(Part 1)
Take privacy. There is a near-critical mass of people aware and concerned about how much data faceless companies have about them without their informed consent and how disparate data sets may be combined to manipulate their choices. But many of them aren’t aware of browser-based ad-blockers, their capabilities, how to install and update them. Network-wide ad-blockers such as pi-hole are simply beyond them.
This will change. Privacy-consciousness is going to be an attractive positioning for a business to take in the near future, because the New Middle is searching for them. The email service Protonmail, the browser Brave, the password manager 1Password, the two-factor authentication service Authy (now part of Twilio), the self-hosted personal information manager Nextcloud – these are all the vanguard for well-designed privacy-centric software but I don’t think they have yet marketed to the New Middle, which still reads, watches and listens to the same things the Mainstream does. Apple is the lone company I see having already staked out an unshakeable positioning here. We have recently discussed Mozilla’s opportunity to own this market as well. There is an opportunity for hardware too – imagine a router with firmware that bundles pi-hole, that does not need OpenWRT to be user-installed (side note: Apple’s hardware is already privacy-conscious).
All this is still just one area – privacy. Think about similar New Middle companies in the other areas we listed above. Pervasive anonymity as a service, anonymous-only social network and communities. Attention preservation for you and your kids. ISPs and communications providers publicly committed to net neutrality. Since there are overlaps between many of these, companies can and will compete and win the New Middle in more than one of these areas. Lastly, for large-scale reach, they will need to raise capital. Many of these will do so via the public market. They’ll make for attractive investment opportunities.
(ends)