Two key stats to ponder for 2024:
The Attention Market
- Boomers: 18% prefer TikTok, 82% prefer streaming.
- Gen X: 31% prefer TikTok, 69% prefer streaming.
- Millennials: 53% prefer TikTok, 47% prefer streaming.
- Gen Z: 66% prefer TikTok, 34% prefer streaming.
The age-gap echo chambers are worsening (and all the, shall we say, *interesting* side effects this has on liberal democracies, but let’s put a pin in that for now), but the opportunity hunters amongst you might notice this is a prime opportunity for advertising:
Zig when everyone zags is marketing 101: compete for advertising and attention in the mediums that no one else is. Thus if your market are boomers, market on TikTok. If your market is Gen Z, advertise in more traditional channels. Worth testing out.
AI valuations
The AI hype bubble is at an interesting place. One-quarter of US venture funding went to AI startups last year, 4 in 5 US unicorns (remember a unicorn is >$1 billion valuation) are AI related, and the biggest ones OpenAI and Anthropic have valuations 180x to 200x price-to-sales valuations.
To compare, Uber, a company that has been touted as how tech lives in financial la la land, has a price-to-sales valuation of 3x.
This is the peak of inflated expectations in the hype cycle (google Gartner Hype Cycle). Right now you can put GPT or AI in your company name and attract clueless investors, similar to when the word “crypto” or “bitcoin” was tagged to business names in 2018.
(I’m not saying there’ll be a bust, I’m bullish on what General Purpose Transformers can do for tech and society in the long run, but right now we live in a world where some stakeholders believe you can just magically throw a GPT at a problem and it will double efficiency. As a data journalist, I can tell you for free, GPT at the moment makes my workflow a bit harder, not easier. It hasn’t nailed data analysis yet, and it can’t visualise graphs. But it is great at problem-solving small scripts.)
The trough of disillusionment will be interesting. Because there are some strong business cases and models that GPTs can solve, mid-2024 is probably going to give us a glimpse of who are going to be the big winners and losers.
(Oh, and it’s too late to invest in Nvidia, or other computing manufacturers geared towards AI computing, if you’re looking for a quick buck. The market is right now in peak over-expectation.)
(Source: https://www.profgalloway.com/2024-predictions/)
This was originally posted on my LinkedIn.