Second last day of the year, but instead of looking over the shoulders in a year that has caused some severe turbulence in almost any business, it’s time to fly up and get the overview of what 2009 may bring to digital publishing. My crystal ball is just polished and it’s bullet proof :-) Justified spend The past quarter’s turbulence in the financial markets has huge impacts – especially for marketing budgets. Depending on your industry, you may already see some signs in the moon, stars and sales figures that your customers are holding on to their wallets. Some of them may not even make it through 2009, and you will lose money and market share. Such situations urge caution, and if you are dealing with printed issues and high costs, you will – like it or not – need to justify your spend. Digital publishing offers great ways to justify spend. Why? Because digital publishing is:

1. Distributed online for just the slightest cost of an offline equivalent.
2. Measurable beyond the physical world.
3. Cost-effective – also in terms of time spend for setup.

Overall, my crystal ball shows a road to success paved with an intensified focus on overall online marketing. It does not mean putting more money into banner ads, but rather to do things a bit smarter than competitors and have online marketing more integrated in overall business processes. That is where marketing budgets pays off the best and where marketers get the best proof that the activities actually pay off. Rented software for cost-effectiveness Another driver for intensified use of digital publishing is an expected increase in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Recession forces businesses to cut it-costs as well, which on an enterprise level is done by investing in hosted software, which is basically rented by customers. This happens at the expense of in-house development and maintaining of it-systems. This has a positive impact on SaaS – also minor scaled systems such as tools for digital publishing and the business model is getting even more appealing in cost-focusing times. With serviced digital publishing you only need to pay for what you get and initial investments are limited. My crystal ball predicts that total SaaS revenue will double before 2012… Oh, wait. It must have been Gartner saying so. The recent report from Gartner also predicts that digital content creation (which includes digital publishing services) will be among the fastest growing sectors within the next five years. The following quote from Gartner explains why:

- Digital Content Creation software is becoming increasingly important as organisations evolve toward a more Web-centric business model. Consumer decisions and confidence control the mainstream flow of the segment and future development of SaaS in this market will depend on internet broadband capacity,

My crystal ball is blurring out. Feel free to leave a comment if you have something to add about digital publishing in the year to come. Happy New Year!