Most people don't go to a mortgage
broker. Often they don't buy ahouse. Often they don't know which
company they should use forhome or auto insurance. These things
(05:05):
are largely commodities andyou go on a good solid recommendation
or you search for an H Vacperson when your AC blows in the
middle of the summer. I thinkthat local newsletters that either
partner with these businesses,acquire these businesses, launch
these businesses themselves,or flip it around a little bit. These
(05:26):
businesses that create a localnewsletter that brings you news and
events on a weekly basis tobecome the most trusted brand in
town, can use it forunbelievable lead gen. Now you have
to bring value to people. Youcan't just sell your product every
week. But if every week yousend them a valuable email that they
want to open and that email ispresented by your insurance agency,
(05:50):
then when it comes time forthem to get home and auto and they're
looking for a locally trustedperson, which I would say is probably
70 or 80% of the name of thegame. When someone is making one
of those service purchases orinteractions that they didn't really
plan for, they're going toturn to someone they know and trust.
That's where these localnewsletters can be really good. The
analogy I would make for thisis think about what is an OG analogy
(06:13):
here. But Mr. Beast is doingwith MrBeast bars and he is outwardly
taking on Hershey. Why isthat? Well, a chocolate bar is generally
a commodity product. And ifyou're a fan of Mr. Beast, which
many people are, he reacheshundreds of millions of people and
you go to the store and youwalk in Walmart where they sell it
and you see a Beast bar and aHershey's bar next to each other,
(06:35):
you're probably going to buythe Beast bar because if nothing
else, it'll just be the samechocolate bar and maybe it'll even
be a little bit better. And tobe honest, I actually do think they
are better and this ishappening. Gary Vee's been pounding
the drum on this about CPGbrands being overtaken by influencers.
Most people don't care whatbrand of toilet paper or paper towel
or plastic spoon they buy.They just know the brands that have
(06:58):
advertised on TV for years andknow they're a safe enough legitimate
choice. But influencers areincreasingly turning to CPG products
because it will appeal toeveryone. And I think you can take
that analogy, strain it alittle bit, but extend it to local
newsletters and have thembacked by these service businesses
that when it comes time tomake a purchase, someone's going
to say, oh yeah, thatnewsletter owns or is partnered with
(07:23):
an insurance agency. I mightas well go to them. I got to spend
a thousand bucks a month toinsure X, Y and Z. It's going to
cost me that much anyway. Idon't actually know who's good just
because I see a gecko on tv.Let me turn to the local guy who
seems like he has good serviceand has been sending me value every
single week. So that's where Isee the resurgence of local media
(07:43):
going Backed by partnershipswith local service businesses. If
they can't piece togetherenough newsletters and overlapping
small towns to have astandalone ad supported or subscriber
supported media business. Thecaveat, there would be a city like
(08:04):
Winnipeg, which has 800,000followers. I talked to Jay earlier.
I think that is a city largeenough to create a $500,000 million
dollars media product. Butthat's pretty unique. Most cities
of that size are larger, inthe US at least, have a lot of competitive
media. So most local mediaupstarts, I would say, are much smaller
(08:27):
areas than that. All right,number two, AI search optimization.
I put out a bonus show on thisfor the last show. I would recommend
you just go listen to that.But the bottom line is search isn't
going away. There's been a lotof hand wringing and some for myself,
and I've kind of rethoughtabout this. That search is dead.
I would say if I make ahundred searches today, 50% of them
(08:47):
start on ChatGPT. The other50% start on Google. And of those
50%, maybe half, 25 of thoseget an AI search result. So I'm a
Internet power user, and twoyears ago, 98% of my searches were
going to Google, maybe 2% toAlexa or Siri, and now maybe only
(09:09):
25 of those hundred are goingthrough the conventional Google mechanism.
But AI bots, chatbots, and Iwould include voice assistants, need
to very quickly triangulate ona best possible answer for you. Unlike
Google, which has a list of 10links and they're pretty confident
they can serve you one or tworelevant links, chatbots have to
get it right the first time.So the better your media brand, your
(09:34):
business, whatever it is youhave can output Data that the LLMs
that back these AI chatbotslike and can more easily and quickly
parse, the more likely you areto be cited in their result. If you
say, what is the best snowshovel? Google may give you a bunch
(09:55):
of websites that review themwith Amazon links. But if you're
I don't know who makes snowshovels. Rubbermaid, and you output
the correct format of data onyour website and the LLM crawls your
website and it identifiesRubbermaid as the best snow shovel.
When people ask their AIassistant or search ChatGPT before
(10:17):
a snowstorm what the best snowshovel is, and the AI tells them
it's a Rubbermaid, and here'sa link to Rubbermaid, which is what
it does, that is in many ways,I think, more valuable in the long
term than ranking number oneor two on Google. So the trend will
be about optimizing for this.And again, I kind of have a whole
show and a Twitter thread,Kyle Scott L on X where you can kind
(10:40):
of read about what I think aresome five low hanging fruit things
you can do right now. And thisspace will evolve and I think in
2025 it becomes a trend aboutoptimizing content and data output
for AI leader in this isprofound. I believe their website
is triprofound.com and theyhave some tools. I'm not super familiar
(11:02):
with them yet, but they lookto have a robust set of tools to
get your brand mentioned byChatGPT and monitor the mentions,
which is super interestingactually. All right, number three,
online communities take off.So kind of piggybacking on the wave
of AI and lack of humanconnection. I think the latter will
(11:24):
be at a premium in the worldgoing forward, if it's not already.
And in a world like this,people will turn increasingly not
only to kind of theirparasocial relationship with creators
and podcasters that they like,but also to communities of like minded
people or people in their areawhere they can engage and be involved
(11:46):
in a discourse on a platformlike Discord or Circle or a learning
community like Skool S K O O Lwhich recently got an investment
from Alex Hermosi. I thinkthese will be huge in 2025 and beyond.
And more than being a part ofthem, if you're a creator who has
an audience and you'rethinking about pushing them into
(12:08):
a newsletter or a text groupand owning that audience off of the
social platform, you reallywant to get to the spot where you're
either selling them ourproduct or getting them into your
community. Because now youhave more ownership over your reach
to them. You can sell things,you can interact with them, you can
have in person events, and youcan coordinate all of this in a community.
Bonus points if you can launcha paid community. Because now when
(12:32):
you create a premium, saynewsletter subscription, you have
to bring it every day, everyweek, every month, whatever that
posting cycle is. A premiummedia content product requires a
lot of premium output to keepsubscribers. But if you create a
community, the people in thecommunity are generating 80 or 90%
of that content and you'resort of the leader and you can charge
(12:56):
for that. This is how youbuild a scalable business that doesn't
make you a slave to sort ofthe content hamster wheel. So super
bullish on communities in 25,both as kind of a trend but also
a media opportunity. Numberfour, live and social shopping so
TikTok shops, whatnot, AmazonLive I think will lead the way here
(13:18):
as brands sell directly whereattention is. So why, why will more
sales happen on social? Allright, so let's just think about
the mechanics. Go back to TVcommercials of the 90s and early
2000s. If it were up tobrands, if it was up to Froot Loops,
they would just allow you tobuy cereal directly on your television
(13:39):
remote control. That would beperfect for them. Instead they had
to show you a commercial andyou had to drive to the store. Now
fast forward 15, 20 years, youcould see a commercial and immediately
order something on Amazon orDoordash or Uber Eats. But the reality
is more attention now thantelevision is on mobile phones. It's
on social platforms. That iswhere the attention is. I mean if
(14:01):
you listen to Gary Vee, youare aware of this. They are the new
broadcast networks, TikTok,Instagram, Facebook, X, whatever
it is. And the technology isat a point now where you can easily
transact on these platformswith the tap of a thumb. Why is that?
Well, most people have Appleor Android pay on their phone, their
(14:22):
credit card's already there.It's a one time login. There's face
id. You see something youlike, you swipe it identifies your
face, maybe you choose ashipping method and next thing you
know the product is on its wayto your house. Brands love this.
Best example to do so. I thinkyou'll see a lot of new brands pop
up this way and I think you'llsee a lot of legacy brands try to
figure out how to crack thisnut. But billion dollar brands will
(14:45):
be built on the backs ofsocial shopping the way billion dollar
brands were built on Shopify,utilizing Facebook ads in the mid
and late 2010s. One of thebest to do it as far as I'm concerned
is Cole Schaefer and BrianWaddick over at Smacking Seeds. So
if you're a baseball fan, youknow, you've probably had sunflower
seeds your whole life and youprobably had David sunflower seeds
(15:06):
and they're fine, you know,kind of the legacy brand. These guys
decided, hey, we're going tocreate our own seed brand, okay?
Super competitive kind ofcommodity space in many ways. But
we're going to add coolflavors to them which others have
done. Brands like Biggs. Andthen we're going to show up at major
League baseball springtraining camps and we're going to
get players when they're moreaccessible, they're walking to and
(15:27):
from the back fields, they'regoing to their car. It's much more
easy to get access to big nameprofessional athletes during spring
training. And we're going toroll out a box of seeds and shout
out to them, hey, you want totry some seeds? And nine out of 10
players are going to say yes.And then you're going to get, you're
going to get star players likeMatty Machado and many other guys
who are going to come over andtry your seeds and say they like
(15:49):
them. And you're going to putthat on a TikTok video and then you're
going to be able to swipe upand buy that product right after
you're done watching thevideo. And that's exactly what these
guys have done. And theylaunched a couple of years ago, a
couple of young guys, I think,out of Michigan, and they just opened,
I believe, a 50,000 squarefoot warehouse. I follow them on
LinkedIn every day. It seemslike they're shaking hands with some
(16:09):
other grocery store chain thatis carrying their product. They had
a holiday advent calendar boxwhere there were 24 different flavors
of seeds that I saw on TikTokand bought two of them for both of
my kids. And we had a lot offun with it. And the point is, this
is a great example of a brandthat is building on social first.
And so I think you'll see alot more of this. And for the legacy
(16:31):
brands, I wouldn't besurprised. More on this in a second
that they will think aboutacquiring large social media followings
where influencers are maybenot monetizing the way they would
like, but they have a bigaudience on a platform that offers
these social shoppingfeatures. TikTok. So big trend, lots
of big brands. Five years fromnow, book it that will be built and
(16:54):
go public the way a companylike Allbirds did by promoting their
shoes on Facebook in 2013.Okay, number five, prediction markets
quantify the news. Soprediction markets went mainstream
in the run up to the electionand I think they'll grow rapidly
in 2025, especially onceRobinhood enters the game, which
it sounds like they're goingto. So if you don't know what prediction
(17:15):
markets are, it's where youcan, quote, unquote, bet on real
world events like thepresidential election, the weather,
the outcome of, in some casesa sporting event. Prediction markets
are here. And what I thinkwill happen in from a media perspective
is you will begin to see theseodds quoted more in mainstream media
(17:37):
articles and you will seeentire media operations spring up
around quantifying andanalyzing these odds. And since I've
been paying attention to thema little bit prior to the election.
What you'll notice is that alot of narratives, and I don't just
mean political ones, I meanentertainment narratives, sports
narratives, real world andyes, political narratives that are
(17:59):
in the press can be quasi factchecked very quickly by looking at
its complementary predictionmarket. And you may have seen a debate
on TV about whether Trudeauwould step down as the Prime Minister
of Canada. And maybe you wouldhave come away from that thinking
there was a 50, 50 chance ofhim doing that. And then maybe you
(18:20):
would have looked at themarket on Couchy on December 28 and
seen that there was a 72%chance he would step down. And lo
and behold, he stepped down afew days into the new year. So I
think these will become reallyimportant, not just for sports and
politics, but for accuratelygauging and getting a public sentiment
on all sorts of real worldthings. Huge opportunity for media
(18:41):
to kind of be early andcrafting, getting away from narrative
street and backing reportingwith and prediction reporting with
public data. Okay, number six,Beehive becomes the Shopify of content.
So just like Shopify we talkedabout a little bit earlier has become
the centralized platform ontop of which retail experiences are
(19:02):
built. And they are generallyagnostic. They started off by allowing
you to create your e commercewebsite and then they offered the
ability to be the back endwhen you sell directly on Facebook
shops and now they have theirown app where you can browse stores
and they have a point of salesystem that if you go into your local
coffee shop and use Apple payon that little white thing, it's
(19:24):
either square or sometimesit's Shopify. They want to become
the operating system forcommerce, for retail and I think
Beehive will do this foronline content. So just like Shopify
started with just the websiteand now they've expanded to social
and in person, Beehive hasstarted by in my opinion becoming
the best content newsletterplatform. They are about to launch
(19:47):
an extremely beefed up versionof their web editor thanks to their
acquisition of AI web editortype Dream last year. So I think
you'll be able to build morerobust websites than you have before.
Once they launch this I thinkJanuary 22nd and I suspect from there
they'll rapidly evolve intomessaging and communities. This will
(20:09):
give creators a one stop shopto own, engage and monetize their
audience. Top of Funnel Socialis great for top of funnel. You can
get massive scale, thousands,tens of thousands, hundreds, millions
of eyeballs by using socialmedia. But one of the other trends
for this year, which isn'teven in here, is the value of an
(20:31):
individual piece of content.Which means the algorithms take what's
good and put it in front ofpeople. Which means if you spend
a decade building up 100,000followers on X, there's no guarantee
that any given post will reachmore than 2 to 3% of your audience.
And that hasn't always beenthe case. So as you establish thought
leadership on social, you willneed to push people into audiences
(20:54):
you own, I. E. Newsletters, I.E. Communities, which we've already
talked about and I thinkBeehive will underpin all of this
eventually. So you will haveone, a one stop shop, much like Shopify
is for a retailer which willtrack your inventory across platform,
handle the backend sale acrossplatform, handle the SKUs and pricing
(21:14):
across platform. The same willbe true of Shopify where you create
a piece of content, you candistribute it to your community,
you can send it to your emaillist, you can text or message your
most premium members, you cancut it up and repackage it and have
AI use your voice to put itinto podcast form rather than recording
this manually like I am, basedon the email I sent yesterday, think
(21:37):
they become the Shopify ofcontent and continue to churn here
number seven. And lastly,businesses acquire audiences. So
I think in particular inparticularly legacy businesses understand
that they need to cultivatedirect relationships with their audiences.
Modern day consumers are moresavvy than just being receptive to
(22:00):
being pounded over the headwith the same Scott ad on TV or Froot
Loops ad. We kind of look pastthese things. You need to engage
people and I think franklynewsletters are a great way to do
this. I already talked aboutwhy in local but overall brands will
understand that they can'tjust use social to do this. See above
all the reasons I just laidout about not owning your audience.
(22:23):
And they will begin to pushtheir audience into their own newsletters,
their own communities and yes,their own social. And inherently
brands aren't great at thisbecause they want to sell, sell,
sell and even when they quotetell a story, it's usually just some
funny ad somewhere. Nowthere's some really good ones that
do this. I think Robinhoodbought snacks a few years ago. Pretty
good financial newsletter.They've rebranded it as Sherwood
(22:45):
News and turned it into awhole Bloomberg like operation. I
think Bloomberg itself is agreat example. They're a media company
and they basically use themedia company to sell their high
priced investment software,their Bloomberg terminal which goes
for hundreds of thousands ofdollars per seat, I believe. And
you've seen this in finance,you've seen it in maybe the creator
(23:06):
economy, maybe in the techspace. I would say HubSpot acquiring
the hustle is a good exampleof this, although I think they've
really kind of killed theproduct. But you will see businesses
in all verticals in 2025 lookto acquire, I think newsletter audience,
especially B2B newsletters,newsletters that serve people in
finance, in agriculture, ininsurance, whatever it is, you will
(23:29):
see brands acquire them anduse it to soft sell their products.
They will still bring valuethrough the newsletter. And like
I talked about before withlocal soft sell to become the trusted
brand for a highly valuablegroup of people. And I also think
you will see brands begin tolook to influencers who have had
trouble monetizing on a givenplatform, maybe aren't getting the
(23:51):
ad and the cool ad deals theyused to get and say hey, this person's
got a lot of followers onTikTok or Instagram or they're very
influential. We can leveragetheir influence to put a shop link
at the bottom. Now you couldobviously make them an affiliate
of yours, but I do think youwill see some brands acquire these
audiences and maybe evenemploy the kind of influencers who
(24:14):
aren't big enough to kind ofsell and tap out. So look for businesses
to acquire and own theiraudience as a major trend in 2025.
All right, that's it. Thoseare my seven digital media trends
set to take over in 2025. Ifyou think I should double click on
any of these and create awhole episode about them. Kind of
largely covered the local newsand the AI optimization, but there's
(24:36):
a bunch of others in here thatI'm happy to go deeper on. I wanted
this to just be a broadoverview. If you want to interact
with me on this, you coulddrop me an email. You could just
email where's the best for youto send to? You can send it to Kyle
scottmm All one word Kylescottmmonetize Media in email you
can find me on X. That'sprobably the best space kylescottl
(24:59):
on X or leave a comment leavea review so you know how to get a
hold of me. Love to interactand please be sure to leave a comment,
a thumbs up, a five starreview, something somewhere that
greatly helps. Tell yourfriends about the show. We'll have
try to do two episodes a weekthroughout 2020 25. That's really
my goal is to kind of doubledown from a personal standpoint on
(25:19):
putting out thought leadershipin digital media and newsletters
as I'm actively in the spacehelping run Access Media in the Philly
area and have a lot ofexperience both in local affiliate
e commerce. I've done a lotover the last 15 years and looking
to share that on a consistentbasis and turn this into a monetizable
large audience by the end of2025. So thanks for listening.
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