All right, welcome back to Monetize Media. I am Kyle Scott. Today I want to go over my seven digital media trends set to take over in 2025. Before we do that, if you're listening to the show, do me a huge favor. Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you're listening or watching, go ahead and leave a review, drop a comment, give me one or five stars. I don't care what it is, just one of those sort of interaction things. It's really good for the algorithms and honestly, if you like what you hear, great. If you don't, give me suggestions, give me feedback, tell me you hate it, whatever, it's all helpful. So take a minute, open your podcast player and leave a review of some sort on your podcast mechanism of choice. All right, let's get into it. Today I want to talk about these seven digital media trends, which I think many of which are continuations of of what we saw in 2024 and will be exacerbated and expanded upon in 2025. And some of them are brand new. So let's start with number one, and I'm going to kind of run through the first two relatively quickly because we've covered both of them on the last few shows. Number one is the resurgence of local media. So if you listen to my interview with Michael Kaufman of Catskill Crew, you'll see that there is a lot of opportunity within with lean local digital startups. So why is this? Well, over the last decade, tons of bad business decisions and printing and overhead costs have led to a devastation in the local news market. Some of that is because major metropolitan newspapers that historically serve surrounding and suburban communities have cut back on the number of reporters they're willing to employ. Others have been because smaller upstarts or small networks of local newspapers just don't have the economics to survive anymore. There's a lot of costs associated with printing and delivering newspapers, and we don't need to relitigate those here. But the local news market has been underserved and over the last year or two, a number of people have begun creating kind of lean one or two person digital local news outlets, largely built on beehive. By sending one or two weekly emails about news and events in a town that was underserved or served not at all. And this was largely piggybacking on a model that I think 6am City has probably perfected where they went in the sort of medium sized cities like Raleigh and Greenville, South Carolina and places like that. Maybe not the top 10 biggest cities in the country, but Also not the top 10 smallest cities. And they found a foothold with these sorts of daily newsletters in these medium sized cities. But that still left a number of local communities, suburbs, small towns, underserved. And a lot of people have picked up the baton and ran with it. Now where do I think this goes? So my belief is that only a sliver of these will be successful. Hopefully what we're building at Access Media in the Philly area, where we have a dozen plus local websites, a sports website, and as of right now, I think five local newsletters will be successful because we're able to bundle together enough scale to get the attention of mid sized and regional advertisers. I think what Michael Kaufman is doing with Catskill Crew, I think what Ryan Sneddon is doing with the Naptown Scoop in Annapolis, Maryland, what Jay is doing in Winnipeg, the name of the publication escapes me. This guy in Wichita, I'm forgetting names and newsletters here, but there's probably a half dozen to a dozen of these do. It will become good media businesses in and of their own, right? But then I think there's dozens, if not hundreds, that will kind of butt up against a 10 to 15,000 subscriber amount and struggle to generate enough advertising revenue to be a sustainable business. And they could make a good side hustle for some. They could help some people get access to events in and around their town, and that may be enough for them as well. But I think the real opportunity will be in either bundling these together as media products and kind of having overlapping towns. But where I think the biggest opportunity, as I said in previous shows, is building or partnering with a business in an area to maximize their reach. And when you think about how difficult it can be for a local service business, for example, to get a customer, I'm talking everything from H Vac to lawyers, accountants, insurance, home escrow agents, mortgage lenders, real estate agents. These are the types of purchases people 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 a house. Often they don't know which company they should use for home or auto insurance. These things are largely commodities and you go on a good solid recommendation or you search for an H Vac person when your AC blows in the middle of the summer. I think that local newsletters that either partner with these businesses, acquire these businesses, launch these businesses themselves, or flip it around a little bit. These businesses that create a local newsletter that brings you news and events on a weekly basis to become the most trusted brand in town, can use it for unbelievable lead gen. Now you have to bring value to people. You can't just sell your product every week. But if every week you send them a valuable email that they want to open and that email is presented by your insurance agency, then when it comes time for them to get home and auto and they're looking for a locally trusted person, which I would say is probably 70 or 80% of the name of the game. When someone is making one of those service purchases or interactions that they didn't really plan for, they're going to turn to someone they know and trust. That's where these local newsletters can be really good. The analogy I would make for this is think about what is an OG analogy here. But Mr. Beast is doing with MrBeast bars and he is outwardly taking on Hershey. Why is that? Well, a chocolate bar is generally a commodity product. And if you're a fan of Mr. Beast, which many people are, he reaches hundreds of millions of people and you go to the store and you walk in Walmart where they sell it and you see a Beast bar and a Hershey's bar next to each other, you're probably going to buy the Beast bar because if nothing else, it'll just be the same chocolate bar and maybe it'll even be a little bit better. And to be honest, I actually do think they are better and this is happening. Gary Vee's been pounding the drum on this about CPG brands being overtaken by influencers. Most people don't care what brand of toilet paper or paper towel or plastic spoon they buy. They just know the brands that have advertised on TV for years and know they're a safe enough legitimate choice. But influencers are increasingly turning to CPG products because it will appeal to everyone. And I think you can take that analogy, strain it a little bit, but extend it to local newsletters and have them backed by these service businesses that when it comes time to make a purchase, someone's going to say, oh yeah, that newsletter owns or is partnered with an insurance agency. I might as well go to them. I got to spend a thousand bucks a month to insure X, Y and Z. It's going to cost me that much anyway. I don'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 service and has been sending me value every single week. So that's where I see the resurgence of local media going Backed by partnerships with local service businesses. If they can't piece together enough newsletters and overlapping small towns to have a standalone ad supported or subscriber supported media business. The caveat, there would be a city like Winnipeg, which has 800,000 followers. I talked to Jay earlier. I think that is a city large enough to create a $500,000 million dollars media product. But that's pretty unique. Most cities of that size are larger, in the US at least, have a lot of competitive media. So most local media upstarts, I would say, are much smaller areas than that. All right, number two, AI search optimization. I put out a bonus show on this for 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 lot of hand wringing and some for myself, and I've kind of rethought about this. That search is dead. I would say if I make a hundred searches today, 50% of them start on ChatGPT. The other 50% start on Google. And of those 50%, maybe half, 25 of those get an AI search result. So I'm a Internet power user, and two years ago, 98% of my searches were going to Google, maybe 2% to Alexa or Siri, and now maybe only 25 of those hundred are going through the conventional Google mechanism. But AI bots, chatbots, and I would include voice assistants, need to very quickly triangulate on a best possible answer for you. Unlike Google, which has a list of 10 links and they're pretty confident they can serve you one or two relevant links, chatbots have to get it right the first time. So the better your media brand, your business, whatever it is you have can output Data that the LLMs that back these AI chatbots like and can more easily and quickly parse, the more likely you are to be cited in their result. If you say, what is the best snow shovel? Google may give you a bunch of websites that review them with Amazon links. But if you're I don't know who makes snow shovels. Rubbermaid, and you output the correct format of data on your website and the LLM crawls your website and it identifies Rubbermaid as the best snow shovel. When people ask their AI assistant or search ChatGPT before a snowstorm what the best snow shovel is, and the AI tells them it's a Rubbermaid, and here's a link to Rubbermaid, which is what it does, that is in many ways, I think, more valuable in the long term than ranking number one or 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 of read about what I think are some five low hanging fruit things you can do right now. And this space will evolve and I think in 2025 it becomes a trend about optimizing content and data output for AI leader in this is profound. I believe their website is triprofound.com and they have some tools. I'm not super familiar with them yet, but they look to have a robust set of tools to get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT and monitor the mentions, which is super interesting actually. All right, number three, online communities take off. So kind of piggybacking on the wave of AI and lack of human connection. I think the latter will be at a premium in the world going forward, if it's not already. And in a world like this, people will turn increasingly not only to kind of their parasocial relationship with creators and podcasters that they like, but also to communities of like minded people or people in their area where they can engage and be involved in a discourse on a platform like Discord or Circle or a learning community like Skool S K O O L which recently got an investment from Alex Hermosi. I think these will be huge in 2025 and beyond. And more than being a part of them, if you're a creator who has an audience and you're thinking about pushing them into a newsletter or a text group and owning that audience off of the social platform, you really want to get to the spot where you're either selling them our product or getting them into your community. Because now you have more ownership over your reach to them. You can sell things, you can interact with them, you can have in person events, and you can coordinate all of this in a community. Bonus points if you can launch a paid community. Because now when you create a premium, say newsletter subscription, you have to bring it every day, every week, every month, whatever that posting cycle is. A premium media content product requires a lot of premium output to keep subscribers. But if you create a community, the people in the community are generating 80 or 90% of that content and you're sort of the leader and you can charge for that. This is how you build a scalable business that doesn't make you a slave to sort of the content hamster wheel. So super bullish on communities in 25, both as kind of a trend but also a media opportunity. Number four, live and social shopping so TikTok shops, whatnot, Amazon Live I think will lead the way here as brands sell directly where attention is. So why, why will more sales happen on social? All right, so let's just think about the mechanics. Go back to TV commercials of the 90s and early 2000s. If it were up to brands, if it was up to Froot Loops, they would just allow you to buy cereal directly on your television remote control. That would be perfect for them. Instead they had to show you a commercial and you had to drive to the store. Now fast forward 15, 20 years, you could see a commercial and immediately order something on Amazon or Doordash or Uber Eats. But the reality is more attention now than television is on mobile phones. It's on social platforms. That is where the attention is. I mean if you listen to Gary Vee, you are aware of this. They are the new broadcast networks, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, whatever it is. And the technology is at a point now where you can easily transact on these platforms with the tap of a thumb. Why is that? Well, most people have Apple or Android pay on their phone, their credit card's already there. It's a one time login. There's face id. You see something you like, you swipe it identifies your face, maybe you choose a shipping method and next thing you know the product is on its way to your house. Brands love this. Best example to do so. I think you'll see a lot of new brands pop up this way and I think you'll see a lot of legacy brands try to figure out how to crack this nut. But billion dollar brands will be built on the backs of social shopping the way billion dollar brands were built on Shopify, utilizing Facebook ads in the mid and late 2010s. One of the best to do it as far as I'm concerned is Cole Schaefer and Brian Waddick over at Smacking Seeds. So if you're a baseball fan, you know, you've probably had sunflower seeds your whole life and you probably had David sunflower seeds and they're fine, you know, kind of the legacy brand. These guys decided, hey, we're going to create our own seed brand, okay? Super competitive kind of commodity space in many ways. But we're going to add cool flavors to them which others have done. Brands like Biggs. And then we're going to show up at major League baseball spring training camps and we're going to get players when they're more accessible, they're walking to and from the back fields, they're going to their car. It's much more easy to get access to big name professional athletes during spring training. And we're going to roll out a box of seeds and shout out to them, hey, you want to try 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 like Matty Machado and many other guys who are going to come over and try your seeds and say they like them. And you're going to put that on a TikTok video and then you're going to be able to swipe up and buy that product right after you're done watching the video. And that's exactly what these guys have done. And they launched a couple of years ago, a couple of young guys, I think, out of Michigan, and they just opened, I believe, a 50,000 square foot warehouse. I follow them on LinkedIn every day. It seems like they're shaking hands with some other grocery store chain that is carrying their product. They had a holiday advent calendar box where there were 24 different flavors of seeds that I saw on TikTok and bought two of them for both of my kids. And we had a lot of fun with it. And the point is, this is a great example of a brand that is building on social first. And so I think you'll see a lot more of this. And for the legacy brands, I wouldn't be surprised. More on this in a second that they will think about acquiring large social media followings where influencers are maybe not monetizing the way they would like, but they have a big audience on a platform that offers these social shopping features. TikTok. So big trend, lots of big brands. Five years from now, book it that will be built and go public the way a company like Allbirds did by promoting their shoes on Facebook in 2013. Okay, number five, prediction markets quantify the news. So prediction markets went mainstream in the run up to the election and I think they'll grow rapidly in 2025, especially once Robinhood enters the game, which it sounds like they're going to. So if you don't know what prediction markets are, it's where you can, quote, unquote, bet on real world events like the presidential election, the weather, the outcome of, in some cases a sporting event. Prediction markets are here. And what I think will happen in from a media perspective is you will begin to see these odds quoted more in mainstream media articles and you will see entire media operations spring up around quantifying and analyzing these odds. And since I've been paying attention to them a little bit prior to the election. What you'll notice is that a lot of narratives, and I don't just mean political ones, I mean entertainment narratives, sports narratives, real world and yes, political narratives that are in the press can be quasi fact checked very quickly by looking at its complementary prediction market. And you may have seen a debate on TV about whether Trudeau would step down as the Prime Minister of Canada. And maybe you would have come away from that thinking there was a 50, 50 chance of him doing that. And then maybe you would have looked at the market on Couchy on December 28 and seen that there was a 72% chance he would step down. And lo and behold, he stepped down a few days into the new year. So I think these will become really important, not just for sports and politics, but for accurately gauging and getting a public sentiment on all sorts of real world things. Huge opportunity for media to kind of be early and crafting, getting away from narrative street and backing reporting with and prediction reporting with public data. Okay, number six, Beehive becomes the Shopify of content. So just like Shopify we talked about a little bit earlier has become the centralized platform on top of which retail experiences are built. And they are generally agnostic. They started off by allowing you to create your e commerce website and then they offered the ability to be the back end when you sell directly on Facebook shops and now they have their own app where you can browse stores and they have a point of sale system that if you go into your local coffee shop and use Apple pay on that little white thing, it's either square or sometimes it's Shopify. They want to become the operating system for commerce, for retail and I think Beehive will do this for online content. So just like Shopify started with just the website and now they've expanded to social and in person, Beehive has started by in my opinion becoming the best content newsletter platform. They are about to launch an extremely beefed up version of their web editor thanks to their acquisition of AI web editor type Dream last year. So I think you'll be able to build more robust websites than you have before. Once they launch this I think January 22nd and I suspect from there they'll rapidly evolve into messaging and communities. This will give creators a one stop shop to own, engage and monetize their audience. Top of Funnel Social is great for top of funnel. You can get massive scale, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds, millions of eyeballs by using social media. But one of the other trends for this year, which isn't even in here, is the value of an individual piece of content. Which means the algorithms take what's good and put it in front of people. Which means if you spend a decade building up 100,000 followers on X, there's no guarantee that any given post will reach more than 2 to 3% of your audience. And that hasn't always been the case. So as you establish thought leadership on social, you will need to push people into audiences you own, I. E. Newsletters, I. E. Communities, which we've already talked about and I think Beehive will underpin all of this eventually. So you will have one, a one stop shop, much like Shopify is for a retailer which will track your inventory across platform, handle the backend sale across platform, handle the SKUs and pricing across platform. The same will be true of Shopify where you create a piece of content, you can distribute it to your community, you can send it to your email list, you can text or message your most premium members, you can cut it up and repackage it and have AI use your voice to put it into podcast form rather than recording this manually like I am, based on the email I sent yesterday, think they become the Shopify of content and continue to churn here number seven. And lastly, businesses acquire audiences. So I think in particular in particularly legacy businesses understand that they need to cultivate direct relationships with their audiences. Modern day consumers are more savvy than just being receptive to being pounded over the head with the same Scott ad on TV or Froot Loops ad. We kind of look past these things. You need to engage people and I think frankly newsletters are a great way to do this. I already talked about why in local but overall brands will understand that they can't just use social to do this. See above all the reasons I just laid out about not owning your audience. And they will begin to push their audience into their own newsletters, their own communities and yes, their own social. And inherently brands aren't great at this because they want to sell, sell, sell and even when they quote tell a story, it's usually just some funny ad somewhere. Now there's some really good ones that do this. I think Robinhood bought snacks a few years ago. Pretty good financial newsletter. They've rebranded it as Sherwood News and turned it into a whole Bloomberg like operation. I think Bloomberg itself is a great example. They're a media company and they basically use the media company to sell their high priced investment software, their Bloomberg terminal which goes for hundreds of thousands of dollars per seat, I believe. And you've seen this in finance, you've seen it in maybe the creator economy, maybe in the tech space. I would say HubSpot acquiring the hustle is a good example of this, although I think they've really kind of killed the product. But you will see businesses in all verticals in 2025 look to acquire, I think newsletter audience, especially B2B newsletters, newsletters that serve people in finance, in agriculture, in insurance, whatever it is, you will see brands acquire them and use it to soft sell their products. They will still bring value through the newsletter. And like I talked about before with local soft sell to become the trusted brand for a highly valuable group of people. And I also think you will see brands begin to look to influencers who have had trouble monetizing on a given platform, maybe aren't getting the ad and the cool ad deals they used to get and say hey, this person's got a lot of followers on TikTok or Instagram or they're very influential. We can leverage their influence to put a shop link at the bottom. Now you could obviously make them an affiliate of yours, but I do think you will see some brands acquire these audiences and maybe even employ the kind of influencers who aren't big enough to kind of sell and tap out. So look for businesses to acquire and own their audience as a major trend in 2025. All right, that's it. Those are my seven digital media trends set to take over in 2025. If you think I should double click on any of these and create a whole episode about them. Kind of largely covered the local news and the AI optimization, but there's a bunch of others in here that I'm happy to go deeper on. I wanted this to just be a broad overview. If you want to interact with me on this, you could drop me an email. You could just email where's the best for you to send to? You can send it to Kyle scottmm All one word Kyle scottmmonetize Media in email you can find me on X. That's probably the best space kylescottl on X or leave a comment leave a review so you know how to get a hold of me. Love to interact and please be sure to leave a comment, a thumbs up, a five star review, something somewhere that greatly helps. Tell your friends about the show. We'll have try to do two episodes a week throughout 2020 25. That's really my goal is to kind of double down from a personal standpoint on putting out thought leadership in digital media and newsletters as I'm actively in the space helping run Access Media in the Philly area and have a lot of experience both in local affiliate e commerce. I've done a lot over the last 15 years and looking to share that on a consistent basis and turn this into a monetizable large audience by the end of 2025. So thanks for listening.