This newsletter offers a brief recap of Q1 2023 mailings and will lay out three key trends I will focus on in Q2 2023.

To remind you, PARQOR identifies a few key trends each fiscal quarter that reveal the most important tensions and seismic shifts in the media marketplace. Must-read stories or market developments are not always obvious from press reports or research analysis, and often require a deeper dive. PARQOR’s analysis questions established ideas and common wisdom, reassesses the moving pieces, and reveals the potential in the media marketplace in 2023.

Recap of Q1 2023

I wrote 25 essays in Q1 2023 and an overwhelming majority discussed the trend, “The definition of scarcity is continuously evolving away from linear.”

I think there are three obvious, simple explanations for this: 

1. Cord-cutting is accelerating and broadcast viewing is dropping, too;
2. The ad marketplace is filled with uncertainty as 2023 Upfronts and newfronts sales processes ramp up; and
3. YouTube seems increasingly best-positioned to capture consumer eyeballs and advertiser dollars in the post-linear TV marketplace. 

Eight of the essays discussed the trend “Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file.” Three of the essays discussed “Hollywood’s future lies in the creator economy, but who is the talent?”  I could have written more about the creator economy given the speculation about a TikTok ban following recent Congressional hearings, but I prefer not to write about speculation. It doesn’t seem like TikTok will be banned by the U.S. Congress and no one has written anything that could convince me otherwise. 

Surprisingly, I never wrote about the trend of Gen Z and Gen Alpha increasingly preferring games to streaming. That trend reflected how “Wall Street seems to understand that capturing consumer attention and time are now the high stakes, win-or-die games for media businesses.” But very little on the topic surfaced in my various feeds. That may reflect a slowdown in gaming revenues across major companies following the pandemic and from the slowdown in advertising. But the trend is still headed in the same direction, so it’s not clear to me why so little information emerged over the past quarter. I am going to put this trend on the back burner for Q2 2023. 

Below are the three updated trends I will prioritize writing about for the next three months.

Key Trends for Q2 2023

1. The definition of scarcity is continuously evolving away from linear and towards walled gardens.
2. Media companies have millions of consumer credit cards on file. What are they building for their customers?
   
3. "Premium content" is being redefined by creators, tech companies and 10 million emerging advertisers
   

Total words: 1,800

Total time reading: 7 minutes