The Future of Media is Software

The next evolution of media platforms is software licensing. Forget content syndication, co-branding or ad networks. If you want to grow your website or mobile application in the next year, you need to create a point of difference through engineering.

Let’s look at what Buzzfeed and Hunch are doing today:

• Buzzfeed opened access to its ‘viral dashboard’ to publishers looking to track the popularity of their content this past September. Use of the viral dashboard is currently free but you can imagine Buzzfeed eventually developing a revenue sharing model with partner sites. The move, regardless, immediately puts Buzzfeed into the real-time analytics game in which there are far fewer competitors and perhaps more money than the content game.

• Hunch partnered with Gifts.com to make personalized recommendations within Gifts by leveraging the Hunch Taste Graph this month.  Early results show that there is a stronger conversion to purchase amongst people who use the Gifts x Hunch combo compared to those who don’t on Gifts.com. Gifts.com and other ecommerce partners are reported to split revenue from purchases recommended by Hunch.

The above two examples come from a handful that I can think of today. It’s clear that Buzzfeed and Hunch are leading the way of how media platforms should evolve over the next year. Licensing API’s that provide other platforms powerful data can lead to greater reach, revenue and market worth than age-old media models.

Where do traditional advertisers fit into this new model? Well, more to come on that! If you want a little taste of what the future will look like, make sure to check out a partnership that I hold dear to my heart, PepsiCo x Foursquare x Catalina Marketing x Safeway.

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