Here's Why You Should Look for Opportunity in Dying Markets

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Where there’s change, there’s chaos. Any time that anything goes through a transition, there will be a scramble of people that want to pick a side. There are those that will side with the thing that looks the newest and most exciting, and there are those that go for the old reliable thing (even if it seems like its days are numbered). With the technology advancements that I’ve seen in my own lifetime, it seems like these existential crises are becoming more and more common.

For those that sell products online, you may think that you have to follow on with the trends and only sell the things that are meant to be on trend, but there are examples across the spectrum that prove that there’s opportunity to make money in markets that should be pretty much dead.

Let’s look at the media game. We’ve gone from physical discs for everything – items that were littered in people’s homes – to almost universal streamable content.

Gaming – I’m properly out of the loop with gaming these days, but apparently you can just download PS4/Xbox One games these days. Madness. And streaming is definitely going to become more universal.

Music – Spotify, Apple Music and Tidal run things now. It’s streaming or nothing. Downloading music seems weird to most people now.

Film – Once it’s done the cinema run, the next best way to get the content back out to the people is via Netflix. And all the best TV and other exclusives can be found on there too.

(And this is without covering the impact of Kindle.)

For all of these, we are in the midst of a transition and that means there is plenty of opportunity for you to make money. While one section of the market moves in one direction, there will be loads that hang on to the old way of doing things.

In same cases, the respective media host may not even have all of the content. For me, there are literally thousands of music releases that I need that aren’t anywhere to be found on Spotify and won’t due to the copyright problems they’ll run into. The only way to get the content is to resort to alternative means.

In all of these cases, you’ll find that the finite nature of the physical copies will mean that the value will increase over time. Obviously it’s not true of the best sellers, but there are loads of niche items with unexpectedly high values, even when in used condition. The rarer the content – the less that were printed – the more people will be willing to pay for them. You know this already, but keep it front-on-mind in whatever market you happen to operate in.

The media game is just one example, but you can apply the same principles to anything else that happens to go through one of these shifts. You don’t necessarily need to jump out of a market just because the trends say that it’s going down. While everyone else is busy caring about that new thing, you can collect all the money being left on the table.