2016 was a big year for PageSuite. From travelling the world meeting clients and exhibiting at a number of industry events, to hosting our own Innovation Conference. We launched a suite of new market-leading products and celebrated our 10th Anniversary.
2016 was also an eventful year for the digital publishing industry itself. With the death of flash imminent, lots of publishers have been facing “the big move” onto HTML5.
The vast majority of publishers were forced to investigate new revenue streams in order to bridge the gap between declining print income and digital revenues. In support of this, digital is becoming an increasing support for print with the adoption of subscription bundles keeping loyal customers and enticing new subscribers.
This is aided by “big data” more commonly known as personalisation. It’s not enough anymore to know what, when and how readers consume content. Publishers must learn what they do when they’re not reading it. Through registrations, subscriptions and visitor data, publishers know who their readers are, what interests them and the content they are likely to click on. In addition, more and more publishers are also adopting the CPH metric, allowing them to create more efficient matches between consumers and advertisers. Proving far more lucrative than standard digital advertising strategies.
Other big changes this year included the adoption of video, the rise of news appearing first on social media and increased sharing of “fake news” and the exploration of virtual reality.
 
So, with the arrival of 2017, we thought it would be an ideal time to collate a set of industry predictions with exclusive forecasts from PageSuite’s board of directors for the year ahead. We anticipate further developments across subscriptions and added benefits, enriching the user experience and the rise of VR.
Nathan Parrett, PageSuite Founder, says “I expect that Alexa/Google assistant will become more widely used. The same with VR along with the headsets becoming smaller.
I predict that Samsung will launch their S8 in March, which will be technically the best phone in the market but will have to fight to overturn poor PR it has received in recent months. Respectively, Apple will launch a new iPhone that will be radically different to their previous phones. Lastly, I anticipate that PageSuite will launch an office east of the UK.”
PageSuite’s CEO, Ross Murphy, forecasts his industry predictions “I predict more biometric login/authentication processes – The rise of facial recognition and Touch ID to access accounts from major retailers and service providers.  Virtual Reality will be adopted by industries such as retail as they’ll start using the technology to replicate a ‘changing room’ scenario, publishers will be paying close attention. Personalisation will continue to gain momemtum and publishers will offer their readers a more personalised experience than ever before. I predict that content providers will follow marketing automation tech to provide readers with the most relevant articles and content based on KPIs and intelligent tracking.
Ben Edwards, SVP of Business Development, says “I think 2017 is the year people start paying for digital content. In the wake of Brexit, Trump & social media hijacking editorial & pushing fake news stories, comes an investment in getting people back into traditional news brands. Publishers will start pulling content back from social media sites, offering more enticing products (e.g. benefits to subscribers) and building stronger relationships with readers. This will be in reaction to the surge in native advertising spend; currently predicted to go to the likes of Facebook, when it is journalists who create the content & whose commercial teams can best partner with brands, rather than giving it away for free on social sites for Facebook to monetise.”
Our SVP of Sales, Chris Took, predicts “the demise or re-launch of Twitter. Digital engagement, growth and value add will continue for publishers who invest in a coherent strategy. Micropayments for articles will become increasingly mainstream (eg: 1p/5p an article/section). PageSuite’s expansion into new territories and success in existing territories will continue apace”
 Jason Pyne, SVP of Operations, says “I see the continued pattern of mobile first. Phone technology and user engagement is only becoming more apparent and I see publishers embracing this further by targeting through digital only content and utilising the birth of ‘content by command (voice recognition)’ news delivery by way of the introduction to the Amazon Echo and soon to be Google Assistant. I predict that Apple will follow suit.
With technology allowing content to be extracted from PDFs and using this to combine additional digital only content, images and videos, I see more usage continuing to produce apps and HTML5 products as feed driven viewable apps. I see new opportunities for publishers to deliver digital only content from their trusted brands in this way too, but allowing them to target advertising by way of digital only using audio and video and not just replication of the print based PDF. I can even see a consumer being able to build their own container app and craft content how they would like to see best viewable creating their own personalised news room.”
 
Within the last decade, the digital publishing industry has rapidly evolved and we are really looking forward to seeing further growth in the coming year. We are interested to know your thoughts too, feel free to send us your predictions via Twitter, using the handle @PageSuite and hashtag #PageSuitePredictions.