1. Things will tighten. While the USD seems to have stopped its freefall (3 months ago it was 1 USD = 0.98 CAD, now its upto 1.02), year over year it got brutally hurt. With high oil prices finally start to affect consumer behaviour, and the housing market meltdown creating a huge gap in people’s spending power, the US will see a legitimate correction/ouch/get your breath moment. I think this will cause some of the more no-revenue sites (even with sizable traffic) to feel some pain. This will finally cause …
  2. The Great Offline to Online Local Migration. Local businesses are alrady starting to get unhappy with yellowpage publishers. There is enough evidence in front of everyone that less and less people are bothering with the yellow pages book anymore. Combined with the general tightening of things, enough small businesses will finally try to understand the internet and move their spending online. Which means …
  3. The rise of the online local ad networks. Part of local’s difficulty (and accompanying beauty) is the granularity. Companies like ReachLocal, which are helping companies move money from offline to online are focusing on the major search engines. But there is a ton of local content online – from event sites to blogs to everything in between. I believe we will finally see the rise of online local ad networks that distribute ads across a swath of websites. A very sizable amount of traffic that is ignored by most are …
  4. Domains (which will finally start to cool down). As things tighten, branding becomes more important. Which means generics like Food.com (great for traffic and SEO but harder to brand) won’t go skyrocketing like they were before. Or they may stay around the same … just like …
  5. Google, Yahoo, MSN – nothing will change. Maybe AOL. But the Big Three will remain the Big Three (really people need to give Yahoo some credit for stealing Flickr when it did).