• Social Media: Marketers will demand better ways to manage and measure the impact of earned media – the additional unpaid exposure a brand gets when consumers share about the brand online. Search will get more social in several ways: by including real-time content in results.

• Video: Further support for video ad growth will come from sites that offer a deeper catalog of professional video content – such as whole seasons of TV shows (both present and past), exclusives of entire sports events and other premium content.

• Ad Targeting and Privacy: In 2010, we will see more Websites let users know what data is being kept about them and give them options to remove data or prevent it from being accumulated. That means publishers will also increasingly need to make clear what the trade-offs are for accepting online advertising—the free content, the quality of the content, the basic value exchange.

• Search: By using social data to filter search queries, search engines will hope to deliver even more relevant results and more effective advertising. Another key change to speed up in 2010 will be more video results as part of general search queries.

• Mobile: Mobile ad spending will rise from USD$416 million in 2009 to USD$593 million in 2010 as more brands and agencies integrate mobile into their marketing mix. The fusion of mobile and social and the appetite for apps (among both consumers and brands) will continue unabated.

• Twitter: The revenue streams that have been discussed include paid corporate accounts, celebrity authentication and temporal search. Expect Twitter to roll this out in 2010 as the cornerstone of its temporal search business.

• Online News Content: Consumers will resist paid systems, and competitors will capitalize on the negative sentiment with ad-supported content. In the end, there will be islands of paid content (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times) and hybrids of paid and ad-supported models, but on the whole, the digital media landscape will be predominantly ad-based.

• Digital Video Convergence: TVs with direct Internet connectivity, or with on-screen access to content portals such as YouTube, Blockbuster and Netflix. As online video becomes intertwined with the living-room TV experience, download and streaming services will take on a prominent role in the home entertainment ecosystem.

• E-Commerce: Mobile-commerce’s time has arrived, and it is an easy bet that sales in 2010 will pass the USD$1 billion mark. In 2010, retailers will become more serious about trying to measure social media’s impact on sales. One question retailers will grapple with is how much a large fan base translates into sales or brand loyalty.

Source: Posted: December 17, 2009. The Article By Geoff Ramsey, CEO eMarketer