2021 Trends and Predictions

[engine]

If we look at the year of the Covid-19 Pandemic it was a year of unexpected and significant change, but let's look forward.

One thing's for sure, the rapid acceleration to online working was hastened by the pandemic, and there's no reason for that process to slow. I think we'll see a continued progression towards online, especially with more acquisitions of businesses with a sound footing in online services and systems.

The recent announcements of investigations into antitrust will run and run for a long time yet. I suspect that the break-up of big tech might only result in big fines, and I will be very surprised if it's concluded in 2021.

What about SEO?
It's now matured and requires much more knowledge beyond that of five, ten or twenty years ago. There will be more opportunities for those teaching SEO to those wanting to get involved in the sector.

Online advertising is faced with continued major hurdles, not least the ad blocking and tracking of users. It's no longer the free-for-all it was.

Tracking will continue to change from basic cookie-based to much more sophisticated analysis of user patterns.

AI will become more prevalent in everyday use.

There are just a few of my thoughts coming to the end of 2020 and towards 2021. What do you think is coming for 2021?

[jmccormac]

More scrapers looking for free content. This will lead to ISPs in developing countries having their IP ranges banned as it will be easier to ban ranges rather than target individual IPs of compromised PCs and outsourced scraper operations.

The deletion of approximately 3 million new gTLD domain names over Q1. (Easy one. Some NGTs have had over 70% deletion of registrations from their January 2020 zone files already.) More new gTLDs to be bought up but some of them are not, based on 2020 registrations, financially viable as standalone gTLDs. (Consolidation.)

More consolidation in the gTLD and ccTLD markets. There has been a trend for large multi-national registrar operations to focus on ccTLD markets (Web.com running wild in Australia and New Zealand). This is likely to continue but won't be noticed as many of the purchased companies are not accredited ICANN registrars.

ICANN has a serious registrar coverage problem that is only going to get worse through 2021. It has only a handful of accredited registrars for the continent of Africa. As ccTLDs become more important in their markets, ICANN accreditation is no longer a priority for growing hosting operations. Outsourcers who offer registrations as a service will benefit.

A slight bursting of the Covid bubble from 2020. Some gTLDs and ccTLDs saw a spike in registrations due to people being made unemployed due to Covid. Many of these domain names were not developed into working websites and are likely to drop if any sort of normality resumes.

Fragmentation of the Social Media market. Google might even try to launch yet another SM product.

Regards...jmcc

[lammert]

I expect to see more abuse through IPv6 connections. Many ISPs, sites, and end-users have configured IPv6 now in some way, but firewalling them is much trickier than IPv4. There is no such thing as default invisibility through a NAT router and newer operating systems like Windows and Linux enable IPv6 now by default, without the user knowing it has been switched on.

The only good thing is that the IPv6 address space is so big that rough port scanners will have a much harder time finding the individual addresses of IPv6 end-users using random addresses or privacy extensions that continuously rotate addresses.

[ronin]

My prediction:

First adopters have been playing with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for a couple of years now.

The VR / AR Web is going to be at the beginning of mainstream by the end of 2021.

2021 will be for VR Headsets what 2007 was for Smartphones after the first iPhone launched, introducing iOS and the App Store.