The Next Next Big Thing

Did you get in on that Snap IPO? All the cool investors did. Even a high school made millions on it. Snap is all the rage on Wall Street, because it's the next big thing.

What? You're asking what the business model is? Oh, well, you know Snapchat, right? Yeah, well, that's not how they define themselves. They say they're a "camera company," reinventing the camera. What does that mean beyond those kind of ridiculous Snap Spectacles that look like rejected Elton John prototypes? We shall all learn together. They've mentioned drones. Everybody mentions drones.

Snap might become what the big money is betting it will. It also might go the way of so many other next big things, which is to say that today's can't-miss hot item is often tomorrow's dim memory. A lot depends on how the company defines itself and how it pivots when the market and technology change. They could be Netflix, deftly discarding one business model to get first-mover status on a better model, or they could be one of the many once-hot companies you don't even remember anymore.

That's one way to remind ourselves that being the hot new thing isn't always a guarantee of how the future will play out. Is the future whatever Snapchat morphs into? Will the media become short ephemeral video that destroys itself? Or is YouTube TV the future, cable without the cable? Or is linear, non-on-demand video dead anyway? Are we all going to ask Alexa for everything, or Google Home, or what?

Dunno. And that's the thing to remember when experts -- LIKE ME -- blather about radio's future and digital and podcasting and dashboards and stuff. We can hazard guesses, but we don't know for sure what the market's going to do, because the market has a way of confounding expectations. I'll give you an example close to my heart: podcasts. You know, if you regularly read my column, that I've been part of the podcasting world for years, I worked at a prominent podcast network, I edit our podcasting section and write for it, I feature podcasts in the daily News-Talk-Sports-Podcast Today's Talk email newsletter, I listen to an inordinate number of podcasts daily, and I believe that it's a significant part of radio's future, even possibly the "safe space" for spoken word programming as consolidated operators look to cut costs with cheaper music programming on FM.

Yet, there's another side to this. We're a decade into podcasting and, whatever people will tell you, the magic formula for turning it into a revenue generator as powerful as traditional radio hasn't been developed yet. The CPMs are high for the biggest podcasts, yes, but the accent is on the C... because the Ms aren't at critical mass yet. Measurement is still in the "it's just around the corner" phase and has been for several years. The matter of curation and ease of use is still unsettled as well. I have no doubt that it's all ultimately going to be worked out and podcasting and on-demand programming will ultimately be dominant in a larger segment of the audio entertainment world, but you could look at where it is now and wonder why it isn't even further along than it is, especially post-"Serial."

Meanwhile, radio, which, according to many observers died a few years back, is still around. Some of its largest operators are constantly at the edge of financial disaster, but it's still around. "Nobody listens to radio anymore," but it still has way, way more listeners than other options. "Nobody under 50 listens to the radio," yet they do. To be sure, radio has serious problems -- time spent listening has shrunk, and the image among younger listeners is generally a lot less positive than you'd want -- and I don't have to tell you (I've told you enough over the years already) that some of the programming and marketing decisions made by the industry are, um, questionable at best. I'm not a fan of a lot of what radio's become, but I'm still a radio fan. I suspect that's the prevailing sentiment of most of the public: Radio doesn't occupy the exact position in our lives that it did 30 years ago, but it's still important enough to be in our lives. And as technology forges ahead, radio has streaming options to be on whatever device or dashboard it needs to reach; maybe not great if you paid a lot of money for licenses and tower leases, and not great if your business model depended on limited competition, but it's a form of future-proofing.

And that brings us back around to Snap, and whatever the next hot item in the media and tech business will be, because there's always a next big thing. Some really do become the next big thing, but predicting what's next is a tricky thing. Sometimes, it's not a bad thing to be the old thing that's still around, still works, and can still find ways to adapt and survive. Now, the trick is to adapt.

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Once again, a reminder that I'll be in Atlanta next week at the Talk Show Boot Camp in Atlanta on March 9th and 10th, for which you can register here. I'm not on a panel or anything, but you'll find me pounding away on the computer in the back of the room as per usual and there are always some great people at this event, so if you can make it to the W Hotel in Buckhead, stop by and say hi. I'll also be at the NAB Show in April in Vegas, and, of course, on May 3rd through 5th, I'll be at All Access' own Worldwide Radio Summit, for which you can register here. Oh, and if you didn't hear my thoughts on attending conventions (which might surprise you), watch the video here. You can see part of my backyard and everything. Exciting.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports
AllAccess.com
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